From "A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy. Now He’s Banned From Campus. Stephen Kershnar, who teaches philosophy, is suing for the right to return to SUNY at Fredonia. The university defends its ban as necessary for safety" (NYT).
The co-host of Brain in a Vat, Mark Oppenheimer, is quoted saying that philosophers "say the wildest stuff and come up with the strangest cases, and any onlooker would go, 'But you people are all mad.' That’s what happened with Steve."
The former campus police chief, is quoted saying "If [Kershnar] were to return... the public’s disgust would extend to this campus, and we would again be viewed by many members of the public as sympathetic to Kershnar’s views and therefore at risk of violence." Ridiculous.
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You can listen to the Brain in a Vat episode here.
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88 comments:
He just let his mask slip...
It's just the Socratic method! to take the position that adults having sex with children isn't wrong seems... par for the intellectual course of modern philosophy.
Ironically, when Socrates was around, the Socratic method would have been to take the position that it is wrong.
So of all the crazy things you can learn at SUNY Fredonia, this is what sets people off?
Will Fredonia President Groucho Marx take action?
If so, the professor will surely be in the soup!
If you object to thought experiments concerns sex with underage children, you're obviously a Rightwing monster trying to impose your twisted view of morality on other people./s
Just out of curiosity, if 12-year-olds can consent to sex, can they sign legal contracts and quit school too? How about launching an Onlyfans site?
Allowing a Rightwing judge to come on a college campus and discuss originalism is so offensive that students have the right to disrupt the event, but objecting to a professor musing about "consensual" sex with minors is offensive?
A bunch of professors musing about states' rights is disturbing enough to drive a college educated grown woman to tears, but discussing sex with minors is not objectionable?
It seems like a well-presented hypothetical which is simply asking the participants to explain themselves. Biologically, it isn't inherently clear why it is wrong. There are many things deemed illegal, such as "claiming an election is stolen", that at face value don't seem wrong. So if it is unclear, can you argue why it is wrong? I can. The girl is taking on a far greater risk than she can understand at 12 years of age. The possibility that her consent is based on untruthful promises made by the adult male to share the risk is extremely high. If we changed the consensual agreement being made from one about sex to one about buying an expensive used car; doesn't the risk the 12-year-old is assuming become a bit more apparent? After all, if she becomes pregnant, she will be responsible for the fetus. An abortion could leave her sterile for life. Having the child will make her economically responsible for almost 2 decades. If she purchased the car, who would force her to live up to her end of the agreement if the car was a bad deal?
If you still think the professor is creepy, then try making your argument without accepting the professor's premise as true.
Now if the professor was posing to this thought experiment to actual 12 year old girls; then I would support his firing. Same if he was posing this thought experiment to encourage pedophiles. However, I don't think it is clear that either was happening.
I'll accept no arguments that suggests his teaching style is the same as allowing porn in elementary school libraries being read by porn actors. Same for arguments made by people who don't understand the professor's "crime" here is no different than Trump's advisors providing hypothetical legal advice.
If he had wanted to be provocative without raising hackles of the powers that be, he should've made it an adult male proposing to have sex with a willing 12-year-old boy.
While it would have been a more debatable premise had the imaginary adolescent been a bit older, the sexuality of 16 year olds is quite different from 12 year olds, this was hypothetical and seemed to be a genuine philisophical inquiry.
Authoritarian impulses tend to emenate from the Left on college campuses these days, and conservatives have inherited the mantle of free speech advocates. This responsibility is not negated when you find the speakers views abhorrent, in fact the test of a commitment to free speech is defending those you disagree most vehemently.
There is no actual victim here, just a philosophical inquiry. Conservative free speech advocates should come to the speakers defense and advocate him regaining his position.
"necessary for safety" What a crock of shit.
They aren’t 12, but the young women in Jane Austen are pretty young by our standards and they are making pretty big life decisions. I won’t even go into Joseph Smith or the Prophet Muhammad.
Susanna Gibson's lawyer husband would have sex with a 12-year-old girl and it would be videotaped. What's the problem here? The girl gave her "consent" just like when Nebraska Medicine got consent of the minor girls before they cut off their breasts.
