Heretic TOC presents a guest blog by Explorer, who has contributed many excellent comments here including a recent one that briefly introduced us to an interesting new organisation called Heart Progress. Today he delves deeper, exploring (well, he is Explorer!) the strengths and weaknesses of Heart Progress, and how heretics here could help it develop its potential as a force for good. Explorer is a young Russian from an intellectual home background, who enjoyed the benefits of growing up in the briefly libertarian atmosphere of the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Qualified as a lawyer, he has a non-legal professional role which has brought him into lively discussion and debate with scientists and technicians, from whom he has learned much. He contributes to a range of online forums, sometimes taking people out of their intellectual comfort zone by presenting challenging ideas on a range of topics, such as parapsychology and anarchist politics, as well as intergenerational sexuality.
HEART PROGRESS COMMUNITY: A CASE FOR SELECTIVE SUPPORT
We live in interesting times, full of surprises; most of them, however, are unpleasant ones, like the regular news of the next stage of escalation of some military conflict, or yet another governmental decision to impose even more censorship, surveillance and persecution than we already have. Yet, thanks to the new Heretic TOC commenter Hypersonic, I learned something which has surprised me in a positive way. A very positive way, I would say!
Heart Progress Community: A Bright Side
Now we have a new activist community which holds not just a pro-paedosexual, but a pro-contact position: Heart Progress. This group of people openly aims to bring about the legalisation and normalisation of consensual child-adult sex. This is not another sad VirPed bunch begging society to accept them as human beings because of their promise to condemn and suppress their sexuality. Neither it is a therapeutic circle providing some help yet still insisting that its members should forever give up any hope of their sexual needs being actually satisfied. These are people who publicly claim that children are sexual beings who can consent to sexual relations with adults, and not get harmed in the process; and, therefore, there is no objective reason to forbid intergenerational sexual contact.
So, we are witnessing the birth of the first activist community to defend consensual child-adult sex in many, many years. We definitely haven’t seen such initiatives since the 1970s, the times of PIE and NAMBLA; and the organisations founded in this remote epoch either were destroyed by the authorities (as PIE was) or forced to remain largely silent and inactive, formally existing yet not being able to do anything noticed by the general public (the current state of NAMBLA). The only remaining activity has been the internet “paedosphere” – a network of websites where unrepentant paedophiles and their supporters have gathered. And this activity has generally been confined to its original circle of participants, unable to reach a wider audience.
And now, Heart Progress is concentrating its efforts on doing exactly this, taking the message beyond the confines to which it has until now been restricted by public opinion. This requires real nonconformity and courage, especially in view of the fact that the community’s list of participants is open and visible, with members who are active on social networks such as Twitter and Google+ (where it has a community page). Apparently many of these people are not paedophiles themselves, but activists in open solidarity with them, without hiding their identities. Such public support is a remarkable achievement.
Nor does Heart Progress limit its activity to online advocacy: it has already organised a public, real-life demonstration called “Breed Out the Hate”. This event was not dedicated to paedosexuality but to interracial marriage, intercourse and childbirth. The demo was apparently quite small; yet, a primarily pro-paedosexual organisation visibly engaged in real-life activism is something unseen since the 1970s (or, at best, the early 1980s).
This is laudable… but, for a balanced view, some unpleasant aspects of Heart Progress must also be taken into account.
Heart Progress Community: A Not-So-Bright Side
With all my sympathy for their paedo-activism cause, here I’ll have to criticise: Heart Progress people are, essentially, “social justice warriors” (SJWs), with all the notable negative traits these mainly left-wingers possess.
Like all SJWs, they have a tendency to dogmatic thinking, operating by slogans and clichés rather than reflective thought, and parroting currently fashionable Left positions without analyzing them critically. They often are overemotional and angry; they expect people to agree with them, and become furious when they don’t. They tend to overvalue their supporters and undervalue their opponents. They are unresponsive to constructive, non-hostile critique and persist in mistakes.
They easily fall for the temptation of reverse discrimination, and of accepting inverted versions of discriminative ideologies of the past. Let’s return to the Breed Out The Hate demonstration I mentioned above: according to some of the movement’s leading figures, the purpose of interracial couples is dissolution of white people’s genetic inheritance – inheritance, which, in their opinion, makes white people innately prone to violence, oppression, genocide and racism. They think that white people, because of their “evil” genes, have been the primary villains since the dawn of history; only by mixing their genetic lines with intrinsically peaceful and tolerant non-white genes, will they allow their progeny to become better. Such “biological pacification” would be manifested not only in genes, but in looks: with all people being of interracial heritage, everyone will look the same and so there would be no place for racist sentiments, which, according to their ideas, requires “whiteness” to begin with.
I think it is pretty obvious that such assertions have no basis in historical scholarship, biological science or simple life experience. It is an inverted version of the classic racist ideology of white American slave-owners of the past. This ideology was born out of the conflict between culture and society: exalted principles of personal freedom and ethical rejection of slavery clashed with the harsh political and economic needs of colonial imperialism and unrestrained capitalism. The result was an ugly, pseudo-scientific ideology that claimed non-white people are lower beings compared to white ones; they are “bestial”, “dangerous”, unable to control their aggressive impulses and thus in need of “benevolent” rule by their masters. Nowadays, we can see their faulty justifications of oppression turned on their heads and thrown in whites’ own faces.
As any person with some decent historical knowledge may attest, non-white civilizations committed atrocities as eagerly as white ones, and proclaimed their own superiority above everyone else just as easily. The Chinese Empire, founded on bloody warfare, bound together by merciless repression, and describing itself as the only civilized nation in the world (with everyone else, including white Europeans, demeaned as savages), is a good example. 20th century genocides and tyrannies were not exclusively white activity either: Mao Zedong was as willing to slaughter millions as Stalin and Hitler were; Japanese militarists were as prone to committing atrocities as German Nazis; the modern North Korean regime is hardly less totalitarian than any of its Western predecessors. So, there is no reason to claim that white people have done more cruel deeds, historically, than non-whites – and that their genetic inheritance is somehow tainted.
Here I need to emphasise that I have nothing against interracial marriage: if two people of different races are in love with each other, they should marry – or just live together without formally being spouses, if they want – and have as many interracial kids as they like, without fear of societal condemnation. But if a white man and a white woman love each other and want to have children, they should do it without being blamed for perpetuating their “evil” genes, or for being innately prone to violence themselves. Racism, like any other oppressive ideology, does not require “whiteness”; what it requires is a lust for power and wealth on the part of the elite ideologues and the willingness of the masses to believe them, feeling satisfied by their illusory superiority; and these elites and masses can be of any skin colour and genetic inheritance.
Selective Support and Why We Need to Give It
So, what should we do? Should we support Heart Progress? Yes, we should. It is vitally important to understand that we have to start our public activism in our actual situation, in the current circumstances that we cannot simply wish away. If we want to re-enter the Libertarian Left movement, we’ll have to deal with the SJWs who, whether we like it or not, are still apparently the leading faction.
Yet, our support shouldn’t be uncritical – while participating, we can and should raise our voice against the ideas and practices of Heart Progress in particular, and the modern Libertarian Left in general, which we find to be baseless, fallacious or counter-productive.
By doing it, we would be able to add a necessary diversity of ideas and approaches to the rebirthing of paedosexual activism and ensure that its supporters are not limited to SJWs. This is important for our public message: the general populace must see that intergenerational sex is defended by people with a range of ideological backgrounds. It must see that not all defenders of consensual intergenerational sex subscribe to nonsensical SJW notions.
This will also help to ensure the preservation of the pro-paedosexuality message when SJW ideology hits a crisis, which may happen sooner than we think. With all the emerging critical voices from within the Libertarian Left milieu, voices that justly point to the current absurd excesses of identity politics and “political correctness”, we would be able to continue our activism inside the future Libertarian Left scene, which will overcome SJW faults.
And it will help to restore the culture of critical thought and open dialogue which is sadly weak in our authoritarian times, when Left seems to compete with the Right in its censoriousness and rejection of complex rational analysis in the favour of simplistic emotional dogmas.
Some final remarks
The Libertarian Left movement is in a sad, I may even say “fallen”, state nowadays – especially if compared with its thriving mid-20th century version. But, with all its current faults, it is still better than its main rival, Alt-Right. With all its mistakes, the fundamental basis of the Libertarian Left ideal – an intent to create an egalitarian society, capable of progress wilfully driven by the people themselves, diverse and yet united in solidarity as regards respecting fundamental humanistic values, cooperative and yet supportive of individuality – is both viable and desirable. The Alt-Right, by contrast, based on a decisive rejection of equality, progress and everyone deviating from an arbitrary “traditional norm”, is unviable and undesirable from the start.
It is worth remembering that sometimes, somewhere, in some specific cases, Alt-Rightists do have valid points – in their critiques of SJW excesses, for example – but the basic principles on which they base their politics are still, in my opinion, fundamentally wrong ones. On the other hand, the Libertarian Left have made, and keep making, many mistakes, ones which have to be identified and criticised as such; but their basic principles are fundamentally correct. That’s why I’ll prefer to remain with the Libertarian Left, trying to repair, reform and renovate it, rather than bitterly abandon it because of its multiple current faults, such as pervasive SJW-ism.
And in the changeable and flexible society led by the Libertarian Left-led, paedosexuals and children alike may have a chance of liberation. In the rigid and normalcy-enforcing Alt-Right society, children can never be free and paedosexuals will be forever persecuted.
So, as I said before, and will repeat here, Heart Progress people are remarkably courageous, and are doing important work. They are the first ones in many years to do it. And as for the absurd ideas which some of their leading figures support, unfortunately, they are not the only ones supporting absurd ideas now. If we support them, we will be able to point them to their mistakes, and maybe even persuade some of them to give them up. Or, at least, we will make their community more diverse – with the benefits I described above.
Hi Tom, I’m back after a long absence. Nothing personal. Indeed I hope to catch up on all your posts.
On Twitter I communicated with a prominant Heart Progress member, warning him of a near Alt Right video exposing them and the publisher’s attempt to get them banned from said handle. Two days later their accounts were suspended.
That said, even I couldn’t agree with children as young as 4 consenting to sex with an adult, and so was relieved my association with them ended. Yet being a lefty, a Left Libertarian, I too feel in spirit at least to help whoever is brave enough to confront the right authoritarians. On Twitter, Facebook and YouTube their hypocritical projection and anti-Christ religious dogma seems to be the more dominant.
So yes, let’s support Heart Progress, as ToC so eloquently requests.
Good to see you back, Pete. I hope you, and others, will keep us up to date on any further developments with Heart Progress. Unfortunately, I don’t have time at the moment to go looking for such information.
This is absolutely disgusting, anyone with a minimum of guts think that. They allow material of non-sexual abuse murder and torture of children and animals, these are the same ones that devote their energies in eradicating the “scourge” of any sexuality with minors under 18. Just go in and look. Facebook is evil and all who represents, this sick and hypocrital modern world. If pedophiles are evil, anti-pedophiles are the devil.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/revealed-facebook-internal-rulebook-sex-terrorism-violence
https://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2017/may/21/facebooks-internal-manual-on-non-sexual-child-abuse-content
Well, the discussion apparently moved to the question of animal rights – and animals’ sentience / intelligence. Well, I can add something much more controversial to the debate – Rupert Sheldrake’s famous research on animals’ psychic abilities.
It should be noted here that probably 99,9% of parapsychological research is done with humans as subjects – “animal psi” studies like Sheldrake’s ones are, sadly, very rare, so, yet, there is no such a vast experimental database on animals’ psychic potential as the one we have on the humans’ psychic manifestations. Nevertheless, Sheldrake’s attempts are highly intriguing – I hope someone, one day, will try to follow his path and perform some new psi experiments with animals.
If one is curious, there are a lot of information about this research of Sheldrake on his site:
http://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers
Here is a video (in German with English subtitles) about his most known experiment of this kind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkrLJhBC3X4
Here is Sheldrake’s video summarising his experiments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmphNsqYUm0
And, of course, his response to the claims of “debunking” of the experiment made by his opponent, psi skeptic Richard Wiseman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkrLJhBC3X4
So, we can say that animals share with us not only “intelligence” or “sentience” (or whatever one likes to call it), but also something we can call – for the sake of better word – “soul” or “spirit”; this is, something immaterial that makes us conscious beings, capable of selfhood, free will and phenomenal experience – and manifesting it in ways that are not yet understood, let alone explained, within our current scientific framework… but we can and should try to research them with the scientific methodology, with people like Sheldrake (and other parapsychologists) are actively doing.
Sorry, I linked the same video twice in my previus comment. The proper first video link should be this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA5wAm2c01w
(Or, alternatively: Tom, if you can, just change the link in my previous comment to the correct one I’ve just provided and just remove this second comment).
>”intelligence” or “sentience” (or whatever one likes to call it)
Intelligence and sentience are not synonymous: the “it” of which you speak refers to distinct concepts, with the former implying a lot more mental ability than the latter. The difference is important for this discussion, I suggest.
Yes, I know that these two concepts are not synonymous – but their meanings, as of any other complex concepts, are quite volatile and speaker-dependent – and, therefore, often overlap, get mixed and confused (especially if other concepts, like “cognitive abilities”, are added to the debate). The discussion here demonstrates it quite clearly!
>overlap, get mixed and confused
Which is why I was making distinctions, as used by philosophers, that attempt to bring some clarity — and which stand some chance of success in doing so if attention is paid to them. Clarifying the terms of a debate, after all, is a staple of the philosopher’s contribution.
You might be interested in this new article in Slate magazine:
Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real
Which means science is broken.
https://slate.com/cover-stories/2017/05/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html
Provocative title. Haven’t read it myself yet.
Oh, I do know what is it – in fact, I already expressed my strong opinion about it on Skeptiko forum (as “Vortex”):
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-which-means-science-is-broken-slate.3825/#post-113825
In short, Daryl Bem’s research is such a painful thorn in psi skeptics’… eh… soft tissue for a simple reason: it is as methodologically sound as experimental psychology can ever be. Which is not surprising, since Daryl Bem is a highly prominent psychologist from the Cornell University – in fact, one of the most authoritative people in the field of experimental psychology – and his parapsychological studies were published in one of the most respectable and prestigious – and most strictly and demandingly peer-reviewed – academic psychology journals.
