Something to be said for that.

I read that story as creepy on several levels of which “sexual come-on” [as affecting adults] and “pedo” were only two. I found it more than a little creepy on the other levels I also noted above.

OTOH,all the material now exists in our societies for a freak-out worthy of the [I hope] apocryphal Brits who in the 1990s allegedly trashed a pediatrician’s office because of a mistaken understanding of the job title… I really hope that was pre-web fake news. But it rang just on the edge of possibly true for England or America in the 90s. So there you go.

I’d like to see a middle ground between the Satanist abuse witch hunters of the 80s and the porno chic culture of the 70s.

After all, sometimes there really is a pedo subculture. Or such as makes little difference. Some of the stuff in the Church was real. At one point a while ago some of the Belgian upper classes were caught in one. The BBC. Rotherham was real, although admittedly there were other issues involved in covering that up for so long.

Yep. No pedo experience myself at all. Only thing close was being in the market for day care at McMartin time, early 80′s, a few miles south of Santa Monica. A guy running a large day care operation said, “A parent accused one of our employees of sexual abuse. We let her go, of course.” And that CYA was supposed to sell us on their day care. While he’s talking, I’m looking around at the total chaos and extreme lack of privacy that goes with a hundred 2-4 year olds and thinking, “You weasel. You know there is zero chance of the accusation being true, but you bought it. I don’t want your sort watching my kids.” The experience may have been the trigger that made me, in the end, unsurprised the McMartin thing turned out to be a crazy mother and her Salem Witch fellows ruining lives nationwide.

BTW, we are due for another McMartin, what with the US’s demographic bump heading in to their 30′s. Also, some riff on another “decade of greed” as that bump starts paying the bills in earnest.

I know, right?

I don’t know what triggered that particular memory in conjunction with this post, but there was something at the back of my mind about the BS programming that early childhood education gives one, like the Disney line of “love nature” crap, and… That’s the half-remembered thing that came out. Took me awhile to track it down, but I eventually found the exact story I remember from about 74-75, when I was going to 4th and 5th grade in a small country school. At the time, that whole thing struck me as being really, really weird, and when I ran into the T.J. Bass SF novels where he’s talking about the Nebish philosophy of “going through life a little bit edible, in case you meet someone hungry…”, it really clicked with me that there was something profoundly wrong in all that Transactional Analysis crapola.

The grooming and pedophilia aspect didn’t really hit home with me until this recent re-reading of it all over again. I mean, I thought about it as being capable of leading to it, but I didn’t consider that it might have been deliberate. I suppose recent revelations about much of the goings-on surrounding our cultural “elite” awakens me to that probability. I’m suddenly very curious as to what was going on in the left-wing circle surrounding one Claude Stein…

How the hell did the adults of that era not see this? It’s perfectly couched grooming propaganda for pedos…

Socialist parable about the glories of primitive communism before power, hierarchy, and property?

Free love parable?

Paean to the glory of the fading hippie movement?

Early assault on Big Pharma as Felix suggests?

Or all of the above. And I couldn’t read it without the creepy pedo vibe either. Good lord.

I wouldn’t last a minute in realistic survival situations. Well, I exaggerate. If there is no immediate peril anyone can last a short while.

I have to be realistic. If I’m ever in immediate physical danger I’ll do my best, with whatever advice I can remember, but I’m probably done. It would probably have helped me to stay healthier and learn a few things, but I was never inclined [a character flaw] and it was never necessary [the enormous grace of the time and place in which I have lived].

I’d say I recognize there are all sorts of evil in the world, my recognition of them overlaps broadly if not entirely with the recognition of some others I have known, it recognizes that sometimes just competing interests and values are involved, conflict not being evil in and of itself for me, though its consequences can be and often are, sometimes the evil is the product of harsh circumstances of the evildoer, and so on.

The idea there is no evil, or that it’s always misunderstanding or the fact that the villains have suffered or were victims of bullying or social alienation or whatever, is poppycock.

On the other hand, the idea that opponents or enemies are always evil is nonsense. Conflict is more complicated than that. Sometimes they are opponents, sometimes they are enemies, sometimes they are enemies whose agendas are so opposed and irreconcilable no compromise is possible, and beyond even that sometimes they are evil.

Similarly, the idea one has to eliminate all evil is too much. To a degree, because Nietszche had a point about the abyss, though one can take that too far and end up in the tortured mind of George Lucas. More importantly, because I’m not convinced it is possible or desirable, and at the margins because the definition of evil is occasionally in dispute. The German Kaiser was not evil, though it was useful for war propaganda to so paint him. We need to always have a skeptical eye to our own stories. And lastly because we are not called to spend the lives and treasure of our nations to right all evils everywhere, only to leave ourselves vulnerable to the rise of new ones.

Where that leaves me wrt this book, I can’t say. I guess I had best order it and try to wade through it. It doesn’t sound promising. I suppose I start from the assumption there are a variety of things I’d call evil at home and abroad, and with well-maintained external and internal defences of the kind the US and similar countries had when I was young, it is possible for most of our peoples to live unaffected by them with minimal self-discipline.

Where I live, I am far more likely to fall on the ice walking home at night and die of exposure in a quiet part of a medium sized city than to be the victim of any crime, let alone a terrorist attack, for example. In my parents’ city, there has been a spike in shootings, some even with regular people as the bystander-victims. Still not that dangerous.

Sorry- rambling.

I repeated, and gave some credit to, but neither created nor fully endorsed that old saying about how you can’t fool an honest man. Rather, I have started to better appreciate the context and meanings of those words as they must have been meant, which I failed to do when young.

It is a useful lesson, though.

Your extension of it has about the same merit- it’s possible to take reasonable preparations and still be victim to a crime or, if a nation, a war. So it goes. I’m not sure complete elimination of these risks is possible. We’ve gone pretty far in the contemporary “West” to the point at which one has to do slightly stupid to very stupid things to expose oneself to the really serious risks, most of the time in most places. Alas, we have reached a point at which once obviously stupid choices are widely seen as part of our patrimony of unrestricted rights, and any attempt to point out any such stupidity, even with the caveat that the malefactor is still a criminal and should be punished, is “victim blaming”. That term could have a viable meaning, but it’s too expansive now.

I take it that you’ve got little familiarity with the typical BS the pedos throw at their prospective victims to prepare the ground, then. If you’ve ever had the disturbing experiences I’ve had with talking some of these people down, the precursors are there, framed quite innocuously. It’s a building progression; first lay the groundwork by constructing the framework of this whole “warm fuzzy” thing, conditioning the subject to have the mindset that they must always be emotionally giving, no matter what, and then gradually shift to sexualizing and trivializing the nature of it all–”Oh, all I what you to do is give me the warm fuzzy that you owe me…”.

I’m suddenly wondering if at least one of the abusers of the women I dealt with wasn’t actually familiar with this stuff, because that was exactly the technique the adult female abuser used when grooming her–A connection I just made today. Hadn’t thought about this material, for years.

The whole thing reads like a trippy dream thing aimed at a target demographic that seems improbably unreal — like stoned people with a mental age of 5 and a vocabulary age of 15.