One of the goals of the today's Left is the sexualization of children. According to one state senator, her own 12-year-old daughter can decide she is a boy and mom would sign a consent for a sex change operation. This is pure evil. And when conservatives tried to stop that in NE, the Left went crazy and filibustered every single bill. Thankfully the filibuster was beaten by one vote.
We, as a society, need to start drawing some bright lines and people who cross them are penalized in a big way.
The Left is insane. The Left is evil. The Left needs to be destroyed.
Kershnar is reminiscent of Princeton's Peter Singer, the annoying ethics know it all whose central error is the conceit that truth is most likely to be achieved by starting with a clean sheet of paper, and placing a high burden of proof upon those with conventional moral beliefs.
Socrates did something similar, and despite the wondrous fun he had, Athens decided after a while that it had enough of this Socrates fellow.
One of the Left's central rules is that if it feels good, do it.
In this hypo, the minor girl "consented." She wants to feel good. In the words of a NE state senator, "Kids know who they are."
Same deal with Susanna Gibson and her so-called husband. If it feels good, do it. And put it on video for all of eternity.
The sex tape of the Richmond pol and this hypo are of the same school. This is Leftism. This is what the Class of '68 gave to America.
What happened to the old “age of consent” thing?
Fredonia just hasn't been the same since Rufus T. Firefly was deposed.
Ripped from the headlines.
Doesn't this stuff happen all the time? (Don't tell me that some 12 y.o. girls aren't hot to trot with the right guy and/or for the right price.)
As someone else has observed here, nowadays the only kind of sex that is supposed to yuck us out is Old Man and Young Girl. All other combinations are perfectly cromulent and only bigots think otherwise.
It's wrong because you can't relate, in the sense of taking care of, to a 12 year old as other than a parent; and sex requires you relate as a husband, that kind of taking care of.
Stuff hooks into morality when it determines who you are by way of what you're called on to do.
It's arbitrary within the limits of ability to relate, so you can find quite a range with different conventions.
Pedophilia is forward-looking social progress, and, perhaps, a prelude to a Democratic reelection, with take a knee VP tumbling after.
#NoJudgment #NoLabels #BenniesForBabies
That said, all's fair in lust and abortion.
As the family genealogist, I can tell you that every single human being on the planet is descended from countless girls who began to have babies between 12 and 16 years of age. This seems to be Nature's way.
Just as with violence and thievery, we used to have a pretty solid consensus that the "civilized" way is better, but just as with violence and thievery, that consensus is cracking, due entirely to leftists in positions of influence and power who fancy themselves the moral superiors of all the rest of us.
Why do we allow such scum to rule over us? Why are they not cast into the wilderness at gunpoint, or dragged from their offices by a mob, horsewhipped until no skin remains on their body, and hanged from a lamppost? Nothing but the civilized, sexist, racist, white supremacist, homophobic, Eurocentric, prudish civilized moral sensibility that they scorn so smugly.
Two bits of advice from my grandfather seem pertinent:
- "Be careful what you wish for. You might get it."
- "Beware the fury of a patient man."
So the rationale for the ban is heckler’s veto?
Presumably there are those who question how “willingly” a girl of twelve could participate; but to do so would be a transphobic dog whistle.
"It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong"
I think it's obvious to him now.
Sometimes morality comes through philosophical musings about reasons (which usually take place in a vacuum of reality) but most of the time morality is a shared expression of a society saying this is how we choose to live as a society.
For him, that he doesn't know the history and physical/emotional/spiritual implications about why this is wrong, suggests he is either actually or willfully stupid. Both more because these are the kinds of things that get him invited onto podcasts.
A person has to be very ignorant about all we know about humanity to think there's no inherent reasons behind this, or and I think this is where the outrage comes, they know all of this, know it is a shared social standard, but disagree with the standard so they want to cause people to question the assumed standard.
He's shockingly ignorant about a wide range of other disciplines besides his own, he is actually stupid so doesn't get what is obvious to others, or he is intentionally in opposition but frames with smarty pants words and weaselly explanations so he can back out if there's any kind of pushback.
