Pedophilia has been more popular than icecream since about 1979. Paedophilia, however, has always been less popular than icecream except in just one year, 2007, when it enjoyed a brief moment of glory, pulling ahead of icecream only to fall back again the following year.
Heretic TOC was inspired to make these discoveries following comments on Boy Chat about Ice-Cream Hands, the short film introduced here in the previous blog, ‘Harmless’ paedos venture out of the shadows. In the BC thread, “cabinet maker” found the film “creepy as shit”, adding “the ice cream man is a pedophile? how much more stereotypical can we get?” On the other hand “Kit” said “Love the ice cream-man cliche.”
While opinions of the film itself ranged from rave to rubbish, nobody disputed that it was indeed a cliché to make the paedophilic Mr Sprinkles an ice-cream seller.
I wasn’t so sure. Yes, any ice-cream van is a kid magnet, so it would make sense for the connection to be a cliché, but I couldn’t immediately think of another film, TV programme, book, painting or any other medium in which this connection was expressed. Then I recalled Chester the Molester, the comic strip character from Hustler magazine. The strip ran for years, with Chester depicted comically (feminists of the po-faced variety will disagree) setting up all manner of ruses to get into kids’ pants, so surely he must have been depicted selling ice-cream? I was never a Hustler reader myself so I can only guess, but googling soon revealed that others have made their own connection, and in the following case linked it to evidence (albeit unsourced and with no details) from news stories involving errant ice-cream vendors:
Chester Molester The Ice Cream Truck Driver
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
It has been brought to my attention that this summer has been a time for creepy, mullet wearing, goatee sporting, shit eating grin men to come out of the woodwork and mess with our young ones.
On the news today I heard of three…Count em three cases where Ice cream truck drivers have bribed children into taking there clothes off for free icecream. Not only that These molesting mother fuckers are taking photos of it too!
Apparently the story goes as followed:
Chester the Molester finds unsuspecting children on the streets while riding around in the molester mobile…Otherwise known as the ice cream truck. Once the kids stop the man, if they’re right for the picking Chester offers them a ride in his pimp ass ice cream truck. Now, if I were a child and was offered a ride in an ice cream truck I probably would have gone too…So don’t blame the kids, they’re just kids.
Once inside the truck, Chester starts his molestation trap. Next thing you know the kids walk out of the truck slightly confused but with a bombsicle tightly gripped in there hands.
Chester gets off easy with his photographs with his naked children…And then he’s off to the next neighborhood.
It turns out that comedian Tim Minchin, has very effectively milked the ice-cream theme too. His Häagen-Dazs-level performance is probably the cream of the cream but, not to be licked (sorry!), the amateur jokesters are hanging in there.
Putting up some admirable resistance to this damning image is Lenore Skenazy at her admirable Free-Range Kids website (“How to raise safe, self-reliant children”). Skenazy, as some heretics here will surely know, hit the headlines a while back after allowing her nine-year-old son to ride home alone on the New York City Subway, and has written a book on less paranoid parenting. In an article titled “Does Ice Cream Man = Pervert?” she notes the fusion of the two in popular culture, “like the twin sticks of a Popsicle”. She objects vigorously in this piece to a proposal for state and federal fingerprint-based criminal history checks on people applying for ice cream van vending licences.
Some of her readers backed her up, pointing out that ice-cream vending is a very public business, and anyone selling from a van is firmly separated from his customers. The traditional department store Santa Claus has a much greater chance of a grope in his grotto. As for teachers, scout leaders and sports coaches, they all enjoy a long-term lust licence, while the opportunities for illicit intimacy open to close relatives, including siblings and parents, are absolutely endless and not infrequently taken.
I was an ice-cream man myself, as it happens, so I can speak from some experience! It was just a brief student job before I went into teaching. It was nice to make the kiddies happy (only with the ice-cream!) but also a much tougher job than might be thought: you have to work hard at building up a profitable round and it isn’t always easy: there are turf wars; a good pitch will be fiercely contested. Yes, you can bribe kids with free ice-cream and invite them into your vehicle, but only at tremendous risk to yourself. Not that bribery would be necessary. Kids ask if they can come aboard and plead to be taken for a ride.
You wouldn’t think that, though, from the supposed victims’ tales of woe in a tabloid yarn earlier this year headlined “Jimmy Savile’s mayor pal ‘preyed on young lads.’ ” This was a Daily Star story about an alleged “paedophile ice-cream tycoon known as the King of the Cornets” who was mayor of the English seaside town of Scarborough. He was said to have employed boys part-time and molested them going home in his van at night after work – while actually driving, it seems. Clearly, a very dangerous man! Nothing was ever proved against him and conveniently for the paper he died in 1999 so is in no position to sue for libel. In fact, it’s a great tab story for three reasons: there’s a villain who is a major local employer and politician, hence too big to prosecute; the guy is a pal of super villain Savile and appeared on his TV show; and last but not least, he panders to the ice-cream man stereotype. Tasty!
Whatever the realities, it seems the Boy Chat thread was quite accurate: people do think ice-cream guys are paedophiles, or might well be. So it is indeed a cliché. At least, it has become so in recent times, as expressed in jokes and comedy sketches if not necessarily in cinema (though I may be wrong, in which case please tell me). There was a 1995 horror film called Ice Cream Man which sounds great fun judging by the IMDB synopsis:
Poor Gregory. After being released from the Wishing Well Sanatorium, all he wants to do is make the children happy. So Gregory reopens the old ice cream factory, and all the unappreciative brats are reprocessed into the flavor of the day.
More Winy Wonka than paedophilia, methinks.
As for novels, there is the very recent The Ice Cream Man by Katri Lipson (the original Finnish title is a wonderfully exotic single word: Jäätelökauppias), which won the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature as a “playful and charming story”. I’m guessing there’s not much paedophilia then.