So, skeptics chose the truly hilarious path: if scientific methodology can be correctly and effectively used to prove something which, in their philosophical – *not* scientific! – opinion is absolutely impossible, when the scientific methodology itself is fundamentally flawed and should be remade. At least, in its forms employed in the experimental psychology.
This is the reason I usually do not debate parapsychology with *extreme* psi skeptics… or intergenerational sexuality with *extreme* paedo-haters, or criticisms of psychiatry with *extreme* proponents of coercive mainstream psychiatry, etc. To maintain a meaningful discussion, one should find an opponent who may, potentially, change or modify his position – or, at least, react to it without hate and severe hostility. There is simply no point to debate the people who demonstrate from the start that no evidence (or argumentation) would ever affect their views, and have nothing but insults and personal attacks for the ones who question them.
Still haven’t had time to read the article as have been busy formatting and posting new blog (q.v.) However, I have encountered Bem’s work before, in the area of research into the origins of sexual orientation. As you say, he came to psi with a big prior reputation..
Another important thing about Bem is that he started as a skeptic, with a clearly negative attitude towards parapsychological research. He was, at that time, simply unaware about the relevant literature. And when he, to his utter surprise, learned how methodologically strong psi research actually is, he changed his positions according to the evidence he had acknowledged.
You may read a long Bem’s interview on the Skeptiko podcast, where he told about this change of position (and much more):
http://skeptiko.com/daryl-bem-responds-to-parapsychology-debunkers/
Just read the Slate article. As I understand it, Bem’s research does not prove that ESP is real, but that the statistical methods of mainstream psychological research are flawed. The article links to many papers by scientists, I recommend reading the other Slate article by a statistician explaining in simple terms these manipulated statistics: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/statistics_and_psychology_multiple_comparisons_give_spurious_results.html
Then of course for the real statisticians, there is the classical “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Now concerning Heart Progress, in response to the questions raised by the screen captures allegedly showing their leaders confessing to be trolls, James Carter showed the same thing done with their enemy Martell allegedly confessing his error and apologising: https://plus.google.com/+JamesCarter_EqualLuv4All_/posts/3GL5HGMv9s3
With some humour he adds: “I’m telling you right here and now that has to be Martell, as no one can fake an account on twitter. After all, if it’s a profile captured in a screenshot then it has to be true, right?”
So, no one really got anywhere, only funding for more research is assured. Maybe the whole field of psychology was created as a money-making proposition.
Anyhow, the academics can wax and wane over whether ESP is real or not.
I know from personal experience that time indeed flows in both directions (that is perhaps a simplistic way of explaining the phenomenon, but we hardly have a better one at the moment).
In fact, the level of interconnectivity between sentient beings (including the rest of the world too) is much greater than academia is willing to admit.
Hello explorer, We have chat before but i just wanted to offer my email so we can pm each other because i have lost my previous email. It’s about skeptiko.
Dexterousplaya@outlook.com or on my blog nucklearonline.wordpress.com
Love the site tom, and especially once again some brain candy from the infamous explorer.
Blaire White just uploaded a video on YouTube pedophilia apology. I can’t stand listening to her, especially after watching the discussion with Omnipolitics16.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54bhKBz3NRU
If she is so outraged by this woman’s ‘is sex good for kids’ videos, Then maybe she should challenge the philosophy rather that just calling on Youtube to suspend accounts that she disagrees with.
Man, why put something that is aggravating here? You don’t know how angry I was when talking to the narcissistic cunt ;(
>when talking to the narcissistic cunt ;(
Tone the language down, please, O16. I know you are not talking about another contributor here, but even so…
Oh yeah, my bad Tom.
Well now I can say thanks for your earlier nice comment about H TOC! 🙂
That’s nice. Hey tom, do I contact you through email on posting works denoting to pedophilia and you will post it through here? Also, have you heard of the pedophile controversy on YouTube?
>do I contact you through email on posting works denoting to pedophilia…
You mean works written by you, or what? You can of course can give links right here in the Comments section for works by other people, then everyone can see them. If you mean a substantial essay or guest blog by yourself, you can talk about it here or send an email if you prefer. My email address is on the About page.
>Also, have you heard of the pedophile controversy on YouTube?
Which one? Please give a link if there is anything more interesting than the usual crap.
Well this isn’t one of my websites, but this is one of my friends websites who was recently an anti pedophile individual who went through a change and is the exact opposite, here’s the link:
https://nucklearonline.wordpress.com/
He just created it not to long ago, so there is a short number of posts on their but they do offer the best insight from non pedophiles who are pro contact & against the sex offender registry.
The YouTube controversy I was talking about was the controversy held against me & cart o’graph not too long ago, also thankfully I really don’t have anything to offer but the unusual crap spewed on by these individuals, the only claim I find new by them is the curiosity & bodily curiosity & their quantity of research regarding the prohibition of pedophilia & sex between adults & children whether it is of quality or not, which I always wanted to hear your critiques towards their claims about pedophile research & curiosity part even though I already suspect an astute & logical response from you.
>I always wanted to hear your critiques towards their claims about pedophile research
A lot of these critiques tend to be shallow and repetitious, so tracking them all down and zapping them is a bit of a mug’s game, requiring vast energy and with little to show for it. I have always done my best in answering various critiques within the course of writing my own blogs.
[…] also left several comments on Tom O’Carroll’s blog, regarding this […]
Dissident, you say that you choose the egalitarian path, but I think I have a part of egalitarian, or do you think that claim “teenagers” should have the same rights as “adults” is not a kind of egalitarianism? And perhaps to claim that all animals are equal and must have the same basic rights as humans is not too? That sets me apart from hard anti-egalitarians like other past “conservative” commentators (we all know who) and the MRAs.
Speaking about MRAs they are unable to understand that a minor should have the same civil and political rights that an adult, sex-positives can support sex with minors, ok, but it is antagonistic to their position, for me feminism and masculinism are anti-age equality and seek social stratification of adults and “non-adults”, for that I oppose both.
In addition, in the Political Compass my result was:
Economic Left / Right: -5.63
Social Libertarian / Authoritarian: 0.21
I.e “mild leftist between libertarian and authoritarian,” asks Steve, if that does not give any credence to me, I do not know what to give. I suppose that the extra 0.21 authoritarian is because I not smoke weed and the usual self-proclaimed “megalomaniac” titles.
Dissident, you say that you choose the egalitarian path, but I think I have a part of egalitarian, or do you think that claim “teenagers” should have the same rights as “adults” is not a kind of egalitarianism? And perhaps to claim that all animals are equal and must have the same basic rights as humans is not too? That sets me apart from hard anti-egalitarians like other past “conservative” commentators (we all know who) and the MRAs.
I think bequeathing civil rights and full liberty to youths is definitely a legitimate part of egalitarianism, and that in fact a true egalitarian system cannot be established as long as younger people are left out of the blanket equality granted to all citizens. However, many otherwise dedicated egalitarians of the modern age have the same deeply ingrained anti-youth prejudices as anyone else raised in WEIRD societies, and therefore often only support equality along racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation lines for those who are considered legal adults.
As for animals, I believe the concept of animal rights is very legit, but the platform needs to be modified in accordance with their lack of sentient status and the far more basic but still very important needs they have compared to fully sentient beings like humans. Please note I have nowhere near the space here to do the topic complete justice or cover all of its nuances, but I will say the following to make the basic gist of my stance clear.
Animal rights should include the right for all species to continue to exist, to be left with a viable habitat & ecosystem to continue providing sufficient resources required for their survival, and not to be subjected to torture or cruelty by humans. The preservation of their habitat, continued survival of their species, and freedom from undue pain and torture (including laboratory experimentation) are pretty much all animals “desire” from the world, however. They have neither the ability nor the inclination to participate in the equivalent of political decision-making, participating in or creating art, etc. They are guided by instinctual behavior only, and thus these basic, primal needs are what we have to take into account when discussing animal rights. They can be considered legitimate denizens of the planet that have the intrinsic right to survive and be free of painful abuse or unjust captivity by humans, but cannot actually be considered akin to citizens of a civilization run by beings who have advanced reasoning capacity and desires and needs that include sophisticated artistic endeavors, display considerable diversity among individuals, and possess the full capability of making morality-based decisions & choices outside the realm of base instinctual needs & the natural laws governing the ecosystem.
Infant humans obviously need a similar degree of care and advocacy from others as do domestic animals, but they are still going to become sentient beings of unpredictable diversity of needs, skills, interests, and yearnings, and quite rapidly at that. Hence, they can be considered full citizens at birth, and thus fully deserving of nurturing guidance towards making their own decisions and having all the resources to teach them and prepare them for doing so as soon as they become cognizant and began displaying such an interest, developing whatever individual artistic inclinations and talents they will have, etc. Unfortunately, children and adolescents are currently considered inherently incompetent and inferior to adults despite much evidence that suggests otherwise. Their current status therefore needs to be challenged and they need to be granted full citizenship and not simply be treated as the equivalent of glorified pets or animals and only afforded the same basic/primal rights as non-sentient beings.
Speaking about MRAs they are unable to understand that a minor should have the same civil and political rights that an adult, sex-positives can support sex with minors, ok, but it is antagonistic to their position, for me feminism and masculinism are anti-age equality and seek social stratification of adults and “non-adults”, for that I oppose both.
Agreed. Contemporary “feminists” (read: politically organized misandrists) and the masculinists (MRAs), both those who have misogynistic inclinations and those who do not which have arisen to challenge feminism as a predicable backlash, are both supporters of the hegemonic status quo that is dominated by adults. The rights they fight for are solely the rights of adults, the only differentiation being which gender rights they happen to focus upon or the hoped for gender demarcation of the adult oligarchy. Neither group are true egalitarians due to the narrow focus of the movements and the biases and prejudices which several of the more “radical” (read: extreme) members of both political tendencies have displayed.
>…their lack of sentient status
Don’t you mean their lack of cognitive status here Dissy? Dogs, horses, etc, and probably much simpler organisms too, have sentient status — they can feel, and suffer — as long as they have a nervous system. Their limitations are in the cognitive domain (especially rational thought) rather than the sentient one. We probably need to go to very simple organisms, such as plants, and bacteria, in order to find ones of which we can say with reasonable confidence they are incapable of terrible pain and fear.
I honestly thought I covered all of that in my stance on animal rights, even if we prefer different definitions of the word “sentient.” I’ve always adhered to the first two of the three possible meanings described in the Merriam-Webster definition of the word, but I see how it can be interpreted in different ways.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient
It was never my intention to imply that animals are incapable of basic but strong feelings, including fear and even affection. I simply tried to make it clear that they are not capable or desirous of doing things such as: creating or participating in artistic endeavors; formulate anything akin to a personal philosophy or opinions; or have highly individualized desires or needs within the same species (e.g., you do not tend to see wild animals of a single species displaying highly individualized aesthetic preferences). I think my stance on animal rights to preserve their natural habitats, respect their right to live free of undue human molestation, never participate in any activity leading to their extinction, and not subjecting them to any type of torture on any level, etc., et al., covers all of that.
Yes, I was never in any doubt as to your real meaning, and I share your view.
It’s just that when philosophers in the animal rights/welfare field speak of animals as “sentient beings” — a very common phrase among them — what they are intending to convey by the word is that these are creatures with highly developed sensory systems; these animals are capable of experiencing pain, fear and distress. The word is directed to the animals’ feelings not their (lack of) reasoning ability, artistic talent etc.
As Jeremy Bentham put it in his pioneering work a couple of centuries ago, “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
https://www.utilitarianism.com/jeremybentham.html
Pigs are even smarter than dogs. In many ways, they are as smart as a 3-year-old human. Yet people wonder why I am vegan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mza1EQ6aLdg
It is that this system is egalitarian, that is the problem. It is egalitarian because the rights and freedoms are between “equals”, an “adolescent” is not considered equal to an adult, are not at our level of mental and sexual development to with us, mature people, teens are only able to be with others adolescents who are “equal”, that is why the usual complaints against the egalitarianism of me and other people. The idea that relationships must be between adults / people of the same age is profoundly egalitarian, just as denying the rights of children is anti-egalitarian, is one of those cases of double meaning, as “liberal.”
The problem with the plan of all of you: What all of you are asking me to is to admit that the only real way to achieve these goals (such, in my particular case, as accepting adult-adolescent relationships and equality between the two or “vegan” level animal rights) is to accept the rules of the world, that is, by activism and social and political advocacy to convince society and the “normal” people (whom I hate with all my guts) that my ideas are the right thing, once we have a lot of support and society conscience is more open, we go to politics and to make new laws, in this case more just. Then it will be a true egalitarianism when – ALL (emphasis here) we can be free and happy and live our own lives without other hysterics and ignorant oppress us. of course you adds that this is within a century, and that we can not even get it for our natural life. Same with all other issues.
Sorry, but this is not a “real” option, even more if you are in my position.
You highlight another good reason why HP are probably trolls: They claim that ‘paedophilia’ will be accepted in the next decade; I don’t think anyone on here that is genuine would agree with that.
It appears that HP might be coming to an end. One of the leading HP trolls is giving up.
https://twitter.com/Securityconcern/status/865996172376371200/photo/1
I showed this image and two others from https://twitter.com/Securityconcern in a comment to Clive Martin, who answered:
Just contacted Ernst. This isn’t even his account. He got suspended a while back and hasn’t been able to create accounts since.
And it appears I have my own doppleganger as well.
In the new group, Steiner is only moderator, the owners are Clive Martin, James Carter and Daniel Gaither. These 3 seem interested whenever I say something thoughtful or provide a link to a good text, which is not what I would expect from trolls, who usually prefer to generate outrage.