As to the anger, it's probably the same as child sexual abuse in general, the result of a partial archetype. The child is purely innocent, so the intervener is purely evil. Says psychiatrist Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, in an essay wondering where the anger comes from.
The true situation, he says, is that the child grows by taking increasing responsibility for what happens to it, indeed that grows into controlling stuff instead of being a victim. What age does that happen? All ages. An increasing lack of innocence.
The law draws a line but doesn't require anger.
Essay is in "From the Wrong Side: A Paradoxical Approach to Psychology"
A book I bought for the chapter on the blessings of violence.
Ethics. When can humans be reasonably expected to offer informed consent, and therefore bear the viable burden of responsibility and liability of their choices?
THIS is what it has ALL been heading to
“... Dr. Kershnar is a 'Socratic gadfly' who goes around questioning fundamental assumptions, often quite annoyingly, to try to get at a clearer understanding of morality and why something is or is not wrong....”
Dr. Kershnar reminds me of someone…
Anyone who has a "mind experiment" about pedophilia and how "Gosh, that young child really wants to have sex" is that "really wrong?" Is just trying to justify having sex with children.
Lets have this mind experiment at an Ivy league university:
What if a group of white want to segregate their town and have "separate but equal" and the blacks in the town agree with that. Is that really wrong?
Again, its the same old bullshit. WHen a leftist says he wants to "Challenge the way people think" or "Examine societal taboos and traditions and examine why they exist", its NEVER something the way the Left thinks and we never examine THEIR taboos or THEIR traditions.
Of all the Thought Experiment subjects in the world, he finds this one the most fascinating. Sure, buddy, it's all about the reaction. Sure it is.
Maybe Kershnar needs to do a little philosophizing about whether or not it's wise to just blurt out any and all stupid shit that swirling around between your ears.
Step one towards the goal of opening 12-year-old Pandora's box.
"Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl; imagine that she’s a willing participant... A very standard, a very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this."
Not at all. He can want what he likes. And she can want what she likes. It's when they take action on those wants that issues arise.
Why this shithole has "donors" is the real mystery here. Giving actual spendable money to criminal morons? Why?
Gadfly
The fly is not reasoning well just now. A man buzzes at its ears. This is enough to render it incapable of good advice. If I would have it find truth, I should chase away this animal which holds its reason in check and disquiets that intelligence which governs kingdoms.
- Lautreamont
Good. Fire them all. Every last one. Then private individuals can hire them, if they are so inclined. The public schools are arguably the very worst thing in a country full to overflowing with really terrible things.
If you violate the sensibilities of your community, there might be consequences. The dialog quoted, however, seems fair enough, but he could have approached it differently by being MORE Socratic and instead asking what exactly makes it wrong, and force the other side to answer rather than state he finds nothing wrong, per se.
It's hard to believe that any self-respecting adult would openly admit to being a professor in an American university these days. Their increasingly cult-like zealotry and goofy pet phrases ("speech is violence", "micro-aggressions", etc.) are jarring to those of us who taught in an earlier era of free speech and classic liberalism. No surprise then that many of us have gravitated to the right side of the spectrum since the left side not only no longer espouses those values but also no longer tolerates anyone who does.
Wrong thought... even for a discussion... on morality.
Kill the witch!
Shame, shame, shame SUNY.
We B Doomed.
I've skimmed a list of topics. Several sensitive (to those sensitive), most of them seem like interesting to pursue...
F*** SUNY
Seems like everyone missed 'lawsuits I hope will succeed' tag on this post.
I am not sure why she believes that, but it doesn't say a lot about people like Begley's reading comprehension to have missed it.
Pervert says "It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong..."
Well, of course it's not obvious to you, pervert.
One of the goals of the today's Left is the sexualization of children.
This is it. There's a wealthy pedophile what's fattened the wallets of the liberal elite. In exchange, Democrat strategists are challenged with softening the objections of the populace by including it as part of the Democrat platform...
This is why education costs an arm and a leg. This, and federal subsidies of progressive prices.
I wish people would stop going after people's jobs. How vicious.