So what about my claim that paedophilia was more popular than icecream in 2007? What’s that all about?
Books, actually. For the first part of my cliché quest, I thought I’d try the quantification route via references to ice-cream in books. If I could search millions of volumes and see a tight correlation between increasing appearances of the word paedophilia (and pedophilia for American books) and increasing appearances of the word ice-cream, then Heretic TOC could reasonably hypothesise the rise of an ice-cream man cliché as the cause. OK, so a third variable could be the cause of both phenomena, which might require some investigation, but I thought I might be onto something all the same. I probably have junior genius James to thank for this thought. New readers: search recent comments for Bayes (of Bayes’ theorem fame) and consequentialism, which are just two of the knotty notions James is into.
It was a fun exercise, but in terms of useful information I think I came a bit unstuck. So here’s a warning: Never take ideas from a Strange Boy (or Girl or Non-Binary Person) unless you are prepared to be amused 🙂 by your own inadequacy :-(.
And also perhaps by the data. So let’s come to that (or those, for any pedantic grammarians here: Heretic TOC wants to keep everyone happy, even if they are virtuous). So, where was I? Ah, yes, the data.
Google n-grams, that’s the tool. The demonstration graph when you go to the link shows the percentage of books published from 1800-2000 in which particular words occurred, the demo ones being Frankenstein, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes.
What I did was create my own n-gram for paedophilia, pedophilia and icecream. This was a bit limiting because the system does not accept ice-cream with a hyphen although it will take ice – cream when a hyphen or dash is separated from the words by spaces. Weird! But n-grams are also wonderful, as I hope will be agreed.
I have put one of my creations on the blog (see below).
Paedophilia and its American variant derive, as is well known, from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s first use of the term “paedophilia erotica” in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. The book’s first edition appeared in 1886 but it was not until the 12th and final one in 1903 that his new term is to be found. Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing, to give his glorious full appellation, included it in the “Psychopathological Cases” section of Chapter Five, on sexual crimes.
It will be seen that the n-gram dutifully records this first appearance of “paedophilia” in 1903, with the American variant hot on its heels. Both terms remained in medical obscurity, though, until the 1970s, since when the graph has shot upwards for both spellings. Unsurprisingly, pedophilia has raced ahead, reflecting the greater number of American publications in general and medical, legal and scientific ones in particular. Fiction probably lags well behind, thanks to imaginative alternatives such as “monster, “scumbag”, and “lowlife”, as deployed by the likes of popular novelist Andrew Vachss.
Pedophilia, but not paedophilia, leapt ahead of icecream just before 1980.
If you go to this n-gram for the period 2000-2008, the latter date being as recent as the tool goes at the moment, you will see my headline point about paedophilia just above a very steady-looking (with zero “smoothing”) icecream.
What, then, may we conclude about icecream as a literary cliché in connection with paedophilia? Bugger all, perhaps. But if the paedophilic ice-cream man ever became a cliché, wouldn’t we expect to see icecream rising in the graph along with the P words? There are similar n-gram results also for “molester” with “icecream”.
Perhaps this is what has happened: in popular culture the ice-cream man as paedophile is such a strongly entrenched figure that seriously creative people, such as film-script writers and novelists, try to avoid what they fear may be seen as a cliché. As a result, it never actually becomes one.
Anyway, I hope everyone is relaxing and enjoying this little ice-cream break after some rather intensive discussions here. 🙂
Ice-Cream hands was a perfect example of style over substance. Gavin Youngs showed he’s really good at editing and camera work but not so much at actually telling a story. I’m not exactly sure what the film was trying to say or if it was just trying to be weird, not even your quotes seemed to match up with what was happening on the screen. Was the fragmented schizophrenic style of the film suppose to represent the twisted mind of a pedophile? I wasn’t impressed.
Just heard an interesting radio interview on BBC Radio 4 that may interest a few people on here…interviewing an artist who had gay sex at 13,and the reaction of social services,cos he was a fat kid,they thought that he could
overpower his sexual partner,and molest his two year old brother.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04p86zd
Thanks for calling our attention to this interview. It’s heartening to hear something like that on mainstream radio, and also to hear that the boy’s mother stuck up for him. For anyone not wanting to sit through the whole thing, the relevant part begins at 23:22.
Thanks mr p for this link and to A. for pointing to the relevant Place. Reminds me of my own consensual sexual exploits at age 13 – 14 with other boys of my age, which I can look back on with great pleasure (at the time it was more complicated, there was a certain angst about identity). I remember particularly one boy that I liked a great deal: he really knew what he was doing. I was woefully innocent. Thankfully, no interfering adults ever knew.
You and me both…I was at boys boarding school,enough said! as far as adolescents are concerned,females have a longer shelf life, I know that sounds crude,just for the sake of making a quick point.but before that boys
and girls are equally beautiful.There was always that stigma of the bender banded around,which cost me allot of fun;-)
There was always that stigma of the bender banded around, which cost me allot of fun;-)
Yes, my school was also a boy’s boarding school, but I was a day-boy so I missed out on most of the fun. The “bender” stigma was all that prevented our education from becoming one big mass orgy, no? But I look back now on those few tentative guilt-ridden sexual explorations with my male peers as some of the best in my life, despite my now mainly heterosexual identity. And isn’t the irony of paedohysteria in the UK that so much of the educational infrastructure is geared up to the fostering of non-mainstream sexuality? No wonder the French raise their eyebrows when the British are busy “discovering” and condemning their proud paedophilic heritage. Hey, they say, you criticise our politicians for their mistress culture when the whole of Europe has known for years that your British politicians have their foibles for beautiful little boys?
A spontaneous visit yesterday to my local swimming pool in my current country gives me a little hope. A gang of ten year old boys running round naked in the male changing room talking willies and comparing erections. No stigma, no shyness, no guilt. At least none that could be observed!