I’m afraid that “Heart Progress” is a false-flag operation and that it’s apparent success in fooling some of our friends should stand as a warning to us all. It may be that, in also effectively fooling the anti-pedo hysterics who constantly patrol Twitter and “report pedos” as a means to give their own lives a sense of meaning and purpose, that the self-proclaimed “Heart Progress” accounts have largely been suspended.
I am always wary of anyone’s sudden appearance on Twitter claiming to be our friend. I never assume that they are who they claim to be. I don’t even assume that their Twitter photo depicts the person whose account it is.
This is unfortunate as we do need to create a community but, as those who were active in NAMBLA can well attest, heightened suspicion is the order of the day and we come to great danger when we begin to trust without basis.
I heard the first part of this YouTube video a few weeks ago purporting to be the words of a “Heart Progress” activist and, frankly, it gave me the creeps. I’m not sure how anyone could possibly sound more phony. He is perfectly willing to parrot what he thinks is our views on intergenerational relationships in order to get a reaction from the social media universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ljCx1GY9tQ&t=307s
This particular ad-hoc fake organization appears to be the work of leftist SJWs rather than the usual Alex Jones-type of right-wing quasi-fascists.
They’re both out to get us, let us never forget! We can now see the “Clover Gender” fraud, which was easily revealed as such, as the first iteration of the “Heart Progress” fraud.
“Clover Gender” was much better, I thought: very clever, and making a brilliantly satirical, still relevant, point.
Was it antagonistic to Kind people? Not particularly. Arguably we were collateral damage, caught up in an ambush aimed at exposing the absurdities of extreme gender-bending. We were presented as the reductio ad absurdem, showing where it could lead. I thought it was rather a neat idea, actually, which quite a few Kinds who genuinely identify as children, or at least child-like, could take up in all sincerity. Think Michael Jackson for a start.
Ernst Steiner and other claim they never “confessed” and these pages were a false impersonation. I asked Steiner to repeat his rejection of the “cofessions” on his blog, for the sake of stable and direct link:
https://ernststeinerblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/whoami/#comment-6
According to them, it was an act of defamation performed by someone named “Martell Nelson”. Does anyone know anything about this Twitter persona?
He is another lunatic who wants kind people to kill themselves. https://twitter.com/MartellThaCool
https://www.youtube.com/user/UltraDOG17
It really gave you the creeps? I actually thought it sounded pretty good even though it sounded a bit phony.
Yes, it was very creepy, primarily because he sounded like a total phony as well as his ticking what he thought were the obvious boxes in appealing to us but which set me on immediate edge and left me extremely suspicious. The smell test, during the first attempt at listening (I have now forced myself to listen to the whole, reeking thing to check my perceptions, thus confirming my suspicions) was not passed. My radar painted him as an incoming skud missile filled with horse shit.
Thank you for these insights, David, and good to see you back here finally.
One reason why the SJWs are “out to get us” is an aspect of their ideology that I think needs to be realized in order to understand why they are against us: despite how they latch onto the now largely corrupt and compromised mainstream Left, they are not–I repeat, not–advocates of progressive change. They are (more or less) fully supportive of the system of hierarchy that now exists. Their goal is not to continue to make progressive changes towards a better and more free society for all, but simply to make some outright regressive tweaks to the prevailing hierarchy: replace the current predominant group in the political and economic oligarchy (WMHs –> White Male Heterosexuals) with Non-WMHs, i.e., anyone now considered a “minority” by pushing the Oppressed Victim card and arguing that the rules of ethics and engagement towards any group marked as oppressors is entirely different from from those marked as the oppressed. For instance, in their eyes, a woman committing the same type of abusive conduct towards an innocent man as immoral men have inflicted on women is not a comparable breach of ethics, because men “deserve it” as a result of their traditional role of oppressor in the past. Note how the same type of rationalization is often used by right-wing Zionist Jews to justify the Israeli government’s policy of ethno-centric apartheid against the Palestinians and to argue for inflicting a destructive war on Iran.
As a result, Kind people are viewed by SJWs as the exact same threat to the tweaked (but not actually changed) status quo of adult hierarchy that the WMH-dominated oligarchy have benefited from. They likewise look upon youths in the exact same way as the current dominant group in the adultist hierarchies do: their continued legal & cultural marginalization as third class citizens is an integral component in preserving the adult hegemony, which is itself a major component of the contemporary WEIRD hierarchical system. This is why they are every bit as against MAPs as their right-wing opponents who play the opposite end of the identity politics game. The SJWs may want to change the racial/gender/orientation configuration of the adult hierarchy, but they still want its dominant group to be distinctly adult. Equal justice, civil rights, and recognition for everyone is not part of their agenda. Their agenda is a mere re-shuffling of the current deck of cards, and replacing the diamonds and spades at the top of the deck with clovers and hearts; not replacing it with an entirely different deck.
Thank you, Dissident, it is good to be back.
I believe that most people, regardless of the groups or ideologies they identify with, or think that they identify with, are just very, very ignorant, certainly on the subject of intergenerational relationships.
We can confirm that they can be programmed to hate through their bombardment by continuous propaganda (as if we need any further lessons in that process) and that some percentage of them will be so ambitious and inventive as to devise new ways to further torment us and subterfuges and misdirections to malign us further still in the minds of the public.
These processes are mostly spontaneous and without benefit of central planning even if the opinion leaders, power brokers and politicians find it convenient and profitable to urge them on.
Correspondingly, I’m very skeptical of successfully engaging with any of them on the basis of their stated political beliefs since we can see how pervasive their hatred is across ideologies.
This is the best argument for waging our fight for the rights of kids and the adults who love them rather narrowly and without conditioning them upon larger political frameworks which can, and therefore should, be excluded from our appeals.
As we have all noted, there are remarkably few minority groups today who can be legitimately hated with the ferocity with which we are universally hated. It is not a coincidence that that hatred exists in inverse proportion to the contracting array of acceptable targets. It’s pretty clear that there exists a universal appetite for hate-objects which exists at a very visceral, atavistic, level.
We will be most effective when we simply document reality and present the facts that give lie to the supernaturalism and calumny undergirding the hysteria. In my view, hitching our wagon to one political horse would always be a mistake and has always been so. Our enemies have, throughout my lifetime, crossed political aisles to hate us.
Their G+ circle was deleted. It was fun while it lasted.
Yes, I just visited it and noticed it is gone – you were faster than me for just a few seconds to inform people here. Their main site, however, still remains, as well as their YouTube channel with a pair of videos:
http://nickmartinezofficial.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-MywT2h3tm2ExeOFOKVhcw
Ernst Steiner is still on G+, but I suspect it is just a question of time for him to be banished. His YouTube channel and WordPress blog are still online:
https://plus.google.com/+ErnstSteinerForProgress
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9KFTvtQvXO6Frd_YLrdjcg
https://ernststeinerblog.wordpress.com/
Nevermind. It is back up. Whew!
Really?! When I try to enter their G+ page, “Error 404” message is all what I get…
Ah, here they are! This is their new G+ community page, not the same as the old one:
https://plus.google.com/communities/118323033971562252682
Let’s see for how long it will last before G+ administration will close it as well to appease the enraged morality guardians… 🙁
They’re back. Now their Google+ group (the same) is called “Safety Awareness”, and everything now goes about autism, not even appear their site link or “LGTBP+” information, or they have been hacked to laugh at them, or the group itself was troll from the beginning. Anyway there are some REAL people who publish REAL (non-SJW nonsense) articles on the web, BUT are those who are joined the group after.
I do not know if when you and others read this is already “repaired”, or is something thematical about, well, autism awareness (autism awareness month is april, not may), but I assure you, they have come back with that name and theme.
It is written in response to “Order”, to avoid the comment-shrinking effect. He apparently claimed that everyone (except him) here is “pacifist”.
While I prefer not to respond to troll-like comments, I will make an exception and clarify my position on the issues mentioned by “Order”.
I am, definitely, not a pacifist; I’m not against armed struggle and violent resistance practiced by genuinely oppressed people against their oppressors, including agents of the state, which, in my anarchist opinion, is one of the primary oppressive social structures. But such militancy should be adequate, critical and discriminative.
By “adequate” I means that militant action can be performed only against individuals, communities, organisations and institutions that initiate and/or perpetuate violence themselves. It should never be used to suppress ideas, or social gatherings that do not employ violence, no matter how strongly, and how justifiably, one may disagree with them or dislike them.
By “critical” I mean that militants should be always aware of premises, circumstances and aims of their activity, and modify them according to the changing situation within which their militancy is practiced.
By “discriminative” I mean that even in the situations where usage of militant actions are adequate (see above), all necessary precautions should be made to prevent harm to uninvolved bystanders. And even to the actual enemies against whom one fights, not everything is acceptable: usage of torture, or any other inventive cruelty, is unacceptable towards anyone, including the worst types imaginable.
The example of the militant struggle which fulfilled all three criteria above were Black Panthers, who practiced armed self-defense against the violence aimed at them, including the “legal” violence of the state. Being combined with other, non-violent methods, and thus achieving a genuine diversity of tactics, this militancy helped the ultimate victory of the Black Liberation Movement (as much as the forceful, physical confrontation between gays and police during the Stonewall Riots was a decisive milestone in the history of Gay Liberation, showing gays that should no longer accept the position of a passive victim, but rather stand and act in defense of their human dignity).
The example of a struggle that do not pass at least the first two of the abovementioned criteria is the one of modern “Antifa” groups: they use force not to defend themselves and others (as Black Panthers or Stonewall gay-fighters did), but to suppress any public discussion or gathering they dislike. And they fail to comprehend that such willingness to employ violence against non-violent targets is not only blatantly unethical, but wildly counterproductive: riots to censor the free speech of (Alt-)Right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter actually boosted their popularity and helped to spread their ideas.
Unfortunately, right here and now, militancy is not the tactic which may be employed by paedophile liberation movement: for a physical confrontation with authorities, one should have at least some acceptance and support of the population, especially its actively anti-authoritarian parts; and a group as universally hated and rejected as paedosexuals nowadays will be crushed by authorities immediately, with nearly unanimous popular approval (and participation). As I already said in my previous post here, for now our tactics are spreading the message and participating in the general liberatory movements (with a future prospect of building relations and securing a place within these movements, if message-spreading will be successful enough). The day of paedophiles’ own Stonewall is not yet on the horizon, sadly… But I’m certain it will, one day, come – no prejudice is eternal.
People like you are a ray of light in a world of darkness, may the Lord bless you.
*sprinkles holy water on Explorer alongside Order*
“and a group as universally hated and rejected as paedosexuals nowadays will be crushed by authorities immediately, with nearly unanimous popular approval (and participation)”
True…Take a look at OSC latest blog…’when victims attack, then scroll down at all the predictable comments!
http://therealosc.blogspot.ro/
I want to add some thoughts about the roles of ideas and persuasion in social struggles.
As Harris Mirkin noted in his wonderful “The Pattern of Sexual Politics” paper, any oppressed group’s fight for the societal recognition and acceptance may be perceived as a two-phase sequence, in which the active political struggle for the equal social status is only the second one. This second phase is the one which is characterised by the notable presence of the group, as well as its allies, in the public scene. And, while the group and its defenders are still being attacked by the sizeable part of the population, their resources, as well as the sheer number of people supporting their cause, allow them to perform as an equal adversary in a societal conflict – with the desired perspective of defeating hostile opposition, and becoming equal friends to (most) non-members of the group, being in the foreseeable reach.
Yet this second phase of massive and public activism is preceded by the first phase when the oppressed group has (almost) no allies and resources, and its vilification, segregation and persecution are accepted as “normal”, “natural” and “necessary” by nearly everyone, including even some members of the oppressed group itself. In such phase, members of the group who dare to question their dehumanised status, simply cannot act much for its own defence against repressive social practices, especially institutionalised ones – for active resistance, one need both notable power and enough supporters. So, in this early phase, there are only two ways for the group to improve its situation.
The first way is ideas, education and persuasion. The active members of the group has to reach as many non-members of the group as they can, and try their best to demonstrate that the justifications for their group’s discrimination is intellectually baseless and invalid, practices of such discrimination are ethically unacceptable and deeply inhuman. And for a group members whose oppression is accepted, if not promoted, by most people around them, even the simple attempt to present evidence and argumentation for their own position may be quite difficult, and sometimes even perilous, since unthinking and uncritical rejection, censorship of their speech, and personal attacks on the people vocalizing it are to be expected.
The second way is the actions to improve the general societal situation, transforming it towards greater inclusiveness, equality and solidarity, so the ideas of the unjustified and cruel nature of the group’s oppression may be easily, and more eagerly, accepted by the population. Here we have a possibility to act, not just to persuade, since the social networks, communities and mass movements fighting for such elevated vision of society are already existing, and are powerful and resourceful enough to make a difference. With the general societal atmosphere becoming more liberated, there is progressively more chance for the oppressed group’s members to be heard and supported – up to the point when they can openly demonstrate their presence as an active social force, and demand an equal inclusion in the liberatory movements, and, later, in the society as a whole.
To demonstrate what the two phases mean, I can give examples of three complex social groups fighting for acceptance that are in the first phase of their struggle, the second one, and in between the phases.
The complex group in the first phase of the struggle – or, more precisely, two groups with oppressed social statuses interconnecting and (to a good extent) merging with each other – are children / adolescents and paedophiles / hebephiles. Their situation is desperate nowadays, since it is almost universally thought that the former can and should be discriminated in the harshest way possible in order to “protect” them from (largely imaginary) dangers; and the latter are mistakenly believed to be the prime and utmost threat to the former, and therefore are repressed in the most inhuman way, with the overwhelming societal approval (and, often, perpetuation) of this repression. Spreading the message, providing knowledge about the intellectual falseness of the dominant position and demonstrating its moral wrongness, as well as participating in the larger liberatory and progressive social struggles, is all they can do for now.
The complex group which is now somewhen in between the first and second phases are “mental patients” / allegedly “mentally ill” people, as well as diverse selection of researchers, practitioners and activists supporting the radical change in the modern “mental health” system. The transitory nature of their liberatory fighting is seen in the fact that while they are not yet fully accepted by progressive milieu, and are not notable enough in the eyes of the general society, they already have a relatively large network of organisations and communities supporting their cause, demonstrate and protest in public, and even try to defend their rights in international institutions like the United Nations. Their activism is not yet as wide, and as intense, as the one of the second-phase-populating groups, yet it is much more developed, and much more accepted, than the one of child liberationists and pro-paedosexuals.