The episode is reuploaded by an angry person on YouTube with the note
This fallacious pedophilia ideology needs to be exposed, which is why I reuploaded this video. Please don't report and/or delete. If we don't expose the contradictions of the pedophilia ideology, they will spread their ideology unopposed.
youtube
He offers a chat transcript so you can follow along as you stew.
It is a disgusting idea, but isn't part of academia and the value of freedom of speech to be able to discuss disgusting ideas? The idea that merely talking about the idea makes that professors presence on campus a threat to the physical safety of people is absurd and more than anyone else involved any administrator that gave that as a reason to ban him should be fired. It seems the decade or two of largely left-wing agitators spouting things like "Silence is Violence" or otherwise equating speech or lack thereof with violence has cudgeled administrator's into enacting idiotic ideas. I hope FIRE and this professor get in touch. I would be extremely disappointed in FIRE if FIRE decided to not help this professor. It would really undercut their legitimacy in my mind. This case reminds me a bit of Ward Churchill the Colorado professor who lost his job a bit after 9-11 in what I seem to remember as a backlash against him saying things like America deserved 9-11.
On an unrelated note, Woody Allen is still married to Soon-Yi.
Ah Fredonia. Every time my alma mater makes the news, it's this same pedophile professor. But it hasn't changed since Duck Soup.
Hail, Hail Freedonia!
"The true situation, he says, is that the child grows by taking increasing responsibility for what happens to it..."
Well, her brain is not fully developed, therefore she must rely on the adults who care for her to protect her from bad decisions that carry heavy consequences.. Maybe my point of view is overly poisoned by the fact that I personally know of a girl who was raped at thirteen and contracted herpes from it. If you can tell me that a twelve year old girl can comprehend what being infected with an incurable disease that will follow her her whole life means, well, you can't, it's a rhetorical question.
Nebraska Medicine got consent of the minor girls before they cut off their breasts.
Progressive liberalism is the slippery slope of religious establishment... human rites, Dreams of herr Mengele, diversity (i.e. class-disordered ideologies), political congruence, wars without borders, redistributive change, [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] immigration reform, conflation of logical domains, etc.
Laura Dern starred in a movie, "The Tale", based on the director/writer's real life experience. I encourage Kershnar to watch it as answer to his thought experiment. It's outstanding work by everyone involved, especially Dern and the girl who plays the younger version of her. It's too brutal for me to ever watch again, though.
Neutral: What motivates consent laws?
Activist: Why isn't sex with children equitable and inclusive? #NoJudgment #NoLabels
This was the path followed by Democrats to establish binary bigotry under the color of law.
Kershnar is about 15 years too early for this. Fifteen to twenty years from now it is likely that several federal courts will have ruled that laws that set age of consent above 12 or so are unconstitutional. The slope is slippery and getting steeper as time goes on.
Paul Valery's Socrates and his Physician is nice, an excerpt page is online here
doctor dealing with a difficult patient
esp see the last paragraph visible
The whole thing ought to be online but I don't see it.
While I share the visceral reaction to hearing such comments, I would be willing to listen to the whole thing and consider that it may have value as a thought exercise. I do think its important to ask questions even about such things. Its not hard to argue why it's bad and it's good to be able to clearly define why.
Hassayamper,
With all deference to your genealogical expertise, I doubt that there are many 12-year-olds in your or anyone's family tree, b/c its only quite recently that puberty (menarche) has happened so early. It's the same phenomenon by which "choirboys" in the 18th c. were often in their late teens, b/c their voices hadn't yet broken. A pre-pubertal girl who had sex, willing or unwilling, definitionally couldn't give birth to anyone.
It's easier for a parent to recognize why it would be a bad idea than it is for someone whose only knowledge of how a 12-year-old thinks is their memory of how they thought at that age. And, to be fair, perhaps the students he associated with at the school did not show any greater ability for decision making and thinking about long-term consequences than the average 12-year-old. No one is going to tell them not to have sex with an adult. (What did he mean by "adult"? 16 or 57 or does it not matter?)
For someone whose job it is to think about stuff, he should have thought of a way to phrase the problem. Questions work better than statements.