Here is my contribution,I remember watching this beck in 2007…with my then girlfriend,who was also sympathetic even knowing he was a sex offender,In a
clip where hes being chased by vigilantes.he’s not the stereotypical raincoat type the media like so much.A middle class,well spoken geza!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL61ECED1D11A25CCF
Just finished the full movie. I found it to be very heart-wrenching because his social awkwardness mirrored my own. OTOH, the YouTube comments were absolutely infuriating!
Glad you enjoyed it,kept me on the edge of my seat…And i hope it also gave you an insight of urban England.
To some extent, yes. I lived in the UK briefly but I’m by no means an expert!
I liked the scene where Charlie is with the girl, the chemistry between the two seemed to be really authentic and sweet. Other than that there really wasn’t much else I liked about this film. Pedophilia is not some kind of compulsive urge to molest children as this film makes it out to be. We’re not like vampires out for the blood or anything. The low recidivism rates among sex offenders support this. This film on the other hand depicts sex offenders as having almost no control and that anyone can reoffend no matter how hard they try to fight it. Nonsense. As a character study the film felt very scripted, Charlie’s character for the most part didn’t seem real to me.
Charlie is probably atypical among paedophiles. However, paedophilia isn’t the sole characteristic he possesses. I read into his character vague anti-social attitudes and very poor impulse control. That may not be a sympathetic characterisation if you expect the audience to generalise it to all paedophiles, but given those qualities I can understand his behaviour.
Actually the film generalizes it. The other sex offender in the film also suffers from low-impulse control which is evident when he tells Charlie about the place where he can go to find underage prostitutes. At that point Charlie was somewhat sympathetic (although still more pathetic than sympathetic) but then he quickly turns around and snitches on the only guy that tried to be his friend and had just saved his life the scene before. Not only that but he doesn’t even show an ounce of remorse for it. At that point I no longer liked Charlie, I thought he was a disgusting, pathetic person. Then the psychiatrist tells him that all sex offenders are in danger of relapsing and that he can never think he won’t. There were a lot of points brought up in the dialogue that seemed to continually reinforce this propaganda. This film was basically anti-pedophilia propaganda, not an honest character study. It even wants you to call their stupid hotline at the end. LOL. No!
This film reminded me a lot of the Woodsman actually. Another bad film that some pedophiles tend to like because it doesn’t show the pedophile as a complete monster as most films do but just as somebody who belongs in a mental institution which is basically the best representation we’re ever going to get.
Surely Heretic TOC must be familiar with the world’s most recognisable paedophile, Herbert the Pervert from Family Guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RykeFKvvhAA
I used to watch The Simpsons. In more recent years, sadly, I haven’t found time to keep up with other promising cartoon series such as South Park or Family Guy, so I’m afraid I have missed out. Clearly, I’ve got some catching up to do with Herbert the Pervert. There seem to be plenty of clips out there including the one you referenced, with its specifically ice-cream theme. Thanks, this is an excellent example!
Tom, one highly amusing South Park episode entitled ‘Cartman joins NAMBLA’.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x195o11_south-park-s04e05-cartman-joins-nambla_fun
To quote that episode:
“What we need is proof that young boys want to be members of NAMBLA. That they want love from us. We need a poster child.”
Wow. If only there were one those around here….
In the Netherlands some 30+ years ago, there was indeed visible proof. Where the US had NAMBLA, the Dutch had the paedophile workshops of the broad-based sexual reform association NVSH. Kids and their adult sexual partners would turn up at meetings together. Police were sometimes present: not to make arrests but just to ensure nobody was there who didn’t want to be.
Where policing is more aggressive, which is pretty well everywhere now, this becomes impossible. Any child would immediately be classed as a victim and “helped” by making sure their adult friend went to prison. I understand NAMBLA did have some young supporters just into their teens.
Being a public poster child was another matter though: that would have brought hostility on the child, never mind on NAMBLA itself. I must check out that Family Guy spoof. Not had time yet, unfortunately.
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.
I was actually making an underhanded reference to myself. I don’t think my communication skills are as great as Gantier implies…
The spoof (I assume you mean the episode I was commenting on) is actually from South Park.
I’ve just seen the South Park episode. Yes, slip of the pen, I meant SP not Family Guy.
>”I was actually making an underhanded reference to myself.”
Oh, right! Nothing wrong with your communication, I was just a bit slow on the uptake. On written evidence, at least, you sure make a much more convincing poster boy than Cartman 🙂 But no pictures please! H-TOC can do without the FBI calling 🙂
“But no pictures please!”
Certainly. I prefer anonymity and I dislike pictures in general because of gender dysphoria. No selfies for me, please!
I’ve just seen the South Park episode
Hmmm…. Is that guy first appearing at approx 3.00 supposed to be you Tom? Is there not a certain resemblance?
Damn! I thought no one would notice! 🙂
Now that you mention it, that’s a possibility…
Do you have stacks of candy and multiple copies of the Kama Sutra?
>Do you have stacks of candy and multiple copies of the Kama Sutra?
Sadly, the cops confiscated all my supplies on their last raid 🙁
Besides you, there is this kid: https://www.ipce.info/newsletters/e_22/2_16_Lee.htm . He’ll be in his early thirties now though.
Plus, of course, Sylvie from a few blogs back…
Oh yes, of course!
From a Wikipedia-synopsis of Miranda episode “Just act normal” from 2010:
Miranda and Penny attend a therapy session after an incident at a park, which saw the police get involved when they thought Miranda was trying to kidnap a class of children and she forgot to pay for twenty-nine ice-creams. Their therapist, Anthony (Mark Heap), remains mostly silent, which proves unnerving to both Miranda and Penny. They try to act normal, which proves difficult for the both of them.