And the group that are now in the second phase is transsexuals / transgenders. Their struggle for acceptance and recognition is already societally notable and important, with both “pro” and “anti” causes having wide support and considerable resource, and thus capable of a large and prolonged confrontation and intense public activity.
So, to summarize: while social change starts with the progressive ideas, it is doomed if it remains unable to put the ideas into social liberatory practice, since it is practice and action that plays a decisive role in the transformation of social structures.
Of the three examples you have chosen, one feature that stands out for me is the tremendous pace at which the transsexuals / transgenders have progressed, rapidly overtaking other groups that have long been struggling for acceptance.
This tells us there is nothing inevitable about progression through the stages, which depends on broader contextual considerations. Notably, for instance, the progress of the gay and trans movements have been fast-tracked thanks to their ideological affinity with feminism: all three are linked aspects of a gender revolution, with feminism leading the way some decades ago.
I agree with the basics of what you say about this, though I think all three phases do indeed occur, even if not all oppressed groups fly through them at the same speed; or, more accurately perhaps, an unequal ability to weather certain political backlashes. However, I also think the homosexual and trans communities took a very long time to get to the “inbetween” phase Explorer describes (let’s call it Phase 1.5 for the sake of lazy typists).
I think there is another reason–this one somewhat unfortunate–that caused the rapid progress of the gay and trans communities after they entered Phase 1.5 by the 1970s, why they continued to progress through the backlash period following that era while the MAP and youth communities did not.
Unlike the Kind and youth communities–who came close to reaching Phase 1.5 in the ’70s–the gay/trans communities continued their forward progress to Phase 2 by (arguably) the late ’80s-mid-’90s by going the same route the general Left did to maintain its political life after the conservative/backlash period beginning with the 1980s decade, which was to abandon all of their radical/revolutionary politics prior to the ’80s, and embracing assimilation politics by accepting and integrating themselves into the established societal norms and institutions rather than challenging or even questioning them (e.g., monogamous marriage and monoamory in general; conservatism towards youth sexuality and to some extent sexuality in general; duplicating the nuclear family unit; embracing or at least working within the framework of capitalist economic relations rather than opposing it). Part of this assimilation entailed turning on other oppressed groups, which included abandoning revolutionary/liberatory thinking regarding youths and MAPs, instead engaging in rampant protectionist attitudes towards the former and harsh demonization of the latter.
This was easier for the gays and trans to do in the ’80s because they had all the basic civil rights afforded to adults, whereas youths did not, and MAPs are attracted to those who do not. You will note that the Virpeds are trying, to the best of their situation, to adopt similar assimilationist attitudes and stances, but it’s not quite working out the same way due to the more complex nature of the MAP situation in regards to the lack of civil rights and entrenched legal & cultural protectionism that the youth community still has to endure. Hence, the Virpeds can only adopt the general attitude of the social norms, but not effectively duplicate the institutions themselves. And the youth community’s lack of basic civil rights enjoyed by adult gays and trans even when they were heavily discriminated against (e.g., they could still vote, assemble in certain places, have a presence in the workplace, network politically with other adults) places a major additional obstacle in their path… they too can, at most, embrace the attitude but not take a similar place within the institutions.
The more complex oppressive situation facing Kinds and youths from a purely legal standpoint, not to mention the heavy degree of age segregation practiced by WEIRD culture, has as much to do with their delayed ability to withstand the post-1970s backlash as their lack of strong connection to feminism.
Don’t forget, In the 1980s when the AIDS hysteria was at its height, Gays were the target of some nasty headlines. Some feared that the current crisis — and with general support for what the papers said about gays — Some worried that there could be a call for homosexuality to be made illegal again.
So, its never a done deal. But the way they pushed the metaphorical ladder away on us MAPS, I’d be happy to watch them burn!
No doubt the AIDS hysteria also had something to do with the gay community turning on us, and I thank you for your important addendum to my post, Libertine.
One thing I will say, though, is this: I absolutely refuse to hate the LGBTQ community, or any other Non-MAPs, in emotional recompense for hating us. This is not meant to excuse their hateful and ignorant behavior, or the fact they turned on us for what amounted to political expediency, but simply to explain it: they are human, and thus prone to all human weaknesses and foibles. So are we, as we prove we are capable of hatred as well under the right circumstances. This is why we must resist it, no matter the temptation, and no matter how justifiably angry and upset we get for our situation and those who continue trying to keep us and the youths we love in our present situation.
I will also point out that just as the LGBT community are capable of all human weaknesses, so too are they capable of all human strengths, which includes the capacity for great courage and for overcoming all negative temptations. Hence, they are as capable of getting over their hatred and ignorance, and rising above the inclination for taking the easy way out of things when the going gets tough, as any other group of people. Let us not forget that Harry Hay, for instance, never turned his back on NAMBLA, or the MAP community as a whole, when the mainstream LGBTQ community had done completely by the beginning of the 1990s. He never stopped being courageous, nor gave up his principles, despite the risk of losing the immense amount of respect and admiration he worked so hard for so long to build. Let us also keep in mind contemporary members of the LGBTQ community like psychology graduate students like Alysson Walker and Vanessa Panfil for their recent paper arguing for inclusion of MAPs as part of the “Q” in the LGBTQ community acronym. They are risking a lot to do this, and I totally love and respect them for it.
Am I very angry at what the mainstream LGBTQ community did to us over the past few decades? You better believe I am! But would I be happy to watch them burn? No, I wouldn’t, because they have the potential to rise above the weaknesses they have shown over the past few decades, and eventually I’m confident they will 🙂
I have dedicated my life to this sexuality so that now you come with this # @ ## @ of tolerance and respect. No, I hate them and would devote my life to destroying them, I not angry I have nothing more to do with this entire MAP community of pacifists and egalitarians.
Order may not have been impressed by your comment, Dissy, but I certainly was!
Thank you for the words of support, Tom! As for our chum Order, I do not expect those who oppose egalitarianism to be impressed with those who espouse it, nor to be impressed with those who oppose hatred no matter what racial/gender/ethnic/orientation group it’s directed at. Using hatred to fight hatred is the equivalent of firemen trying to douse a burning manse by hosing gasoline rather than water on the flames 🙂 And for the record, I’m certainly no pacifist, as Order has mis-perceived me as; I simply do not use the same destructive weapons as the opposition to do my fighting. Those destructive weapons are not a particular group of people, but the general use of hatred, ignorance (willful and otherwise), fear-mongering, witch-hunting, misinformation, pre-emptive violence, censorship (or draconian legislation in general), and vandalism.
I am losing my patience for the LGBT. I have been harassed by these people long enough. I damn as well know that they were largely responsible for getting my Twitter account suspended. The LGBTP is cool though.
You should rather blame Twitter for being such puppets…
Twitter is also to blame for having such lame rules.
I too sometimes come close to losing my patience with various groups who spew the hate and demands for censorship at us, particularly those groups who should know better (which includes the LGBTQ community). But progress takes time, my friend, and as we all know there are various setbacks and potential backlashes along the way. What I do when the temptation to lose my patience threatens to overcome me is remind myself of how Harry Hay put himself on the line for us when he had so much to lose by doing so, and of the courage and pro-inclusion attitudes expressed today by the likes of Walker and Panfil. They may very well be providing us with a mini-mirror into the future, and that future may be a bright one. Sometimes the main solace we can take out of our suffering and arduous efforts to change a highly resistant status quo is that MAPs in the future will have a far better life thanks to what we, and those who support us, are doing now.
In response I want to say that I do not hate a group because of its condition but because of its harmful and sick acts and ideas, which is different.
One positive thing I would like to say of this MAP community is that is most comprised (over all, in this blog) of educated, learned and rational people, unlike the Antis, whether they are supremacist “LGTB”, these fundamentalist “Anti-contact MAPs”, or the usual straight vanilla. They are, besides ignorant addicts to junk science (“their brain is not fully developed blah blah blah”) , a group of agressive, rude, violent people who can not finish a text without “sick fucks” “kill these sick fucking rapists” “under (random age) can not consent, they are filthy sick”, calling to death or violence etc.
The main diference between me and this community is not authoritarian vs egalitarian or other issues in sex moral etc., is that I consider these Antis as dangerous errors of nature and treated in consecuence, but if all of you want to consider them human beings worth of rights, it is your choice.
If we consider anyone unworthy of rights, then we damn ourselves by proxy every bit as much as we damn them. The main factor that allows such power imbalances to exist in the first place is some groups having rights, while others do not. This is why I have chosen the path of egalitarianism.
Why can I no longer get into Boy Chat anymore…Anybody having similar problems?
Perhaps a certificate problem on boychat.org? Provided you use Tor-browser, Tails
(https://tails.boum.org) or similar solutions, the BC onion http://r2j4xiyckibnyd45.onion
works.
On a related topic, Dissident is still greatly missed at GC.
Thank you for saying this, Nada, and I’m sure you know I miss everyone at GC just as much. They are like a second family to me, and have been for a very long time. The main reason I’ve had such a lengthy hiatus is due to the same technical problem Libertine mentioned about BC: me and many other people are not able to access those boards unless they are willing to install and deal with using Tor, and the administration either has no major interest in finding a solution as long as enough posters can access the forum using Tor; or have not yet been able to come up with a lasting solution to the problems with the server. Some former GC posters have simply contented themselves to migrating permanently over to VoA, which can be easily reached without the requirement of having Tor or “slicing the onions.” Nevertheless, since I’m on the mod team there (though not the administration) many have been asking me frequently what the story is with GC, as they have great interest in participating there.
I’ll find my way back there eventually, as I will always love GC and believe it’s creme of the crop, but for now I’ll likely be spending my available time over at VoA.
Well, whatever the technical issues may be, they can be worked around cheaply (at the cost, with Tails, of two USB sticks) and in a matter of hours.
It’s also an alternative solution, besides reinstalling Windows, for local software problems.
There are more and more articles on their site http://nickmartinezofficial.com/ and their quality is very variable. Recently Daniel Gaither made a call for contributions:
CALLING ALL WRITERS
We are expanding our on-line presence and need fresh material on any of a wide range of subjects. If you have something to say and have been looking for a forum, consider submitting your work for our web site or publications.
We welcome all kinds of writing, from news reporting and analysis to opinion pieces to original fiction and book reviews to scholarly articles, non-fiction, and everything in between. You may use the category index along the left column of our G+ page as a guide, but don’t feel that you have to fit within those topics. We are looking for diverse views and expressions that reflect the benevolent nature of pedophilia and the injustice inherent in efforts to suppress it, as well as constructive dialog on all related issues. All submissions are welcome, but as always, we reserve the right to select what we will publish.
Original poetry, art, music and video will all be considered. Of course, in the current climate, we will not be publishing any nudity and we request that you not send nude images.
While all contributions here are quite good, my special thanks go to Dissident, whose analysis of capitalist social relations, not race / gender / orientation, as the root of the structural oppression (and SJWs’ misunderstanding of these roots) is very well-thought and well-written.
I would add here that living in Russia provides me easier access to some historical knowledge that American people sometimes miss – the ugly knowledge of the same-race slavery, which was Russia’s scourge for centuries; its taint is still felt in many Russian people’s minds.
Like the USA, Russia had formally forbidden slavery – or “serfdom”, as it was called in the Russian Empire – only in the mid-19th century. Before that, Russian peasantry – one that was comprised of white, Orthodox Christian, Russian people – was officially a property of Russian aristocracy. And Russian masters treated their Russian slaves with the cruelty comparable to the one with which American white masters treated their black slaves. Their racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious sameness had not prevented oppression, nor even mitigated it: the often-vocalised rhetorical justification of the serfdom was the perceived moral and intellectual superiority of the aristocrats, who, from their higher cultural level, were supposed to control uneducated and unrefined peasants “for their own good”.
So, it didn’t matter what was the difference between slaves and masters – what did matter what the master’s understandable interest in perpetuating the exploitation of the slaves; the ruling minority’s power, profit and prestige were founded on the subjugation of the large majority of the population. Of course, such subjugation were entirely contrary both to Christian spirituality and to humanistic intellectuality, apparently professed by aristocracy; but, as long economic / political / social structures were based on serfdom and on hierarchical subordination which allowed aristocracy to constantly gain while peasantry constantly lost, any spiritual drives or intellectual concepts were twisted to comply with these structures. Humanistic thought was turned into the hypocritical colonial-style paternalism and religious experience was transformed into power-worship.
Here I need to say: ontologically / cosmologically / metaphysically I’m not a materialist; I think that mind is, at least, an independent phenomenon which is neither reducible to matter nor determined by it (dualism); or, probably, it is even a primary source of existence (idealism); one may call me “ontological idealist”. Yet, at the same time, my understanding of social, political and economic problematic is far from “idealistic”. Social structure is painfully objective; it is, probably, *the* most objective phenomenon we encounter. It cannot be changed only by spreading of humane ideas, or by some spiritual practice; it need actual social struggle. Without it, positive effect of progressive ideas and transcendent experiences would be only local, limited to individuals and small groups who will follow them or be inspired by them, while most people would continue to suffer because of structural oppression. What is worse, these ideas and experiences may be easily distorted and abused by the ruling class to justify their control of the subservient class, and to persuade their subordinates not to rise against their bosses and masters. The cynical distortion of the biological science discourse to create a racist ideology – be it classic, explicitly reactionary “white supremacist” one or pseudo-progressive anti-white one – is the example of such abuse. It shows that science and philosophy can be used – and are actually used – by the (would-be) oppressors as proverbial “opiate of the masses” as easily, and as eagerly, as religion and spirituality can be.