Should taxpayers support low hanging fruit? Defending pedophelia is an honored academic exercise, but he thinks and writes about constantly. This isn't some random classroom exercise for him. So there's more to this story, and more to his interest than just practicing the Socratic Method. It's also fair to say that he's seeking this response. Is "but he's a philosopher" enough of an excuse for bothering to retain a professor whose research interest is defending the morality of pedophilia over and over? I've heard some of his defenses. He's obsessed with this topic. His approach is more fetishistic than pedagogical. He's written extensively about screwing children.
Get back to me when he burns a Koran, or suggests that the 12-year old should be a minority because they "mature faster." Then we'll see how far the liberal outrage at his suspension extends.
Meanwhile, despite the hysteria in the comment threads, it is a conservative free-speech group, FIRE, that is representing him.
Dr. Kershnar seems to assume that morality exists outside of human society and can be judged in universal terms. Is there really anything wrong with cannibalism and human sacrifice? They have all been accepted in some cultures. One might ask instead if a culture benefits from its moral assumptions, which at least has the virtue of judging its utility. In evolution, biological and social, utility is what matters.
An interesting question that leads to other interesting questions: Is it ever proper to give a man who had sex with a twelve year old girl an honorary Oscar and a standing ovation? Some ambiguities involved. It was a long time ago. How about is it ever proper to give a man who had anal sex with a drugged thirteen year old an Oscar and a standing ovation? Again we're perhaps judging someone's actions yesterday through the prism of today's glasses. Here's a question more current: Is it ever proper to cut off the primary or secondary sex organs of a willing minor?....These are difficult questions with many paradoxes. Should you ever trust people without moral insights to instruct you on how to behave morally?
An interesting question that leads to other interesting questions: Is it ever proper to give a man who had sex with a twelve year old girl an honorary Oscar and a standing ovation? Some ambiguities involved. It was a long time ago. How about is it ever proper to give a man who had anal sex with a drugged thirteen year old an Oscar and a standing ovation? Again we're perhaps judging someone's actions yesterday through the prism of today's glasses. Here's a question more current: Is it ever proper to cut off the primary or secondary sex organs of a willing minor?....These are difficult questions with many paradoxes. Should you ever trust people without moral insights to instruct you on how to behave morally?
“One of the Left's central rules is that if it feels good, do it. “
What bullshit. It is apparent you don’t know anyone on the left and have imagined what an average person on the left thinks. You’re an attorney, supposedly intelligent , why do you say such stupid things?
Is is accurate to say he is behaving like a Socratic gadfly? Socrates was more prone to chase people down in the agora, get them to say what they took to be the case, and then led them to re-consider. Here it looks more like Kerchnar standing on a soapbox, making a provocative claim that enshrines the notion that apparent willingness on the part of a 12 year old girl to have sex with an adult male should be taken as epistemically certain consent, and putting a sign around his neck like Steve Crowder that says “change my mind” and slapping on a smug smile (again, like Steve Crowder).
A Socratic gladly might ask, “Is something morally wrong, just because it is viscerally disgusting and repellent to the nth degree?”, and go from there. Socrates might venture to de-couple viscerally disgusting and morally wrong by finding examples of acts that are viscerally disgusting, that are not morally wrong. Etc. And then say something like “So we’re agreed that the mere fact that something is extremely disgusting and repellent doesn’t mean that it is morally wrong?” You can imagine getting most people to agree with that. Then for questions like having sex with 12 year olds, the Socratic questioner would go on to say, “In this case, then, find a reason beyond the fact that it is disgusting to the nth degree to establish that it’s morally wrong, because you’ve just agreed that disgust and moral wrongness can be decoupled.” Many people would then find it relatively easy to advance non-disgust reasons as to why they think and adult man having sex with an apparently willing 12 year old is wrong — although since it’s not apparent to Kerschnar that this IS wrong, he might not help with that argument.
I am put in mind of Crime and Punishment. The trick in the current case is that both parties agree. The counter argument is that a young child cannot understand the consequences of their choices, and consequently their agreement does not suffice to bless the act.