Remember thinking this would be a hard comedy to make if it starred a man with his father. You women paedos you don’t know how lucky you are! You blend in so well, unlike us balding saddos in our worn-out raincoats!
http://vimeo.com/40589153
And a fair few of those female teachers arrested for sex with teenaged male pupils are outright blonde bombshells! Of course, the papers love those photos, so they’re probably not at all representative of the group of such teachers as a whole, but still.
“…wanted to know why I was buying twenty-nine ice creams for children I’d never met.” Well, they do say dating is a numbers game…
LOL. Might as well diversify your investments 🙂
(Bad joke is bad. I’ll stop economisting now…)
Well, they do say dating is a numbers game…
Quite! I just loved the whole mother – daughter thing at the psychologist’s. Recognize some of the conflicts in my sisters…. All the women in my family are great fans of Miranda Hart in this series (but some won’t admit it)
A poem for all occastions:
SIX SCHOOLGIRLS
I met them for half a day
(we were making a TV programme)
in my familiar room. We talked
about poetry and were taken out
for an extravagant lunch. Such ice-cream!
I’ve thought of them since
with such relish of their likenesses
and differences it adds up
to affection.
It’ll be strange when the TV flickers
and steadies and there they are, successfully
hiding their shyness.
Will I recognise in them
(so composed, so informed, so subtle)
those gossiping youngsters devouring
such soups and steaks ? Such ice-cream ?
by Norman MacCaig
I like that poem. Thanks for introducing us to it.
And, what is wrong with being a pedophile? We are all part pedo, hetro, homo. That is just the way we are. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution made us what we are. The sooner we quit trying to fit humans into some notion of society and start fitting our notions of society to fit us humans the better off we will all be.
Evolution counts, especially when you realize that evolution has made us desirable, i.e., egalitarian, gentle, inclusive, cooperative and non-violent. Not the lies we have come to believe, i.e., men are competitive, selfish, mass killers.
W. Edward Deming believed we were egalitarian, gentle, inclusive, cooperative beings and built his management systems on this belief. Thus, Japan was able to rise out of utter devastation building automobiles that outlasted anything we in the USA were doing and well we all know the British never have been able to make quality cars except for the Rolls Royce where money is no object.
Linca
“Not the lies we have come to believe, i.e., men are competitive, selfish, mass killers”
Are we not competitive in the face of scarcities? Do we not generally give preferential treatment to ourselves and our kin-groups over strangers? (Cf. Tom’s comment about the Strange Man.)
James,
We live in a zoo that causes us to do awful things but these things are not natural to us and end up causing us lots of problems, i.e., setting off mental illness like what has happened to so many soldiers, illnesses that keep on killing them and killing others.
Most all of us have been culturally conditioned to believe we are what we are not, what we cannot be. Read this book and come back to me: “War Peace and Human Nature” Edited by Douglas Fry, https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hfh227na7pz03bg/AAAMGprH1ILBoEgHwt3RQM2-a?dl=0
Also, I will see if my Evolutionary Psychologist friend who is close to and working on Bruce Rind will visit with you via email. Darn, you are in the UK and cannot get on the telephone with him. Dale is a bit technology challenged and does not do Skype. Maybe next year when I visit him in Detroit I will stay overnight with him and get him Skype literate.
There are other books we could get you the same as we are getting to Bruce Rind. Bruce has a ways to go as you do and Tom O does: A Long Ways. Actually Rind has further to go than you and Tom because he is invested in “man as fierce killer”.
When you finally grasp what we are saying you will say “Hell yea. Why did I ever believe this other crap, these theorists, with evidence that doesn’t stand up rather than evidence, simple beautiful evidence, which does stand up?” Now, take a look at “War Peace and Human Nature” as a beginning. The PDF I am sharing with you is searchable. You could become a strong advocate for children and one of the ways to a world a lot better than the one we now live in which is crap. The world we live in is crap. The theories you are following now are crap. No such thing as non-MAP, doesn’t exist. You are forgetting the powerful and devastating effects that “Cultural Conditioning” has on us.
Linca
Linca, thanks enormously for giving us a Dropbox link to this important book. I would have bought it the first time you mentioned it, but it is very expensive.
I definitely aim to read it ASAP. It’s a lot to read on a PC screen, though, so I think you have finally given me a compelling reason to invest in some sort of tablet, so I can read while sitting comfortably in an armchair.
And your version is searchable! Marvellous!
Tom,
This is GOOD news. If somehow/someway we can get you and Dale and Rind and James and me on the same page we will be unstoppable, we will be impossible for our aginsters to deal with. Think about accepting an invitation to come meet with Rind, Dale and me next summer in New Hampshire. I haven’t been invited yet but Dale is putting in a request for me: Fingers Crossed. If you think you would like to do that I will ask Dale to get your invitation accomplished.
I seem to only be able to learn face to face when I can grumble or maybe yell from the back row or grumble and bitch in informal coffee break groups.
Linca
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve met Bruce, Linca. It is very unlikely I would be allowed into USA these days though.
“we will be unstoppable, we will be impossible for our aginsters (sic) to deal with”
Assuming we have no problems coordinating our actions 🙂
Does Dale visit this site? Does he agree with your economics WRT usury, national banks, etc?
“We live in a zoo that causes us to do awful things but these things are not natural to us”
Neither modern hunter gatherers nor our closest primate relatives are perfectly peaceful.
“Read this book and come back to me”
I’ll try but, as I mentioned in a comment on the last post, I’m rather pressed for time.
“Darn, you are in the UK and cannot get on the telephone with him.”
Uh, no I’m not. I live in Latin America and cannot get on the telephone with him!
‘When you finally grasp what we are saying you will say “Hell yea. Why did I ever believe this other crap, these theorists….’
That might be over selling and I generally find it disquieting when people tell me what I’m going to believe.