So, it is important both to respect the diversity in opinion and experience and yet achieve solidarity in necessary political action and understanding. Look at our own small community here: while we do have strong disagreements about many philosophical and scientific issues – for example, I do not expect everyone here to agree with my support of parapsychological research, my immaterialist philosophy of mind or my interest in spiritual teachings and practices – we are united by our understanding of total inadequacy and destructiveness of prohibition and persecution of consensual intergenerational sexuality, and the critical necessity to change this ugly social situation. And, as I can see, we are also share the understanding that Libertarian Left political perspective is the one that not only can create a social structure that is viable and desirable in itself, but can provide a social framework for the liberation of children, the breakdown of harsh segregation and severe discrimination to which kids are subjected nowadays. And this liberation can – and should – include a sexual liberation as well as any other one, which means the possibility to normalise paedosexuality and let it be accepted by society.
Thank you for the words of support and appreciation, Explorer! I enjoy everything you post here as well.
Reblogged this on take a risk nz and commented:
I have just put up a link to this blog piece, however it occurs to me reblogging the item may make it easier for a reader to access the text.
[…] Source: Applaud their courage, and take heart […]
As skeptical as I am of HP, we kind of have no choice. This is the first time in a while that people have brazenly stepped forward to defend this kind of stuff. Keep a watch for HP, but side with them. They might actually be able to get things done. If all else fails, we take the movement from them and do this ourselves!
Good read if I do say so myself. One thing I must state is that Heart Progress is not solely a pedosexual rights organization. We actively advocate for the rights of all sexual minorities, and the fact that we advocate for some more marginalized groups like pedosexuals is just one thing that sets us apart from others.
As for the accusations of many of our ideas being “SJW”, what is wrong with fighting for social justice? One of the reasons I support pedosexual rights is because of my principled belief in social justice. I doubt you will find many conservatives, or even libertarians for that matter who are in support of radical sexual liberation. I have written an article on the term “social justice warrior” on our website, which I will link here: http://nickmartinezofficial.com/index.php/2017/04/21/no-social-justice-warrior-is-not-an-insult/
Lastly, the #BreedOutTheHate movement doesn’t advocate for miscegenation out of the premise that white genes are inherently racist, but rather from the logical assertion that the racism embedded in white society would be nullified as racial differences disappear and less people are able to hold white supremacist ideals.
Your comment is a good read too, Ernst, and so is the linked article. Thanks for turning up here. As you rightly say, working and struggling to bring about social justice is a good thing. There could hardly be a more noble objective.
I guess it’s the “warrior” part of SJW that invites the nervous ridicule – ridicule because their only weapons are words, but also nervous because these words can be sharp as knives, deadly in ruthless hands: the allegedly homophobic no-platformed speaker or the supposedly sexist college principal can find their reputations and careers trashed in an instant in the name of virtue by vicious verbal thugs.
The “warrior” part of the term SJW is thus aimed at those activists who do indeed fight, and often fight dirty in a breathtakingly dishonest way, ostensibly in the cause of social justice for oppressed minorities but actually as a means of giving themselves a voice so strident and domineering that they become bullies themselves.
Let us then by all means work vigorously for social justice. Let us struggle for it and perhaps even put ourselves at risk for it if necessary, like warriors in a real war. But let’s not take the metaphor too far. The war against social injustice is not well fought when its biggest weapon is hate.
I cannot at this point say I have studied Heart Progress closely, but I see nothing to mock and much to applaud in aiming to promote respect for oppressed minorities and to reject hatred. That is why I agree with Explorer that there are good grounds for seeking common cause with the best of what HP is saying, regardless of its still-mysterious origins.
For starters, thank you for posting here, Ernst. I’m a bit ambivalent about Heart Progress right now, but I do promise to take a closer objective look at it and see how things play out before I make one assessment or another entirely based upon the words of another. It seems to me that some members of this organization are sincere, though certainly not all of them. We’ll have to wait and see, and hope the sincere eventually extricate the trolls and provocateurs.
Now, I would like to address the “SJW” debacle.
As for the accusations of many of our ideas being “SJW”, what is wrong with fighting for social justice?
Tom’s response put it well, but I think the main thing you need to understand about the pejorative context of the “SJW” term is that it’s used in an ironic fashion, to imply that those marked with it are making a mockery of a laudable ambition by using corrupt and non-productive methodology that ultimately achieves the opposite of the stated goal.
There is certainly nothing wrong with fighting for social justice. The problem comes when justice is confused with revenge (which is why some people are starting to re-coin SJWs as “social revenge advocates” or other close variants), and an attempt is made to fight hatred and prejudice against minorities by displaying similar types of hatred and prejudice against people who are considered “the majority” (ostensibly in this case, white male heterosexuals). This causes advocates of this ideology to lose sight of the major economic issues that create conditions of inequality in the first place, and instead incite people to join forces on the basis of opposing “white oppression” rather than capitalist/plutocratic/oligarchic oppression. It neatly overlooks the fact, as pointed out by Explorer, that no group of people – whether based on race, gender, or sexual orientation – have ever behaved intrinsically better than any other group when given a position of economic (and thus political) power over others, either as individuals or as a group. American politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are textbook examples of this, as are fascist politicians of the female gender like Margaret Thatcher and Trump’s current female & French counterpart Marine Le Pen, or the Jewish far Right fascist and apartheid-monger Benjamin Netanyahu. This has resulted in an overall acceptance or tolerance (or even lauding) of the system by the working class, who instead war on each other to collect the largest crumbs while a handful of individuals enjoy the entire pie.
Further, the focus on one racial/ethnic/gender-based group within the context of the working class opposing another group on the basis of the latter’s racial/ethnic/gender make-up within the same class has led to the types of divisions that caused different factions of the working class to support the likes of either Clinton or Trump in the most recent election, and allows the likes of Clinton, Trump, and Le Pen to rise to power in the first place. Members of the working class align themselves with fascist politicians on the basis of the latter’s race, gender, or ethnic affiliation with little to no concern for what their policies are, or for the fact that their primary loyalties are to preserving the system and the interests of a small handful of ultra-privileged elites.
Lastly, the #BreedOutTheHate movement doesn’t advocate for miscegenation out of the premise that white genes are inherently racist, but rather from the logical assertion that the racism embedded in white society would be nullified as racial differences disappear and less people are able to hold white supremacist ideals.
This is one of the end results of focusing so heavily on race (or gender, sexual orientation, etc.) as the crux of inequality rather than economic basis of society. Nations where most people are of the same race have never resulted in overall good material conditions for members of these nations’ respective working classes. Explorer provided examples in his guest blog above, such as the fact that the ruling class of China is strongly oppressive towards its predominantly Chinese working class; other examples past and present include the likes of Idi Amin, who was no less ruthless and oppressive to fellow blacks in Uganda (even if homosexuals are treated worse than the average straight citizen), and ruling classes in the Middle East have been quick to set working class members of the same ethnic and racial affiliation against each other on the basis of whether they follow Shia, Sunni, or Kurdish beliefs. This proves that “divide and rule” tactics do not in any way rely upon arbitrary morphological differences such as race or gender, or other nominal natural differences like sexual orientation or ethnic affiliation. Female members of the ruling class in even the most stringent patriarchal societies, such as Queen Victoria during the era in Britain named for the duration of her rulership – the British Empire under her rule was oppressive an oligarchy as ever existed in the West, and the only major difference between her and the likes of Hillary Clinton and Marine Le Pen is that Queen Elizabeth didn’t feel compelled to give lip service to “improving conditions” for women.
Wherever there is an economic system whose core basis is inequality and unequal distribution of the resources, there will be a small number of individuals with massive power and privilege who will exploit a multitude of workers, and each of these ruling classes will use “divide and conquer” tactics by giving nominal privileges to some sub-group within the working class designed to condition them to identify with the ruling class, and to get the more oppressed sub-groups to focus their ire on the other working class sub-group rather than the system itself as the main source of their problems. We do not live in a “white” society, we live in a capitalist society, and this holds true for every nation in the world.
Hence, not only does the support for miscegenation as a logical way of ending racial-based conflicts completely overlook the crux of the problem, but it further advocates a type of war on diversity rather than the acceptance of differences which I believe is what is actually necessary for harmonious social relations within the context of the working class that will best result in unifying us against the system of class rule that is the main cause of mass poverty, war, inequality, social conflict, crime, and environmental destruction.
Dissy, I totally agree with you, this is one of your best Marxist non-Liberal piece since long. On Heart Progress, I commented their recent post about #BreedOutTheHate (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ErnstSteinerForProgress/posts/ArD7sFpFRiF), linking to your comment and adding my worth.
Thank you for saying this, Christian, and I’m glad you found it beneficial.
It’s also worth cutting and pasting Loli Chan’s response to you on Ernst’s blog:
Glad to see not everyone is blind[l]y following either the left or the right around here. These things I like to see and I agree with you over this. I wouldn’t marry someone of a different skin color because “I’m breeding out hate”, either I love the person or I don’t. And “race-mixing” doesn’t even really help anyways. Where I come from almost everyone is race mixed and they still somehow discriminate against each other, lol.
This is exactly the reason why I abandoned what counts today as the mainstream Left in addition to the Right, and chose socialism over what passes for contemporary (i.e., post-1970s) liberalism. I can oppose the core source of almost every social problem we face today without having to “take sides” on the basis of some arbitrary factor like skin color, gender, etc. A genuine socialist world wouldn’t be perfect or akin to a “utopia,” but it would be considerably better than what we have now or in the past, and since modern technology now makes such a system possible, there is no philosophical excuse I have ever heard not to work together to bring it to fruition. The “identity politics” thing compromises the unity of the working class, and plays right into the hands of the ruling class.
And Ernst Steiner replied:
+Agapeta WordPress Okay, thanks for the link. After reading what Dissident had to say, I do agree that capitalism is a problem, but I don’t think it’s the only problem. It’s just one symptom of the institutional bigotry that society has embedded within it.
I believe that with a bit of subliminal encouragement, the amount of miscegenation happening can increase significantly. One thing you must realize is that capitalism is merely one problem, and racism is another that, although somewhat related, is a form of hate that can be curbed with a separate agenda.
Lastly, by curbing racism, we can further united the people against capitalism.
Definitely he’s no Marxist and his viewpoint is rather “intersectionality”, with a good dose of historical idealism, that societies are guided by “ideas”.
I thank Ernst for his response, and this is what I say in response to his points, which I will try to do as briefly as I can while doing full justice to my side of the debate.
Capitalism is not a “symptom of institutional bigotry,” it’s the very core cause of institutionalized bigotry of various sorts. The economic system and its rules are based on rewarding a tiny handful at the expense of the majority, thus dividing people into “winners” and “losers,” and subjecting the majority to varying degrees of material deprivation and insecurity – and this in a world that now has the technological capacity to eliminate material want, if only the economic order was changed to one of private ownership of the industries and services to social ownership, and production for the private profit/enrichment of the few owners was replaced with production to meet the material needs and wants of everyone in a system of collective ownership.
It’s therefore to be expected that this tiny ruling class in every capitalist nation will have a vested interest in promoting nominal privileges to certain sub-groups within the working class to trick them into being loyal to the system, and to encourage the more seriously disadvantaged sub-groups in the working class to see the slightly better off sub-groups as the cause of their problems, not the system itself. This is akin to one of the pre-Civil War Confederate plantation owners fostering competition and animosity between the house slaves and the field slaves so that the plantation system of chattel slavery itself is given a free pass.
These inter-class conflicts that divert from working class unity against the system do not always take the form of conflict between different racial groups and genders, as is the case in most Western nations; in other areas of the globe, where racial and ethnic diversity are considerably less extant, it takes the form of inter-class conflict between members of different religious groups, tribal affiliations, et al. This is most evident in Asian nations, the Middle East, and certain African & Caribbean nations. This type of disunity and in-fighting within the working class that results in a mass lack of class consciousness is characteristic of all capitalist nations, regardless of how diverse the racial and ethnic constituency of the working class happens to be, or how many women have positions of great political/economic power within a basically patriarchal framework, etc. In the latter case, more women do rise up the ranks into power, but the vast majority of them continue to be oppressed and exploited as much by the few female rulers as their male counterparts.
“Identity politics” therefore takes different forms in all of these nations. If the ruling class happens to be predominantly white and male, then the white and male members of the working class are bamboozled into identifying with the ruling class, and the non-whites and non-males are bamboozled into blaming white males in general for their problems. When non-whites and non-males rise to power and act exactly the same as the white male rulers sitting and working beside them, the non-whites and non-males identify with these members of the ruling class and are thus conditioned to continue competing with members of other groups within their own class to make it “to the top” rather than uniting with them against the system itself.
Similarly, in nations where most people are of similar racial or ethnic affiliation, but the ruling class happens to be predominantly Shia (for example), then Shia members of the working class get nominal privileges and are tricked into identifying with the ruling class, while non-Shia members of the working class are tricked into blaming everyone who is Shia for their problems. The end result is mutual hatred and blame thrown around within the working class with none of these sub-groups uniting against the system of class rule itself.
Therefore, race and gender, etc., are not problems of equal merit and consideration to the issue of class, because class is the matter that creates the type of material disparity, inequality, and forced competition that pits different segments against each other for whatever little pieces of the pie they can get in the first place, rather than uniting on a class basis so that everyone gets to enjoy the bounty of the entire pie.
Finally, yes it is true that if racism, sexism, etc., were alleviated, the working class would be more likely to unite against capitalism. However, a political methodology that effectively attacks white male heterosexuals in general, and accuses all members of that group of enjoying great privileges when this is most often not the case; and which imposes guilt and shame upon people for being born white male heterosexuals; and blames them for the misdeeds of their historical counterparts, is not a productive way of fostering this unity.
What it does instead is exacerbate fear among large swaths of the white working class, causing them to worry they are on the verge of being thrown under the bus, and it encourages them to unite under the “leadership” of capitalist class fascists like Trump who gives them false promises to “return” the nation to some sort of golden age that never actually existed. It also serves to exacerbate the racist and supremacist members of the white male working class community who truly harbor such attitudes, causing them to likewise align themselves with any white fascist who comes into office. On the other side of the matter, it exacerbates the otherwise understandable anger of Non-WMH (Non-White Male Heterosexuals) into fuming hatred against all WMHs, and causes them to align themselves with any ruling class “leader” who happens to be black, female, etc., or any “liberal” member of the ruling class who gives opportunistic lip service to “improving” conditions for minorities.