I'm inclined to give the philosophy professor the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he was challenging his students to justify their inherent belief that it is "wrong;" perhaps they gain some insight into why "societal mores" exist and are quite often codified as laws.
But I'm a little disappointed that nobody else immediately thought of this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Td67kYY9mdQ
A Brain In A Vat is aptly named for this. A brain alive in a vat would be completely cut off from all sensory input. A brain in that condition start to invent or hallucinate some sort of reality that would get weirder over time probably resulting in insanity. Which is what this is. Cut off from reality it goes insane. To a lesser or rather slower rate, so do the woke with it's willful denial of reality. There is a concept called in the public interest as the basis of having a legal system and government and that derives commonly held, indeed near universally held beliefs and and grounded in reality.
Choices are often revealing. Of all of the societal or civilization norms the professor could challenge in a dialogue, he choose the prohibition against sex with children. Hmm.
Dr. Kershnar absolutely had the right to make those arguments. Everyone else, inducing his employer, has the right to reject those remarks. No one has the obligation to accept, defend, or reimburse that speech.
The best thing Law can do here is step back and let (non-violent) consequences happen.
“ I'm inclined to give the philosophy professor the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he was challenging his students …”
Yeah, SUNY Fredonia is the epicenter of elevated Socratic teaching.
Mary Beth asks a question about age differentials: how is "adult" defined? "16 or 57 or does it not matter?"
Let's thought-experiment some more.
70 y.o. guy and 12 y.o. girl? Right out, for most people.
60 and 13?
50 and 14?
40 and 15?
30 and 16?
20 and 17?
No doubt societies will draw lines and impose punishments despite the VAST influence of pervy philosophy profs on modern America.
Next Up: How "protecting little girls" has contributed to the growth of the American Imperial War Machine since the 1890s.
"Blogger Tina Trent said...
Meanwhile, despite the hysteria in the comment threads, it is a conservative free-speech group, FIRE, that is representing him."
FIRE is not a conservative group. The people who head FIRE are what we used to call liberals because they believe in free speech. It only seems that FIRE is a conservative organization because of the fact that the vast majority or violations of free speech by universities is done to conservatives. Harvey Silverglate, the co-founder of FIRE is not a conservative and neither is the current head of FIRE Greg Lukianoff. I have been a longtime supporter of FIRE and I have met and spoken with Greg a number of times. I can assure you he is not a conservative.
I'd like to know how long the podcast has been inviting these thought experiments, and what others have put forward. If this was an early choice that would seem worse than if there had been dozens, and he was trying to keep up with the philosopher joneses.
If you read the whole quote from him you'd certainly want him removed from any contact with minors. Or anyone else.
@Michelle Dulak Thomson:
I have some knowledge of this topic at a professional level. Menarche in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies was very young, often 11 or even less. In the Middle Ages it was at 12-15. Plenty of 13 year old girls gave birth in those times, I assure you. It was only in the days of the Industrial wRevolution, when urban squalor, rickets, and malnutrition became pervasive, that it typically occurred after 15. In recent years we are starting to see it go back down to 11-12. It’s tempting to blame hormones in the water (turning the frogs gay!) but it more likely relates to abundant high-calorie, high-protein, iron and vitamin-rich foods from an early age.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/
I'm confused. So one is not allowed to say that an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old is not obviously wrong, but one is also not allowed to say that altering the genitals of 12-year-olds is obviously wrong.
so, the "doctor" was just trying to figure out 'why something is or is not wrong'.
Well.. THERE YOU GO! it's WRONG to make the proposition he did.. Because it GETS YOU FIRED!
the 'doctor' actually did a GREAT JOB of showing WHY and HOW this is The WRONG THING TO SAY
How old was Mary when she was impregnated by God?
Religious (i.e. behavioral protocol or model) instruction. Only God, gods, mortal gods, or a professor is required.
Thank you Richard. Its nice to know there are some principled liberals out there.
But pragmatically, is it possible to oppose CRT, diversity regimes, and the assault on conservative academicians without, in some way, behaving like a political conservative, no matter whom it is that you identify with electorally?