Anyway, I’m off to take a look at “War Peace and Human Nature”.
Yes, thank you Linca; nearly 300 scans? Wow! Hopefully absorbing material to while away the time on a particularly long bus journey this weekend to Laos.
Thirded: thank you so much for the book, Linca.
“we all know the British never have been able to make quality cars except for the Rolls Royce where money is no object.”
I must protest! Come for a spin in my thirty-year-old (British-made) Daimler and you will surely change your mind.
Edmund, author of Alexander’s Choice, a boy’s love story.
Daimler is a German company so, even if your car was manufactured in Britain, it probably wasn’t designed there 🙂
Gottlieb Daimler was indeed a German, but it was the Coventry-based Daimler Company Ltd., which enjoyed license from him to manufacture and design engines in his name from 1896 and designed my rare modern example of British manufacturing expertise.
“Daimler is a German company.”
Really? Can you substantiate?
“it was the Coventry-based Daimler Company Ltd., which enjoyed license from him to manufacture and design engines in his name from 1896”
Interesting. I stand corrected 🙂
“Really? Can you substantiate?”
I was referring to Daimler AG, which is the only type of Daimler where I live. I was completely unaware there was another Daimler. Mea Culpa.
MG ROVER In the end was made in the UK…last plant at Coventry,they did make reliable cars,the rover 75 was very well made reliable and smooth.
I had one…Linca you make a good point about HONDA,they are the best car to choose if you don’t want to be left in the ditch.As for the Jaguar,the build quality vastly improved in the late nineties.
Edmund,
I would love to take a spin in your 30-year-old Daimler. Wasn’t that about the time they spun off Jaguar with a sale following that of Jaguar to Ford and later a sale of Jaguar to Tata. Daimler used to be a car for the Royalty before Rolls was selected. That was in the Wikipedia article on Daimler.
My conclusion from a quick reading is that Daimler makes/made high quality cars for the 1% but not for the 99%. Japan figured out how to make high quality/dependable cars for the 99% and that was all based on the assumption we are kind, gentle, cooperative people. W. Edwards Deming was attacked with a knife, sporting a large scar you could see when he was out in his garden in the summer. He held no animosity toward his attacker. He didn’t blame him. He blamed the system he was raised in and spent his life changing it. Let’s continue that too. I know you say yes. I have read you and you read good.
Wish I could get there for a ride in your Daimler. Better than that I wish I could be 12-years-old again and sit next to you in your car’s front seat maybe riding down the road and looking up at F-16’s circling over head telling them to go home. You could reach over and rub my leg. I would smile.
Linca
” Better than that I wish I could be 12-years-old again and sit next to you in your car’s front seat maybe riding down the road and looking up at F-16’s circling over head telling them to go home. You could reach over and rub my leg. I would smile.”
So indeed would I in this delectable dream you conjure up. I wasn’t meaning to dispute your underlying point, less still to defend the British “system”, which is ignominiously similar to the other anglophone ones. I merely thought to defend accuracy (and my lovely car!).
“Japan figured out how to make high quality/dependable cars for the 99% and that was all based on the assumption we are kind, gentle, cooperative people.”
The Japanese are indeed quite good at cooperating, but I don’t know if I’d call the system they live under kind or gentle. More like strict, high-pressure, and hierarchical.
About Lenore Skenazy’s excellent site: this happened recently: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested-for-letting-a-9-year-old-play-at-the-park-alone/374436/
Wilfred, the married man attracted to seven-year-old girls who speaks Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue ‘Playing Sandwiches’, has been a lollipop man and a swimming-pool lifeguard, and he gives sweeties to little girls, but he has not been an ice-cream man. One cliché too far? (The monologue is actually excellent — compassionate and very thoughtful — and yes, it’s on YouTube…)
“The Ice Cream Man by Katri Lipson (the original Finnish title is a wonderfully exotic single word: Jäätelökauppias)…” Agglutination. Gotta love it.
One of my hobbies is conlanging and I’ve gotta say – agglutination kicks arse! Isolating languages are too vocabulary poor unless they have tones that I can’t even hear (I’m pretty tone deaf and I recently figured out which of my genes is responsible (rs41310927)) and fusional languages give me traumatic flash backs to French class. Agglutinating languages can have words for everything and the case systems don’t look completely random and each word is a beautiful special snowflake 🙂
>I recently figured out which of my genes is responsible (rs41310927
How?
I had a genetic test done and got a copy of the raw data. Then I went looking for any research I could find on what particular genes do. One of the things I found was that people who are GG homozygous at the rs41310927 SNP have the greatest (average) ability to differentiate tones while people who are AA homozygous have the lowest (AG heterozygotes are in between). I’m AA. The research is preliminary so it might be wrong, but one thing is certain: I’m very bad at distinguishing tones.
>I had a genetic test done and got a copy of the raw data.
Ah, actual hard data! Cool!
Yep. Nothing I love more than raw data to do what I please with! I also found out I had Ashkenazi ancestry. I knew my maternal line was composed of Sephardi cristianos nuevos but I had no idea about the Ashkenazi heritage. I was equally surprised to learn that I didn’t have Indian ancestry.
But I’m probably boring you with all this genetic navel-gazing….
>But I’m probably boring you with all this genetic navel-gazing….
I can’t speak for others but it definitely interests me.
Nicholas Wade, in his recent book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes Race & Human History, is controversial on the subject of race and intelligence. Your point about Ashkenazi ancestry is interesting here, as is the fact that you are black.
Wade notes that humans have evolved genetically in recent times and claims that these differences go beyond relatively superficial factors such as skin colour. He points out that the Jewish population, and in particular Ashkenazis, are prominent in science, and claims a genetic basis for this. Indeed, it is hard to explain away Jewish achievements through cultural factors alone, when we consider (on his figures) that the Jewish population make up only 0.2% of the world’s population but by 2007 had won a staggering 32% of the Nobel prizes in the 21st century. This was not a particularly freakish result as they also won 14% of the Nobels in the first half of the 20th century.
