DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

We saw this happen with racism. As long as I’ve been alive, it’s been bad to be racist in America. But over the decades, the minimum definition of racism went from something like “hating people on account of their race” to “having a private preference for one’s own group over others” to “supporting policies that have a disparate impact on a protected minority” to “not actively struggling to make yourself antiracist.”

Nobody ever wanted to be the guy to stand up and say we’re overrating the problem of racism, or that given its power we should define this word very narrowly. As a result, we got the madness of the Great Awokening throughout the 2010s, culminating in the Summer of Floyd and the events of the next year or two before things subsided and the backlash kicked in.

We see something similar happening with the concept of pedophilia. In recent days, I’ve been arguing that it is of course ridiculous to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile, and a lot of responses are along the lines of “you may be technically right but why die on this hill.” I’m convinced, however, that these distinctions are quite important.

He is absolutely correct. Pedophiles are interested in pre-pubescenty children. Ephebophiles, on the other hand, are interested in post-pubescent adolescents below the (sometimes arbitrary) legal age of consent. That’s why the age of consent was as low as 16 i some states and even 14 in others. (You can look it up)

But nobody cares about such distinctions any more, ore even any distinctions at all. What matters is having a rhetorical stick with which to beat the people you don’t like.

Feh.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2025 at 16:00 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.