I do not feel as if I have altered my ideology, worldview or values, save on a single subject, since the time when I identified as a Blue Dog Democrat. But to the world around me, I wandered from barely acceptable centrism to paleo conservatism.
Some people are born conservative, some choose conservatism, and some have conservatism thrust on them.
Bravo Leslie Graves.
I'd add to the Socratic exercise a few transcripts from testimony by groomed and raped children. Too real? Too subjective? Says who? The guy with tenure?
Here's where reality meets the formation of law, something Kershnar has been pretending to study for decades. Raped children are frequently so worried about causing harm to their families by speaking up that they catatonically endure repeated rapes. Often they do so because they believe they are protecting their siblings by being the subject of the rapist's sexual appetite. And often their failure to report the criminal is then used against them in the courtroom. Such stoic dignity, interspersed with descriptions of the violations themselves, are more than most people can handle, and such realities and the laws we have created to deal with them are certainly not part of this asshole's classroom shtick.
He argues that if children can't understand consent, they might be giving it. The Times article does not discuss this.
One of the reasons we as a society are still letting child rapists walk free (prosecutors and judges frequently just ignore minimum mandatory laws) is because most people are so repulsed by the subject that they seek comfort in looking for any excuse to avoid seeing and naming the worst of human behavior for what it is. Evolutionary biologists and philosophers sophistically exploit these tendencies. An interesting Socratic exercise for them would be to examine their own intellectual choices with the same detachment. Do all those hours watching bonobos masturbate blinker rational judgement?
From what I've seen of Kershnar's work, discussing child rape is a fetish for him, more like the male shop teacher who wears fake size Z breasts, insists they're real, and insists that everyone else accept his delusion.
Academic like Kershnar creates a set of classroom rules in which they control the flow of information and choose the accepted arguments. Such exercises aren't conducted as free speech; they aren't "critical thinking": they demand suspension of belief and reality, and submission to the professor from the outset. Kershnar's thought experiments actually underscore the fatal flaw in academic " free speech": is speech ever really free when that freedom only extends to one person (or fewer) in the room, the tenured professor class?
We are witnessing the bonfire of some vanities here.
"thought experiments", demand wiping clean all of history. The is a lousy structure of any experiment.
The "experiment" takes you to humans as animals. Demands you ignore all human evolution.
This Philosopher King has never heard of Chesterton's Fence.
It's really not much of an experiment, serves no purpose...a metaphor for college education?
Socratic method is it? Fine. Let's convene a jury of 100 or so ordinary people; let the Professor explain himself for an hour or so; then let the jury vote on drinking the hemlock.
It would be GREAT pay-per-view TV. The first hour would be pretty boring but that would just help the curve of the drama. The last 10 minutes would be a treat.
In "Romeo and Juliet," Juliet is 13. Watching that play, we are entranced by her sexual expression and her — childish?! — choice of Romeo (who is 16). Why aren't we horrified and disgusted (especially when actual adults facilitate their coming together?
Shakespeare? The parents? Expected viability?
Perhaps we need to reassess our measure of maturity, our discernment of informed consent. Feminists preached to us about superior exploitation, but then an intern took a knee to a president, a lawyer to a mayor, a boy to a groomer.
Althouse, I used to see R&J as a tragedy, with love the cause of death, but after raising my own kids I now see it as a dark comedy, just full of laughs at how stupid kids are, and how stupid adults are about kids. Sort of like my changing views of Apocalypse Now, which is also a great comedy.
--- There are many things deemed illegal, such as "claiming an election is stolen", that at face value don't seem wrong. [Leland]
I agree. And in this case, it is not some all-encompassing principle by which such a concrete example can be decided. The fact is, there is no taboo for which there is not an exception. Just a fact of life we must deal with, in my opinion. There are probably numerous cases in which the 12-year-old girl is in fact more mature than the adult male who lusts for her. Numerous, as in millions, IMO. It was certainly true at various moments in Lolita, just to take a flawed example.
--- Will Fredonia President Groucho Marx take action?
If so, the professor will surely be in the soup! {Joe Smith]
LOL, good ones! Fredonia, who could avoid the thought?!