Others have commented on a phenomenon known to breeders (perhaps plant breeders in the first instance) as “hybrid vigour”. Barack Obama, who has called himself a “mutt”, or mongrel, is clearly a very intelligent person (whatever we think of his policies!) and might be considered an example of this vigour: he is perhaps even more talented as a result of being concocted from very different gene pools than his non-mixed-race relatives.
You may prefer not to be too controversial, so don’t answer unless you want to, but I wonder whether you have any observations on this?
(Moving response over here.)
I’ve spent enough time hanging around the Human Bio-Diversity (HBD, racial realist, scientific racist) community that I don’t mind being controversial at all if you’re fine with it.
I’m iffy on whether there are large genetic gaps between most races WRT intelligence. It almost goes without saying that appreciable differences in observed IQ exist between blacks, whites, east asians, etc. However, I don’t think there is enough evidence to rule out effects from the biological environment (eg: the average sub-Saharan doesn’t have the best diet). Also, there are various reasons to believe that the genetic stock of New World blacks is degraded from that of our West African cousins.
OTH, I think the genetic explanation for Ashkenazi achievement is pretty robust, especially given the relative genetic isolation and strong selection pressures. I don’t think this generalises to Sephardim, though. For one thing, we were simply treated much better in Al Andalus than the Ashkenazim were in Germany and Eastern Europe so there was less genetic isolation and lower selection pressure.
With the exception of isolated populations such as the Ashkenazim, I’m sceptical of whether hybrid vigour applies to humans. Plant and animal breeder usually work with very inbred “pure-bred” stocks. In these cases, a little bit of outbreeding can lead to sudden gains in fitness. This is particularly good when it comes to genetic diseases and I am quite thankful that I’ve found I lack any “Jewish” diseases.
Interesting. Thanks.
>I’ve spent enough time hanging around the Human Bio-Diversity
I take it you mean on-line?
Yes. I don’t know anyone IRL who subscribes to these views. In fact, I’m the most bio-determinist person I know, with my mother coming in second and everyone else separated by a wide breadth.
“I’m iffy on whether there are large genetic gaps between most races WRT intelligence.”
Since you’ve at least studied the question, can you enlighten me as to how anyone could justifiably care, as they apparently do? What difference does it make? If 45 or 49 percent of A group have a higher IQ than most of B group, shouldn’t that be very obvious grounds for everyone not to make any presumptions about the individual intelligence of A groupers, so very many of them being more intelligent than average B groupers. By the same token, it must be pretty obvious that rich trained children will score higher. So what? The real socialistic disgrace and injustice is thinking such generalisations should under any circumstances prevail over individual differences.
For some of them, it’s white people (or, occasionally, Asians) with low self esteem who want to piggyback off the successes of their race. Thus, any way they can claim that their race is “better” reflects well on their self-image. However, I find this to be a load of crap. I don’t feel proud for belonging to the race of Marcus Garvy or Benjamin Disraeli, I’m proud of my own accomplishments.
I’m not a fan of Objectivism, but I’ll quote Ayn Rand because she puts it very well: “A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race – and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes, or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.”
On the other hand, some of them have good reasons for caring:
1) In the US, affirmative action laws require universities and large businesses to have certain quotas of various minorities. However, if, as many HBDites claim, blacks have lower average intelligence than whites, while east Asians have higher average intelligence than same, that system unfairly rewards blacks and punishes Asians relative to their achievements.
2) Social Justice people always complain about the relative lack of black people in positions of high status, authority, and wealth. If HBD is right, this isn’t a problem that needs to be “fixed”.
3) American special needs schools often turn away black students to avoid looking disproportionately black, since it reflects badly on the county’s education system if blacks are disproportionately classified as “retarded”. If HBD is right, this is a travesty because these students need all the help they can get, political correctness be damned.
…And a hundred more reasons. However, most of the people join the movement for the racial prestige boost, only the top 10% have reasons as smart as the above.
The case systems may not be completely random but Finnish, as you probably know, has fourteen or fifteen cases, depending how you classify. I could never cope with that but your splendid brain probably can!
I’ve never learned to speak Finnish, I’ve only studied it from the perspective of the disinterested linguist. I’m quite aware that it’s a monstrously difficult language and have no intention of trying 🙂
I hope everyone is relaxing and enjoying this little ice-cream break after some rather intensive discussions here
Lol. This comment got me thinking Tom. It would be interesting to get your take on the controversy over contact vs non-contact. Not so much on the question itself, which is somewhat abstract, but on how you see it affecting the overall struggle for greater tolerance and acceptance.
The controversy seems to divide the paedo population like the Gunners and Spurs divide North London. I know you have your own established allegiance, but maybe you’d be willing to adopt a quasi-neutral stance for an analysis of this rivalry …
>how you see it affecting the overall struggle for greater tolerance and acceptance.
I expect this issue to come up very soon in connection with a particular media event. I hope to give advance information about this event in the next few days.
How intrigueing
Not the first time we are treated to a cliff-hanger on this blog!
…intriguing.
I think the term ‘pro-contact’ is unfortunate for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that contact is illegal almost everywhere. ‘Pro-choice’ is better. Who can be against choice?
WRT abortion, about 50% of Americans.
Well, I meant who can REASONABLY be against choice?!
Actually, where late abortions are concerned, I think the moral issues are a bit more finely balanced.
How late are we talking here?
Late enough for the foetus to suffer? Actually that might not be all that late.
That’s still being researched. The general consensus is that a foetus is incapable of pain before 26-29 weeks at the earliest. Some researchers, however, believe that even a foetus past this age mark may be sedated by its chemical environment in the womb.