This class in-fighting and alignment with different parties of the ruling class only ends up serving the latter class as a whole by diverting mass working class energy from opposing the system that is exploiting them into opposing each other instead, which plays right into the hands of the capitalist system’s ruthless competitiveness. It stimulates the most base emotions of the common people, and fueling hatred and antagonism between different racial and gender-based groups within the working class is not the way to foster intra-class unity.
Sorry for delay in moderating this, Dissy.
Not a problem 🙂 I think everyone knows you have a full life outside of this blog, including the many other projects you are now tending to. Keep up the good work, never doubt this blog is one of the most important in all the vastness of cyberspace!
Somehow, Dissy, I have managed to moderate this comment much more promptly than your last. I do not know how this has been achieved, but I am not going to listen to a word of any cynical mutterings from less supportive voices than your own. Absolutely not. I totally deny that my speediness this time has anything to do with you saying this:
>…never doubt this blog is one of the most important in all the vastness of cyberspace!
🙂
” such as Queen Victoria during the era in Britain”
Dr Sean Gabb from the Libertarian alliance cited that the 1800s in England was when England was at its most ‘liberal’, What do you say to that?
This could be true in the sense that there was a lot going on beneath the surface of Victorian society that was not openly acknowledged. Also, the age of consent was lower, I believe (13?). But in terms of ‘received opinion’ Victorian society was not liberal. For example, sex outside marriage was considered wrong and chastity a virtue. We know this from the attitudes of even quite enlightened writers such as Dickens.
Victorian England was a very different place in 1837 when the queen began her reign to what it was at her death in 1901.
In the 1830s the age of consent under common law was 12 and it stayed that way until raised by statute to 13 in 1875; it was further raised 10 years later to 16. So the AOC in early Victorian England was 12 for 38 years and it was 16 in later Victorian England for only 16 years of the queen’s reign.
It is also noteworthy that in the Offences against the Person Act 1861 it was made clear that sex with a girl under 10 was deemed a serious offence (a felony) but sex (“unlawful carnal knowledge”) of a girl aged between 10-12 was considered less serious (a misdemeanour). Earlier, common law had traditionally set the age of consent within the range of 10 to 12. This is just for girls. There was no AOC for boys.
What happened between the beginning and end of Victoria’s reign was a revolution in sexual laws and mores as profound as the changed attitude towards gay sex during the reign of the present queen. At the start of “Elizabethan England” gay sex was abhorred as an abomination. Now it is practically compulsory to be gay if you want to be taken seriously as a commentator on matters of gender and sex.
Well, that certainly provides a lot more detail on changes to the age of consent. But if the age of consent was going up as opposed to down, in what sense was it a ‘sexual revolution’?
Revolutions do not necessarily go in the direction one might wish! In the words of Merriam-Webster, all it means in the sense I was thinking of is “a sudden, radical, or complete change”.
It is an odd word, for sure, because it originally meant to go around in a circle, a meaning still very much alive in terms such as “revs per minute”. So what sort of complete change is it that ends up where it started?
I’m also glad to see this comment here, as it seems HP came out of nowhere, and hasn’t been very interactive with the established MAP community.
I’ve been waiting to see signs of reaching out.
I’m also painfully aware, that there could be sincere people behind the base group…And the last thing I want, is to attack sincere human rights activists who also support MAPs…
…I mean, good grief…I even normally hold my tongue when Virtuous Pedophiles members start virtue signaling, and throwing barbs at “pro contact” MAPs….it happens…I’ve seen a couple of them get down right insufferable…But I think waging battles with other MAPs is counterproductive…I’d rather just go off on my own, and do something constructive.
By nature, I’d rather accentuate the common grounds…
…But when new groups come about, I also have to take into account how much egg I’m willing to get on my face, should the whole thing turn into a fraud…Hence, my strong reservations here.
I’ll offer a good will piece of advice…
…Twitter is terrible for interacting with hostile people, when you discuss MAP issues. I primarily use it to find news to blog about, and to highlight backdated posts I publish on my blog. Rarely do I spend much time arguing with hysterical people…A lot of them are just trying to box you into a trap, and make it seem like you violated the terms of service, anyway.
After 20 years of being online, and 11 years in the blogosphere, I’ve become somewhat talented at saying things, without necessarily “saying them”, while on services I know to be very intolerant.
You may have already tainted your identity…but to any MAP friendly user of Twitter, I would strongly advise avoiding direct confrontations with regards to MAP [and childhood sexuality] issues.
You might be able to get away with the occasional philosophical discussion of MAP related issues, but you cannot directly come out and state the obvious on Twitter…To many people are itching to delete your account.
You have to have a good mind for picking and waging your battles…Otherwise, you’ll just get your account deleted.
Somehow, Mr Oldfield never seems to get that message!
Nigel has had his career destroyed, and his life forever marred by the “justice” system, because of one brief period in his life where he downloaded “indecent images”. He’s very frustrated from being a good person, trapped in bad circumstances…and the insanity of those circumstances.
I think he intentionally uses Twitter as an outlet, to release a lot of that frustration…which translates into sparring with hysterical, ignorant people who spew hate.
Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my impression.
It’s not a good model if you want to project a professional, organizational image, however.
Even I’ve gone through phases where I’ve been of a certain emotional mind [some of them recently], where I’ve gone round and round with hysterical bigots…And when I quit for the day, it was clearly in the back of my mind…that my account might not be there, when I came back tomorrow.
It bothers me, because the account is valuable to me…just like any of my peripheral accounts are valuable to me, even if many of them stay dormant most of the time.
I value a consistent presence on Twitter, over winning battles with people on Twitter.
I agree with your overall premise on Mr Oldfield. Also, for some people there is an addiction issue. But its great that he’s found love on Twitter, who’d of thought; and a very warm and open minded woman; She’d have to be, of course!
The clear problem in Explorer’s analysis of Heart Progress lies in the statement “Apparently many of these people are not paedophiles themselves, but activists in open solidarity with them, without hiding their identities.”
Anyone highly experienced in sifting truth out of the internet will soon see that this can’t be true. People in the USA, especially, are all listed on multiple personal info sites like Radaris and Spokeo, and for a low, low annual fee, you can get the home address, address history, and phone number of all but the most protective. Even with pseudonymous internetters, most leave some bread crumbs that can be followed to their identities in a few minutes or hours of work. When you write news stories about events in the Twittersphere, you develop some facility with determining how and to what extent personae check out.
The vivid Heart Progress identities don’t check out. Each one is a carefully crafted, but false, story.
This is part of what led to my conclusion that Heart Progress is a propaganda work in the category of “super-inflammatory document coming from the stigmatized minority,” like the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where phony Jews proclaimed that they wanted to sacrifice Christian babies. Heart Progress are provocateurs of the US Right, plain and simple. They ‘want’ to lower the age of consent to 4. They love Sharia law and ‘think’ it’s progressive. They hate hate so much that they want to genocide the nasty white race. They are, in short, a red flag for the degraded middle-American bull, the members of the civilization that used to be Christian-influenced but now spends most of its time dreaming of big black men raping people in its gluttonously overflowing prisons.
I know that ‘false flag’ arguments are very annoying. Every time Bashar poison-gasses a town, he finds a way to claim the other guys did it, and it was really the Americans’ fault. Most false-flag scenarios are fiction based in the vivid opportunistic imaginations of the people who suggest them, but in this case, I think we really do have a false flag. The true flag of Heart Progress is anyone’s guess at this point – trolls being more satirical than political at times – but it’s not pedosexual liberation.
Incidentally, as Tom points out, I didn’t in any way state that Heart Progress itself was organized by ISIS. It clearly is not. Its origins lie in 4chan. I said that its appearance illustrates an opportunity for ISIS that the latter could easily recognize they could exploit.
You can see a version of my article with one photo illustration added (inflammatory tweet about marrying toddlers and Islam) at https://justpaste.it/15vex
Thanks for this, Bernie. Good to see you here.
Now that I have read Bernie Najarian’s piece on HP a couple of times, both before and after the many thoughtful comments here, it seems to me Bernie makes a strong case for his analysis, which includes two salient propositions: (1) HP and Clovergender were both started by right-wing trolls in order to discredit transgendered people, “liberals” and “the left”; (2) Anonymous are at risk of targeting for physical attack by Isis when they gather for their masked demonstrations. Bernie’s article:
https://pastebin.com/AxKraZAj
It is important to note what Bernie does not claim. He is not saying this trolling is aiming “to attract flames against all MAPs, including the VPs”. The trolls would see attacking Kinds as desirable collateral damage but we get attacked from all quarters anyway, so this ingenious campaign would hardly be worthwhile just to take us down yet further. “Liberal” SJWs, by contrast, are a powerful enemy. From a right-wing POV they really need taking down. Whether mere goading is likely to achieve that goal is another matter, but we know that trolls simply like having fun at their enemies’ expense. That may be sufficient motivation.
Also, Bernie nowhere claims that HP was started by Isis. I agree that any such claim would be far-fetched. However, it is surely true that Isis will be keen to use any opportunity it can to take revenge on Anonymous for disrupting its presence on social media. If Isis can bring guns and bombs into play against Anonymous masked demonstrations they surely will. The fate of Anonymous people is not our primary concern here. I make the point simply in order to say why I feel Bernie’s analysis is not weak in the ways suggested.
I would go further, too. His piece strikes me as very well researched and considered, as I would expect from his earlier work. Accordingly, at this point I find myself inclined to agree with his assessment, and I urge everyone who has not already done so to read his article carefully.
Bernie cites one particular detail that must surely be a spoof, when he refers to a tweet: “The really inflammatory bit on that tweet was the accompanying image, which showed a tiny doll-like toddler girl of two or three dressed in a fancy Muslim wedding dress, with the meme-logo ‘What my husband and I do in bed is nobody’s business.’” Had the girl been 12 or 13 instead of two or three it might just have been possible to take this for a serious message. But a toddler? That looks like satire The Onion would be proud of.
It seems entirely possible, though, that an “organisation” started on a spoof basis could take on a life of its own, morphing into something at least partly genuine by attracting true believers into the ranks. If that has already started to happen we should perhaps not be too disparaging and cynical. However, they clearly need to raise their game a great deal if they are to be taken seriously and make a positive contribution, as several commentators here have said, including Explorer in his blog.
Just one other point. Christian remarked that trolls “would have to make a lot of efforts to hold a coherent discourse, and to write again and again articles denouncing every type of bigotry; this would need a really professional training, as in State agencies, beyond the capacities of the ordinary troll.”
I agree. However, a small number of trolls are not ordinary. The guy implicated in setting up Clovergender has been named as pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, a very sophisticated and energetic individual indeed. See: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/martin-shkreli Having said that, though, I would not rule out state agencies either: they get up to all sorts of mischief.
Tom: to reach an understanding of HP, you need to read in detail their texts and comments in the Google+ community and on their other sites, you can’t rely on the Bernie Najarian post, which I find superficial, relying on anecdotal evidence, and with some inaccuracies.
First Najarian says HP that leaders “claimed not to be pedophiles” … “claimed to be altruistic, normal heterosexuals and homosexuals, none of them pedophiles”. In fact, I know one moderator of the group on Google+ who openly says to be both GL and BL, and I suspect some other moderators may be MAPs (or appear so if you think of trolls); otherwise one moderator claims to have a MAA brother, another to have a distressed MAA friend. And Ernst Steiner calls himself “pansexual”.
Next, evidence like Frank B. Cousins making crude sexual comments while using a #NAMBLA hashtag, without having ever been member of NAMBLA, is not meaningful: anyone can use any tags to attract as many readers as possible, it is not that which will harm the real NAMBLA. Also the fact of Peter Berstein writing “What my husband and I do in bed is nobody’s business” under a photograph of a little girl wearing a tchador (not a “fancy Muslim wedding dress” as he says) does not mean much either, I don’t find his name anywhere, either in the Google+ membership or in any text, he rather looks like an individual freak not representative of the group.
Their leaders seem to know about Clancy’s book, Harry Hay and Tom himself, not the usual readings of alt-righters.
So if HP leaders were trolls, I would rather imagine them being porn-minded MAPs trying to disguise themselves as leftist political activists, impersonating thus ordinary people like a mother of 3, and old man, etc. This looks more credible than alt-righters.
Note that they recently made a purge on Google+, going from 109 members to 58, by expelling all antis.
>to reach an understanding of HP, you need to read in detail their texts and comments in the Google+ community and on their other sites
Yes, this would surely yield many clues and insights but I suspect a clear solution to the mystery might prove elusive from this evidence alone. It is entirely possible that two different people could read all this material and come to opposite conclusions.
Hard facts may yet emerge at some point from further digging, if anyone has the wherewithal to keep investigating. In the meantime I will be keeping an open mind while acknowledging that you have made some good points here.
I don’t believe their public demonstrations are real though. It seems too good to be true, and they seem to Photoshop pictures a lot. I first joined the group with the belief that it was a troll group. I joined because I admire the fact that they defend pedophilia. How can I have a problem with that? I noticed that real pedophiles and activists are joining HP, so it’s starting to turn into a real group.
A more recent article with the same hypothesis as the one of Bernie Narajan: http://theantimedia.org/alt-right-pedophilia-fake-news/
Excellent article, Explorer.
I’ve looked at some of Heart Progress’s pages and listened to the interview James Carter gives on Youtube. I’m still not at all sure about them. I’m not yet even convinced that they’re 100% sincere.
I agree with your description of SJWs. I’ve been a life-long adherent of the left and see in SJWs and much of the contemporary left only a grotesque caricature of what I recognise as left-wing ideas and values.
With the fall of the Berlin wall and the apparent discrediting of communism, the ideological heart has been ripped out of the Left. What remains, what SJWs adopt, are the epiphenomena of the left without the ideological complexities, disagreements and debates which keep a movement anchored to reality, which, in ideologically and intellectually driven movements, help the most valid ideas rise to the top and the crack-pot ones vanish.