Cannibalism? See Piers Paul Read, "Alive."
Incest? Genesis 19.
Probably these examples were considered above; apologies if redundant.
---In "Romeo and Juliet," Juliet is 13. Watching that play, we are entranced by her sexual expression and her — childish?! — choice of Romeo (who is 16). Why aren't we horrified and disgusted (especially when actual adults facilitate their coming together? [AA]
Because we are accepting the action within the bounds of our suspension-of-disbelief regarding a play's storyline and fictions?
But also because we understand that Shakespeare is getting at human emotion AND sexuality with a great deal of accuracy and honesty. Before everything was regulated for the perfection of civilization, and the elimination of risk, they lived in some ways much more freely than we do.
Interesting litmus test.
How do you respond, encountering this sort of discussion? What do you do?
Reframe the issue: Say you're an American soldier. You find your indigenous allies indulging in local custom, raping a boy about the age of 12. What do you do? Do you ignore it? Report it? Shoot the participants? How does your chain of command react, and how do you react to their response?
This isn't just an academic exercise. I have friends who were in that identical circumstance, real-life, at several levels of rank and life-experience. Some still have PTSD resulting from it.
Hell, I walked in on senior KATUSA soldiers sodomizing a newly-arrived KATUSA. Ordered the surly bastards to stop, got the ROK liaison to come down and deal with it. Nothing was done, in the end: Political connections on the part of the abusers. Did my best; still wasn't enough. Was told by my bosses "Hey, local custom, not our business..."
I'm still not OK with that, decades on.
So, how do you parse the "willing 12 year old" thing?
I am not sure I know, but I do know that whatever adult in that situation does or says had better be an emphatic "NO!", or I'm going to follow my "local custom" and do what's necessary.
That said, the increasing sexualization of the young in this culture is getting pretty damn disturbing. As in "Waiting for the fist of an angry righteous God" disturbing. I remember the first time I saw them advertising thong panties for pre-teens, and was like "Surely, this is a joke... Right? Right...?"
During the Renaissance, society had not yet developed modern concepts of childhood. The chivalrous tradition also still held force, so expressions of love were not reducible to lust. People died frequently at 30, and women younger in childbirth. Recorded marriage was confined largely to the upper classes, and it was a practice that involved joining of families, with major political and social consequences.
So, no comparison.
The guy who taught Ancient and Byzantine history at MSU--a superb old-fashioned ham of a lecturer--used to relish telling about the Assyrians, who swept through all the lands "dishonoring maidens and boys." Likewise the great Eurasian conquerors that succeeded them, at least down to the Ottoman Turks.
Good times. He got busted for associating with Kitty Pron a few years later, and was heard of no more.
Hassayamper said...
As the family genealogist, I can tell you that every single human being on the planet is descended from countless girls who began to have babies between 12 and 16 years of age. This seems to be Nature's way.
If you go far back that may be true for everyone.
In my ancestry going directly back for as many generations as I can there is exactly one first birth before age 21- my paternal grandfather- my maternal great-grandmother was 16 - by a month or two- when she gave birth "prematurely" since she had been married only 4 or 5 months. My great-grandfather was only 14 years older (if you don't see sarcasm in the 14 check your sarcasm meter) then her, 10 years by all US records. He was born in England. There is DNA evidence he may have had 3 other children- not with her, and with 3 different women at that. Not all our ancestors were saints... I suspect he was told he was getting married to her-- with a very serious "or else" attached.
My ancestry is mostly from people West of the Hajnal Line...
Now in my extended tree I can find a few marriages and births before age 18. Not nearly as many as people would think- and most of them are in the 1950-present time range. Quite a few 16 year olds marrying in Texas in particular.
I used to think that the 1600's to modern times was chock full of teens giving birth. Not so much. First off- a man didn't get married (generally) until he could support a family. And most of the time it would be to a woman close to his age. There was no government supported social safety net.
Another surprising thing- many many first births were "premature", so to say. The closer to the frontier, the more likely this happened. Makes sense. For a family- you need children. If after a while the woman wasn't pregnant while "courting" they'd drift apart, then try again with someone else.
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