An excellent documentary on the question of late-term abortion is After Tiller, about the four doctors (two women, two men) who, after George Tiller was murdered in his church, are the only ones remaining in the US who will admit to performing very late-term abortions. In most cases the foetuses have been discovered to have extremely serious disabilities, often disabilities which would kill them within a few days were they born.
One needs to be a little careful here. Not very long ago it was thought by the medical community that newborns were not able to feel pain. Their nervous systems were not developed enough. On the basis of this they preformed operations on infants without anesthesia. The connection between the external biological facts that science observes and inner subjective experience is not always what one would expect.
These are somewhat reassuring points.
By the way, because this is starting to look like a depressingly gendered argument between a man apparently attacking abortion and a woman defending it, I should emphasise that I have no particular axe to grind. But I do think that–to return to the initial topic–if choice is the issue, then one has to take into account that a foetus might have, beyond a certain hard-to-ascertain point of development, if not the capacity to make a choice, then at least relevant wishes or preferences.
WordPress is trying to confuse us again! My comment about being reassured was meant to refer to A’s comments about U.S.policy on late abortions,, not to Jedson’s comment (later inserted) which of course is not reassuring at all.
(Forgot to consolidate)
PS: What do you mean by reasonable? I believe most anti-abortion people are deontological* in their thinking. Do you broadly consider deontological thinking to be unreasonable (as I do)?
*I’m basing this on my observations of Catholics, whose theology is known to be heavily reliant on “Natural” (ie: deontological) Law. I’m not sure if pro-life ‘USian’ Protestants are substantially different in outlook…
These people I can take seriously: http://blog.secularprolife.org/
Same here. While I wouldn’t necessarily agree with everything they say, I do think it helps clarify matters if we can avoid religious arguments!
I didn’t have any particular conception of ‘reasonableness’ in mind–I just meant something like ‘such as we could approve of’.
I find it difficult to regard any particular moral position as downright irrational. But like you, I want more consequentialism in my ethics than is provided by most deontological systems. So I wouldn’t be happy with anyone who argued that all abortions are wrong simply because they involve killing an innocent person period.
Very interesting documentary on channel 4 last night, It was alright in the 1970s
with a clip from the likely lads,fantasizing about being a headmaster,one guy summed it up correctly by saying,today that would get him on a register and even worse,attacked by a lynch mob!
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/it-was-alright-in-the-1970s/4od
I suspect that ice-cream man is more an aspect of the stereotype than a cliche in its own right. No idea where it came from, though.
Thanks for the mention 🙂
I wonder if it’s a compliment to be called a Strange Boy/Girl/Non-Binary….
I would have used Google Correlate for this if I could get it to load for me. It’d probably be easier to tease out correlations with the software than to try eyeballing them. However, I think I see something with “child sexual abuse” & “ice cream”
>I wonder if it’s a compliment to be called a Strange Boy/Girl/Non-Binary.
Absolutely 🙂
What’s it supposed to mean, though?
Ummm. I’m slightly puzzled by the question but I suppose it’s possible you are unfamiliar with the underlying reference, which may not apply in your part of the world.
All the major Anglophone countries, but not necessarily all the smaller ones in Britain’s former Empire, share a culture in which kids these days are warned by their parents from a very early early age against trusting strangers. The usual meaning of “stranger” is simply someone we do not know. At one time that would have meant someone from another village, or town, and a foreigner from abroad would certainly have been a stranger. The related French word for a foreigner is very similar: étranger.
But, of course, another main meaning of the word is as a synonym for odd or peculiar.
When British parents warn their kids against strangers the two meanings fuse together. Thus is created the figure of the Strange Man, who is both unknown (a stranger) and odd in a possibly dangerous way (strange). I’m not altogether sure whether American kids are warned against Strange Men or whether a different expression is used.
There is also the mythically dangerous figure of the bogeyman (or boogeyman in the US) who is used as a threat by parents when a child is naughty. He is a stranger, and certainly menacing in perhaps strange ways. As a mythical being, though, he may be no more human than elves or hobgoblins, whereas a Strange Man is not quite as strange as that: he is entirely human, but might well be dangerous nonetheless.
It is in this last sense that I used the expression Strange Boy, as an analogue of Strange Man: a bright boy with wonderful ideas except that these ideas might ultimately confuse and confound a less bright person who is seduced by their attractiveness.
Hope that captures it!
Ah. OK, I understand. No, I’ve not been warned against strangers in general since my community is small enough that no one is really a stranger.
Plus, I now see why you meant it as a compliment. Thank you 🙂
USians say Strange Man but the phrase doesn’t have the same universality and instant recognisability that it does in Britain. Often US kids will simply be warned against “strangers” or “anyone you don’t know”, but the implication of course is that the dangerous ones are men. Then there’s Good Touch Bad Touch, which I think was always a bit more popular in the US.
“USians”
LOL.
I’ve heard of “Good Touch; Bad Touch” though I don’t think anyone around here says that. It always seemed stupid and creepy to me. Isn’t any touch you don’t like a Bad Touch. Who gives strangers the right to presume that grabbing your arm is a Good Touch? This hits me particularly close to home because, due to autism, I freak out when strangers touch me anywhere.
Besides, I can never hear “Bad Touch” without thinking of The Bloodhound Gang.
USians as opposed to those people from the Americas but not from the US — like your good self, I gather. (But then, what about the United States of Mexico?)
Good Touch doesn’t actually mean any touch that feels good, of course. Bad Touch is typically defined as any touch on any part of the body that would be covered by a swimsuit. If you think about it, that means it’s OK for a little boy to have his chest and belly caressed but not for a little girl, however flat-chestedly prepubescent, because little girls typically wear one-piece swimsuits! And what about procedures at the doctor’s that a child dislikes and feels are Bad Touch? William Carlos Williams — paediatrician and general practitioner, poet, husband, father of two sons and lover of little girls and adult women both — wrote a very honest essay about such a situation, an essay which is often used in medical ethics classes: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html
>very honest essay
Yes, the honesty is very striking.