Nowadays, when I see the left, it feels I’m watching a comedian’s impersonation of the left rather than what used to be the true left. Impersonators focus on the easiest, most noticeable, often grotesque, quirks and ticks of those they impersonate and exaggerate them. SJWs are sugar-bingeing on the epiphenomena of the old left – and such sugar binging is noticeably nutrition-free – unsupported by any complex ideology, or historical perspective.
And just as impersonation is a performative act – done for the eyes of others – SJW politics is a performance whose prime purpose seems to be to draw attention to the self. This may be why their political activism feels so skin-deep, and egocentric, self-indulgent
The world needs a true left now more that it has done for decades. Global and national wealth and resource distribution is becoming ever more unequal; and the left, rather than cheering them on, should be condemning the rise of totalitarian ideologies, that are against equality before the law, against freedom of thought and expression, homophobic & treat women as chattels. I believe that the wealthy should not have a privilege on power, I believe that the planet is not an inexpendable resource for making the wealthy wealthier. I also believe that consumerism as well as destroying the planet, deforms and destroys the good and potential that resides in humans and human communities. I also passionately believe in freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of expression – something that SJWs campaign vigorously against (see recent ill-treatment of Charles Murray at Middlebury College – https://youtu.be/Y1lEPQYQk8s).
The left desperately needs to reinvent itself.
I just deleted my Google+ and YouTube accounts. I am done. I can’t get through to these people. They say that it is always manipulation, and that the child can’t possibly understand sex physically and mentally. Anyone who says they had a consensual intimate experience when they were little is seen as having Stockholm syndrome.
I admire some of what Heart Progress does. I hope they will continue the fight for pedosexual rights and youth liberation.
You should simply have told those people that they are ignorant, because the “Stockholm Syndrome” can only arise while a person is experiencing a very dangerous or virtually lifethreatening event which is taking place, and that person is quite unable to stop it. If the event took place in the past and has ended, it cannot be Stockholm Syndrome by definition.
That would be a good retort, Sugarboy, except I think that semantics may be relevant.
I suspect that what the Precepticons (Precept: a general rule intended to regulate behaviour or thought) were suggesting might have been conveyed better had Hypersonic concluded the sentence thus: ” Anyone who says they had a consensual intimate experience when they were little is seen as having HAD Stockholm syndrome, at the time they were experiencing it. ” (After all, obviously it is a “traumatic experience” regardless of how vehemently the child says otherwise.)
My response would have been: Clearly, there are many children who have been severely affected as a result of sexual experiences, inter-generational and otherwise, and even amongst those the child considered consensual at the time. This makes me both sad and angry. I fervently wish that this might cease to be the case in the future, and that all children will feel no adversity of any kind for agreeing to a sexual encounter.
This will never become possible if the child is prevented from addressing the issue by those who purport to love and care for them. (Excepting for those who grow up self-confident enough to not need anyone else’s endorsement.) The overriding reason children cannot be informed to sufficiently evaluate consent is because no one is willing to inform them. However, if instead they did, this doesn’t preclude also saying “No”, should the parent or guardian be inclined to do so. Even if child disobeys this instruction at least he/she is informed.
It seems to me though, that you would rather have a child at a disadvantage. Should they happen to associate with someone with a sexual attraction to them, with no previous knowledge to draw on, their only understanding will come from this person, only “realising” later that their naivety was taken advantage of simply because they were kept ignorant and uninformed. By not trusting said child to make informed decisions; you thus resolve to have them spend the rest of their lives in purgatory. Why, – so that you can continue to use these children’s misery as a tool to vindicate your point of view?
Though rather longer than I had originally intended, it got to the point eventually. (With that in mind, it may possibly be evident to some that I don’t use Google+, too long?)
I understand your position…What is the point of debating people when they just report you, and when that happens, The moderator always takes their side regardless of the abuse and threats that they vent towards you. Something big needs to happen; Something bigger that Milo…He was just small fry.
Come back.
I might come back. It is tempting to return because the anti-HP groups believe their reportfags got me banned. That did not happen! I deleted my accounts.
I will be out of town for a few days for a May Day celebration. A feast in the woods, with food cooking on a campfire, cup of wine and friends around.
So, I will reply some days later, and when it will be time to think whether I was fooled taking “Heart Progress” seriously… or I was not.
Anyway, thanks for replies and for food for thought you provided!
Fascinating. Let us hope that Heart Progress is the leading edge of the real childlove liberation front!
Does anyone here have a deeper association with this group? I’d like to know if an established person, who’s been around for a long time, can actually vouch for their integrity.
The group, itself, seems to have come out of nowhere, comprised of characters nobody’s heard of, prior to their internet arrival.
As you point out…some of the ideas they are pushing are extreme…I’d say they are ludicrous, in some instances.
Some people believe “Heart Progress” is little more than one or two people, who are moles trying to bait a bunch of online communities [white nationalists, LGBT, gamers, marijuana advocates, etc.] into a war of outrage, focused against MAPs…As in they’re nothing more than a stunt, trying to cause a lot of angry hype, to aim at online MAPs and what we do online.
Of course…I’ve been aware since early on, they may be legitimate, but infiltrated by antis…who are trolling, and hijacking the groups identity.
“Heart Progress” is a very new, unestablished presence…And this has to be taken into consideration…They haven’t really shown anything, or established their credibility…We don’t know for certain, what they are about.
In this situation…how does one even establish, what is genuinely going on?
Initially, I retweeted some of their tweets…I featured one of their videos on my blog…and I referenced them, with some degree of annoyance, when their initial Twitter and Google+ accounts got suspended…I was annoyed, because I’m watching this group, trying to determine what they are up too, and I have a much harder time doing that, when their accounts are constantly being suspended.
I suspended my retweeting of them, as well as all mention of them on my blog…and I’ve gone on record saying, officially, what I’ve seen of them makes me believe they are antis, up to nefarious goals.
Initially…I just thought they were a bunch of old guys, retired and not worried about long term consequences of this sort of activism…who have some reasonable ideas about human sexuality, but otherwise are out of touch with reality on a number of issues…and looking to pad their portfolio of causes, they’ve adopted some very kooky ideas.
Part of the mess this is causing, is that “Heart Progress” personalities are intertwining with a lot of MAPs on twitter…Not by close, established trust and friendship…but just by following and being followed, retweeting and being retweeted…I’ve personally been accused of “being their friends” and “promoting them”, two or three times…And this gives antis a golden opportunity to be extremely deceptive, and extremely destructive.
In addition…the one “event” they claim to have organized, nobody showed up at…except a few antis, who established that no “Heart Progress” people were there.
“Heart Progress” currently possesses zero credibility…And a lot of questions are left hanging over their heads.
The thing about “internet activism”…is that many of us are not great at it…We have no magical answers, as to “what” exactly to do…We just know there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, so we keep doing things, in hope of working towards a solution.
A lot of times…the things we end up doing might seem meaningless or weird, to some onlookers…I, for example, have released something like 15 musical albums, of varied quality [I’m genuinely proud of the three holiday ones, though]…in hopes of showing another human side of myself, and connecting with people in a way other than through text or speech…Heck, a huge part of the reason I record my voice, and blab on about anything, is the human connection it stands to create…I don’t do it because of any great speech craft or uncommon intellect I have to impart…I’m out of my element, when I record my voice…I do it, because I live by the truth…that we have to put our real selves into this fight…We have to own this fight, as ourselves…
…Getting back to the point…a lot of what people in our position do can come off strange…of poor quality…underwhelming…So, I’m pretty accustomed to just rolling with things, and accepting that “ragtag patchwork” groups will form, who don’t look like much on the surface…They’re not slick, and they don’t have a lot of resources behind them…They’re grassroots.
I don’t count their shabby videos and graphics against them…I’ve just seen too much under the “Heart Progress” title, that makes me pause and become evermore concerned and suspicious.
Again…can anybody vouch for them?
They are very active on twitter, and I do not say only the 4 “bosses” but the “soldiers” look like real people, they are all tweeting every days on many issues, and they have different opinions among them, one is a wiccan vegan lesbian who hates Islam (besides hating mens, as 99% of feminists) and accuses the prophet of being a pedophile but then says that he is in favor of pedophiles if they do not act, as a curious note she says the same as I, that from puberty are young adults, and counts things of his daily life, who had a lesbian relationship at 15 with an older woman, etc. even she triggered weak lefties snowflakes. If it is trolling it must be the most worked trolling of history.
Also is homurous that typical anti people trolling heart progress are as follow:
– “this community is full of fucking sick people who promote pedophilia.”
– [go to their google+] is a fan of No Game No Life…. an anime whose main attraction is based on seeing a 11-years-old girl in sexy school girl uniform and sometimes in panties or bathing. (I actually saw it just for that, Cantor’s pedohebephilia and white matter at their best)
BTW Their trolling is of good quality, consistent and straightforward, but it gets heavy to follow and loses potency over time and the fact that half of trolls are furries take off some seriousness (and the trolls try to be serious!)
A few additional thoughts…I’ve never seen a “Heart Progress” personality, who’s Twitter account hadn’t just recently opened…It opens, they start up with their “Heart Progress” activity.
I know a lot of people don’t want to “cross the line” with an account they’ve had for years…But I’ve danced around that line and even crossed it a handful of times, with my account I’ve had since 2009…I just do it in a more informational, discussion based, non-aggressive way…with people who approach me….
…Do none of these people have a history?…Just because they claim a list of character traits, doesn’t mean a whole lot…The one you cite, potentially could be seen as having several points of social disadvantage…As in, they may be trying to play the “social stack”, and “privilege” game against “progressives”…the people who invented the game.
Just because they claim to be something, does not mean they legitimately are…And yet another Twitter account which just opened up , doesn’t make for a lot of validity, in my judgment.
I’ve seen this account…”Heart Progress” personalities keep following me, as soon as they arrive…
Thus far, it’s just been a constant trickle of “soldiers”…I’ve not seen any mass numbers of them….One gets shut down, another opens…It doesn’t seem like a large group.
I agree…this style of trolling can be very humorous…I followed one of them, after they “chewed out” someone, and called them a brat, for having claimed they were a child rapist. I initially thought that, maybe, humor was part of their strategy.
…And, of course, there was the fake rally [on April 1st…April Fools day]…allegedly focusing on the message of breeding white people out of existence…
…That, alone, has got to send up major red flags.
Allegedly…the original person behind “Heart Progress” is a young, male college student in the UK…Like an idiot, I did not save that information…But, I figured this would blow over at some point, and have no way of verifying it, anyway.
It’s always been in the back of my mind, that people could take what I do as a human rights advocate, and model the behavior into a trolling campaign with nefarious intent.
I strongly suspect, that’s what’s happening.
I could be wrong…but the leanings of evidence are not in favor of “Heart Progress”…Not from what I’ve seen.
Maybe “Heart Progress” will pull out of this nose dive, and finally validate itself…identify and expunge the trolls within it…Maybe a few sincere people are there…But I’ve not seen any of that, yet…And if they are legitimate, that’s something they need to address
Right now, they’re just a collection of personalities, posting a bunch of stuff online…They’re not clearly organized…They don’t have a cohesive message…They came out of nowhere, introducing themselves [and reaching out] to nobody in the larger MAP community…
They are not standing on any solid ground, that I can recognize.
eqfoundation’s description of Heart Progress sounds an awful lot like an Alt-Right campaign to discredit SJWs. The Alt-Right are pretty much the best trolls out there right now.
Very curious, and possibly there are ways to take advantage of this. If nothing else, just getting people to seriously discuss pedophilia is a major accomplishment. You should also be aware that the Alt-Right’s defense of traditionalism is mostly a joke. While they do take seriously the right of white people who want to retain their traditional culture to do so, very few are deeply interested in that for themselves. Mostly they just want to piss off the dogmatic egalitarians.
I say it always, if there were no black people would simply be other liberals or social-democrats, they are a reaction against multiculturalism and race-mix, they are not Nazi Germany, not even the Nazi party, only a group of white supremacists with all hatred of Nazism, without the german culture that accompanied it.
One might argue that they hate more things apart from race to be just social-democrats with racialism, and it’s true to a point, but they can even tolerate relatively open gay people like Milo until milogate. Half of the Nazis I met were social-Democrats, they became Nazis because of racial mix. They believe that all sex under 18 is rape and over 18 is ok, like all liberals. Remove blacks, you have white-only liberals.
I think this post is missing something – what concerns me is how UNLIKE actual so-called “SJW” rhetoric this is.
I read through the Ernst Steiner Twitter account, @steiner_ernst, before it was suspended – he’s supposed to be a founder of Heart Progress, right? – and a few things stood out to me:
– Using, apparently, a real name and photo is a bold move. So it’s odd that there weren’t really any personal tweets to speak of. You’d think, in over 1000 tweets from a non-anonymous account, you’d find the odd slice of life here and there, a stray biographical detail or two. If this was a fictional character, you’d criticise him for being underdeveloped.
– Obviously, the peculiar concept of “Breed Out the Hate”. Left-wingers are generally indifferent to the racist notion of “white genocide”, but don’t actually ADVOCATE for it. Someone defined by a niche opinion holds another niche opinion, okay, sure, but it’s the kind of thing a Stormfront poster would make up if they were pretending to be a black power activist. Perhaps it might be done as an act of provocation, but this is apparently an old man with a fairly placid internet presence and little evident sense of humour. It doesn’t fit. (Do we know whether that planned demonstration actually went ahead? There were tweets leading up to it, but I couldn’t find any during or after it)
– Some tweet along the lines of “I’m actually against video games, as they promote violence and sexism” or something. Okay, that’s one tweet, but a strikingly odd one. Leftists frequently criticise gamer culture, but nobody is broadly “against video games” bar a few elderly and demented Daily Mail readers. It’s the kind of thing a Gamergater would think the left thinks.