Does his GL side come out in his poetry at all? Presumably he could not be too explicit, as he was a paediatrician. However, he associated with the BL poet Allen Ginsberg and even wrote the introduction to Ginsberg’s Howl, so he was not that shy either.
Definitely. Three pretty open ones that come to mind are ‘Sympathetic Portrait of a Child’, ‘Youth and Beauty’ and ‘The Ogre’.
Here is ‘Sympathetic Portrait of a Child’ by William Carlos Williams. I’m posting higher up the thread so it’s readable.
The murderer’s little daughter
who is barely ten years old
jerks her shoulders
right and left
so as to catch a glimpse of me
without turning round.
Her skinny little arms
wrap themselves
this way then that
reversely about her body!
Nervously
she crushes her straw hat
about her eyes
and tilts her head
to deepen the shadow —
smiling excitedly!
As best as she can
she hides herself
in the full sunlight
her cordy legs writhing
beneath the little flowered dress
that leaves them bare
from mid-thigh to ankle —
Why has she chosen me
for the knifethat darts along her smile?
Well, that messed up the line-breaks a bit, but not too badly.
Here is a poem (not mine) that might clarify this.
http://www.uryourstory.org/index.php/poetry/96-children-follow-the-dwarfs
I think that perhaps Tom may be saying that you are the “Disordered Man who sings like a river.” He’ll correct me if I’m wrong.
“Disordered Man who sings like a river.”
It’s a fine poem, for sure, and I have nothing to correct!
I see. Thank you.
What font do you use? Why are all the poems saved as images?
The font is called “Purusa.” All of the poem files at my site are put in as images (jpg) because if I enter them in my Joomla program in as regular tex files (doc or whatever) they lose all their formatting (including font styes). Formatting tends to be important for poetry. Most programs would do this. WordPress (which is what Tom uses) would do the same. That’s why I can’t just post a poem here. All the lines automatically move to the left margin, etc.
I see. Thank you.
I’m thinking Tom’s query shows a hump and spike correlation of all three terms around 1990, at which point interest in ice cream trails off (maybe people start wondering where the ice cream man’s hands have just been when he serves them…).
Btw, James. You’re 16? Wow.
At least you can see his graph. WordPress keeps telling me the image does not exist. Maybe the ice-cream is a lie…?
And yes, I am 16. I take it that surprised you 🙂
As far as I can tell, I’m the only non-MAP who frequents this site.
James,
A non-MAP is an impossibility.
Linca
“A non-MAP is an impossibility.”
What? How so? If there are people who have no attraction to adults, it’s only reasonable to suggest there must be people who have no attraction to children. The former exists (unless you believe our host is a ghost) so the latter must as well. Plus, at the very least, all aromantic asexuals are non-MAPs.
WRT me specifically, ‘non-MAP’ may have been a poor choice of words. I am a minor and I feel some level of attraction to other people my age, but I don’t think that corresponds to what one means when they refer to MAPs. I’ve never felt any attraction to anyone more than 2 years younger than me and my preference is for people in their 20s. It’s not particularly reasonable to classify me as a MAP because, if you did, MAP would become a meaningless category, inhabited by almost everyone by default.
Also, I never stated or implied that there was anything wrong with being a paedophile. I’m not religious or an adult or white or short or neurotypical but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of these groups of people. I simply fail to fall within any of those categories.
You’d certainly be hard put to it to find someone, especially a man, who had absolutely no significant attraction to under-eighteens. I do remember, though, reading a post somewhere or other by a man who explained he was attracted to “boys 11-14 and women 20+”. Having just admitted a sexual attraction to little boys, he had no earthly reason to deny a sexual attraction to little girls in the same sentence, so we can assume he was being truthful. And since an attraction to boys 11-14 can certainly exist as a person’s sole attraction, so, presumably, can an attraction to women 20+: these attractions coexist in some people but they are not at all dependent on one another.
It appears that globally, the most commonly searched-for porn terms are ‘teen’ and, in second place, ‘milf’ (Mother I’d Like to Fuck). ‘College’ (US meaning: 18-22 age range) is also in the top ten, but so is ‘mature’. MILF actresses are, apparently, most often in their early and middle thirties. MAPs are probably (mildly) unusual not in the mere fact of being capable of sexual arousal to kids, which, as you say, is an extremely common capability, but in the strength of that arousal and the strength of the preference for kids.
A,
In each of us are many mansions. The reason: We needed them to become human. We need them to stay human. IMHO.
Linca
What do you mean by “mansions”?
James: that expression originally from the King James Version of the Bible: “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” (John 14:2) It’s one of the many KJV phrases we use all the time in English, typically without even recalling their origin. In newer translations “rooms” is substituted for “mansions”.
OK. Thank you. I’m just a bit confused as to his figurative meaning here. Is he referring to the variety of (personality) traits which compose human beings?
I think so, but I shouldn’t presume to answer for him. Am I right, Linca?
Yes A you are spot on. In each of us are many mansions, i.e., In my father’s house there are many mansions. Paraphrasing The King James Bible.
I will continue here to answer another one of James’ questions. My friend Dale even went to a General Assembly of Occupy Detroit to talk to them about money creation. When we take this power away from the banks and incorporate it into The Treasury we will be able to be on with creating a better world for us all. We will be removing the money power of The Calvinist Puritans.
My fingers are crossed that we get everyone here and Rind and Dale on the same page: A big task but when we get that accomplished we will be unstoppable. James and Tom or anyone as soon as you have some thoughts (good or bad) about what you find in “War, Peace, and Human Nature” let us all know. Make us work.
Linca
True enough :).
Bravo Linca!