– Several tweets about how much smarter and funnier women are than men –
something people commonly express light-heartedly, of course, or perhaps to flatter a woman they like, but not something a staid old rationalist would repeatedly espouse with absolute sincerity about nobody in particular. Not wildly implausible in itself, but still adding to a picture of a right-wing parody.
– Several tweets enthusing about Islam being a “religion of peace”. An alarm bell phrase – actual Muslims may say this, but otherwise this phrase is pretty much the preserve of sarcastic right-wingers. I also seem to recall him saying he intended to hang an Islamic flag over his door or something? Perhaps leftists all just look like budding Muslim converts to the right, but by and large, people who defend Muslims aren’t doing so because of a romantic affiliation with the religion itself.
– Even if you think any actual “SJW” genuinely holds all these views, that doesn’t explain some of the weird soft liberal stuff they’re mixed in with. One moment he’d promote antifascist demonstrators and Nazi-punching, the next he’d swooningly post a YouTube video of cops dancing at a gay pride parade (criticised by actual leftists in the comments). One moment he’d explicitly denounce capitalism, the next he’d be tweeting “#ImWithHer” and saying he wants Hillary Clinton to run again in 2020. What the fuck kind of ideology is that? Even taken on its own terms, this is NOT a hard leftist “SJW” – this is a crazily incoherent grab-bag of contradictory liberal centrist and actual leftist views that looks very suspiciously like the invention of a right-winger who can’t tell anyone to the left of them apart.
That’s just what I remember off the top of my head (I can’t check it now, obviously) but I scrolled through like a thousand tweets and it looked less and less like a real human the further I went. Of course, a bit of insincerity is to be expected in an account devoted to latching paedosexuality on to unrelated movements, but, given how overwhelmingly this looks like a bullshitting conservative, I’d be concerned about their sincerity there too.
To what end they’d lie about that, I don’t know. But nobody here needs me to tell them to be careful who to trust, and I’m certainly no insider – I’m not a paedophile or part of any paedophile community. It’s just something that’s been preying on my mind a bit, and I’ve found an opportunity to vent about it here.
(I’ve only briefly glanced at the accounts that aren’t Ernst Steiner. All very recent join dates and seemed to me like similar typing styles, but I haven’t had time to investigate that to any useful degree)
Thanks very much, Hmm, for this intelligent analysis. These early comments at H-TOC are showing a strong pattern of scepticism and I agree with this generally cautious response.
>But nobody here needs me to tell them to be careful who to trust, and I’m certainly no insider – I’m not a paedophile or part of any paedophile community. It’s just something that’s been preying on my mind a bit, and I’ve found an opportunity to vent about it here.
Heretic TOC’s philosophy of sexual self-determination at all ages has obvious appeal to Kind people. When others turn up here, as seems to be increasingly the case, it is always interesting to know how they came to hear about the site and what encouraged them to join in the conversation, if they have done so. Would you like to say a bit more about that?
As a Corbynite myself, I would love to see rationalist universalists on the Left – supporters of equal rights and opportunities (economic, educational, etc, as well as sexual) for all, regardless of race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation etc, taking notice of the fact that sexual self-determination for all is a position that deserves the support of the Left on intellectually respectable grounds.
This is not to say we should turn away support from those of other political persuasions. Those who find inspiration in the pedagogical pederasty of Ancient Greece, for example, often lean to the Right thanks to the ancients’ high regard for tradition and excellence, notably in scholarship, and their concern for passing values from one generation to the next. There is much to be said for this.
What we do not need is the shallow identity politics of those who band together only to attack others. However, we can do our bit to persuade the sort of disaffected people who gravitate towards identity politics that a more principled approach is required. Some angry young people initially drawn to the Alt-Right, for instance, show themselves capable of thinking things through and moving on towards a more mature philosophy and politics.
Has Corbyn said anything about pedophilia?
Not as far as I know. If he does, my enthusiasm might suddenly evaporate!
I admire the man’s honesty, Especially over the Brexit campaign. I was watching that chat-show when he gave the EU a 7 out of 10 rating.
Unfortunately, a politician on an upward career path can only be honest and courageous about unpopular views to a limited extent. Both supporting or opposing Brexit openly are equally acceptable and politically “safe” sides to take, because each position currently has a large enough degree of supporters both within and outside of the political establishment. The same with other “hot” topics like abortion or gay marriage.
With regards to pedophilia, however: hatred, knee-jerk condemnation, and a ruthless insistence on not even trying to understand it or put it into accurate perspective is still the mainstream view, with those who support it still too much in the minority to avoid being silenced, partly because so many of those who do have an open-minded view of the topic are too fearful to speak out about it. Hence, the latter individuals tend to remain stoically silent about the issue, and to be honest, I would prefer a rightfully popular politician known for his/her open-minded and courageous views simply keep silent on this topic rather than pretend to go along with the herd mentality in order to maintain their career. I would, of course, like to see more of them stand up for us if they truly feel that way, but that is admittedly a lot to ask of a politician right now, and it’s always terribly depressing when one of them does make the rare decision to speak up on this, only to be beaten down and shamed into pretending to meekly apologize and beg forgiveness from the public and of the people they “callously offended” just a few days later once the social media and Twitter backlash hits critical mass.
This will likely continue to be the case until politicians who may be supportive of us in their personal views and observations are confident that a sizable number of fellow supporters are likely to speak up and support them against the outcry. That day is not today.
I am not sure how REAL they are. However, I do know that a few people who joined HP are real, including myself. There are some people who are analyzing Heart Progress and claiming that the whole group is fake. Even though it might be true, there seems to be a lot of effort to defend adult-child intimate relationships. They seem to be going at it every day on Twitter. Even though their accounts keep getting banned, they will create new accounts. That alone makes HP worth it.
What I’m about to say is probably a horrible idea, and not worth the effort…But the mischievous humorist in me is wondering…
…If “Heart Progress” is what some of us suspect, and only a small gaggle of people who are trolling, and trying to funnel a firestorm of outrage at MAPs, by tapping into a grocery list of modern, “hot button” issues…
…certainly, we MAPs have the numbers to swoop in, hijack the name and identity…and build a legitimate group, branch, whatever, under the “Heart Progress” banner [if anybody wanted it]…
Again…”Heart Progress” is probably already way too tainted…but I find it a funny idea to pull off, on a gaggle of troublemakers.
…Kind of like owning disparaging terminologies, by making them part of one’s own identity…And shoving it into the face of the pipsqueaks, who are trying to hurt us.
Thing is…we’d honestly have to flood them out.
We can start by using the term ‘grooming’ in a benign way!
Some people are doing that already.
My understanding is that “Heart Progress” is a troll front established to parody the pro-MAP position and to attract fire from the “SJWs” it lampoons. The very naivete of their rhetoric looks to me more affected than genuine, and their apparent support for MAP liberation seems to be a fairly standard attempt by right-wing activists to ‘smear’ progressive causes by associating them with support for paedophilia, militant Islam, etc. (You know, the sort of thing Milo used to do before he slipped up). This case has been made quite convincingly by Bernie Najarian both at BoyChat and here: https://pastebin.com/AxKraZAj
Admittedly, it can be extremely difficult to tell blatant trolling from sincerely-held convictions these days, and I don’t like sowing division and doubt. But people need to be careful about who they trust, and unless anyone has personal knowledge of the individuals behind HP and can vouch for their good intentions, I think it would be wise to treat this “Heart Progress” organisation with extreme suspicion.
The hypothesis suggested by the linked page, that HP (heart Progress) could be a front set up by pro-Daesh trolls to divert Anonymous, seems completely ludicrous. On HP’s Google+ blog you don’t find any glorification of religious violence or terrorism. Beside fighting Islamophobia and the stigmatisation of Muslim (I agree with this fight), some (but not all of them) have sympathy for Islam as a religion (I guess it is like “my neighbour’s grass is greener”), and some (like Steiner) think that because the old story of Mohamed and Aisha, Islam may be more open to GL; I think it is a quite illusory belief, most Muslim believers and theologians either adopt a Western lifestyle, and the mantra “minors cannot consent”, or they can have nostalgia for a feudal past (and its remnants in Saudi Arabia and similar societies), but then it is not GL, but patriarchal marriage.
The author of this linked article seems to have strange sympathies for Anonymous, although he seems to recognise their reactionary populist orientation. And he cherishes the chimera of the “liberal left”, which should indeed make him afraid of anything “extremist”.
The other hypothesis that HP is the work of alt-right trolls trying by extremist speech to attract flames against all MAPs, including the VPs, does not seem to hold. They would have to make a lot of efforts to hold a coherent discourse, and to write again and again articles denouncing every type of bigotry; this would need a really professional training, as in State agencies, beyond the capacities of the ordinary troll. Moreover, trolls would not involve their kids in their infiltration, as I show here a photograph of a girl holding HP propaganda in favour of inter-generational love:
Anyway, even if you have “agents provocateurs”, remember that in 1905 Russia, the priest Gapon, who has been suspected of being an agent of the secret police of the Czar, led the workers in the streets, and this started a revolution.
HP uses a lot of Photoshop to try to be funny.
I certainly do not endorse Bernie’s suggestion that Heart Progress is some sort of front for radical Islamists – this strikes me as far-fetched. I am interested merely in his comments about the history of Heart Progress as an organisation, which strike me as discomfiting. My own opinion is that the group is probably an Alt-Right front that is seeking to irritate the so-called ‘SJWs’ (a term I personally find distasteful) by associating their causes with paedophilia. Unlike Bernie I don’t spend a lot of time in the Twittersphere because I don’t have the stomach for it (and so I’m grateful for his reports from the field), but from what I’ve seen, Twitter users who associate with Heart Progress are being identified and targeted, and in some cases having their accounts shut down. Whether this is the intention of the movement or not I don’t know, but it’s hard to see how MAPs benefit from any of this.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe it doesn’t matter who is behind Heart Progress if what they are saying is right and true and useful. But that argument can be turned around as well: maybe it really doesn’t matter whether they are sincere, if their arguments and their methods are so ludicrous that they cannot possibly be taken seriously even by other MAPs. I do not think this group will start any revolution, and I do not think their rhetoric can be anything but damaging to the interests of the community they purport to be representing.
Things you need to know: The author of the article is another modern Muslim who believes (without proof) that all sex is ok as long as it is “between adults” (as he said vanilla gay adult sex is guaranteed “by the throne of Allah”) and that the age of consent should be at the end of the educational stage, at least 16 in the best of all cases, so if you fall in love with a 14-year-old who go to school (mandatory of course, minors cannot have freedom rights) you must rot in a dungeon because Mr Najarian in his inspiration of the allmighty God, has decreed that. I know this because I’ve read talk with he and read other things of him, I dont go on gossip… But hey he support paedos of intolerant vigilantes while you do nothing with a 17-years-old “minor child”.
I’m not a Muslim. I was raised in the Armenian Orthodox faith but I haven’t been active. I’m open to seeing the good sides of religions, unlike many people online today, but my perspective is secular.
‘Order’ seems to have tweeter Kamil Beylant, in mind, as seen in his mention of something about ‘the throne of Allah’ That refers to an easily googled hadith about sex between males. Kamil did mention this phrase once in a paragraph urging Muslims to accept LGBT people, so perhaps Order is referring to that case.
There were some members of Anonymous who said that Kamil and I were the same person, since we often work together. Recently they also decided Kamil was the blogger Anna Raccoon and started referring to him as ‘her.’ Trolling people aren’t firmly committed to keeping personalities sorted out. It’s all part of the lollage of internet life.
You’re right, it was a mistake, and also very silly, I apologize for it, it was never my intention to perjudice you in anything.
> Christian says: “and some (like Steiner) think that because the old story of Mohamed and Aisha, Islam may be more open to GL; I think it is a quite illusory belief, most Muslim believers and theologians either adopt a Western lifestyle, and the mantra “minors cannot consent”
Curiously I just saw this:
“””Women’s rightsEdit
In December 2015, Jammeh banned female genital mutilation (FGM) in Gambia, labelling the practice of FGM as having “no place in Islam or in modern society”; anyone that ignored the ban would face a prison sentence of up to three years. After the end of Ramadan and Eid ul-Fitr in July 2016, Jammeh further announced a ban on child marriages. In 2016, some 30% of women were married while under the age of 18. Yahya Jammeh’s response was that anyone caught marrying a girl under 18 years of age would be jailed for up to twenty years.[36]””””
Yes, he’s the guy who turned the Gambia into an Islamic republic.
Yes, it is the religion of the prophet who married a 9-year-old girl.
Yes, it is within the “womens rights” issue again, yes is again “under 18 are children”, yes, it is that ideology that begins with the F word … again, again…
So marry 17-years-old has no place in Islam or in modern society (dominated by the F word ideology). Cool bro.
Now our friend, LSM, probably will tell us that is just a rare (emphasis here) Muslim man who cares about little girls, FGM is evil, and he only tries that are no more marriages arranged and marital rape with 17-years-old infant girls (until LSM go to wikipedia and reads what he has said about homosexuals …)
But two mistakes do not make a success, hitler also did good things, like the cool nazi uniforms. Some can say: these two ideologies are a bit like Stalinism and Nazism, on opposite sides only seek to enslave men, and I say “men”, do you understand what I mean?
HP (Heart Progress) fights for all oppressed minorities (blacks, migrants, sexual minorities), against racism, against sexism and against Trump. The idea that the white race is intrinsically racist and needs to be diluted in interracial marriage has been put forward in one post by their leader Ernst Steiner, but it does not seem to be held by all moderators, they seem a diverse group without a clear “party line”. Of course a new budding movement has some confusion in it.
Many of their activists had their Twitter account suppressed, the same happened for HP’s Reddit site. They have an official site, http://nickmartinezofficial.com/ and Ernst Steiner has a WP blog with only two posts now: https://ernststeinerblog.wordpress.com/
The group is partly infiltrated by antis, who repeat the mantras that kids cannot consent, that sex is illegal under 18, that paedophilia is disgusting, or is a disease, plus various more explicit insults and threats. There is an Anti Heart Progress group, but it does not seem very active (it is in return infiltrated by HP activists).
Well, Harry Hay was mentioned on their site…That is a good start!