The Pedo Bear strike

So? It's a journal of MEDICAL SCIENCE not a political rag. Everything non-medical is not worth thinking about when it comes to the Lancet. You don't get it because you want to hear some editorial about the current political climate, you get it because you want to keep up to date on new medical breakthroughs.

The fact is though that they still have more credibility than you ever will.

It a matter of ‘cred’.  The Lancet has a certain amount of ‘cred’ due to their history but that does not mean that everything they publish is true and factual.   Like any other magazine, professional or otherwise, the stories and articles are submitted by independent authors.  The Lancet does a good job of vetting submissions but they have had to retract and amend articles due to errors, new data and outright fraud.  The fact that ANY publication or person has credibility does not excuse or give them a pass from scrutiny.   The  ‘cred’ may give one an initial sense of believability and trust but does not mean one is immune to review and verification.
 
But you are absolutely wrong that Aardvark or most of the other posters here have less ‘cred’ than the Lancet which has a proven history of publishing false, inaccurate and misleading articles.  This does not even include their editorial statements, conclusions and “recommendations” which are notably elitist, socialist and give little concern over individual freedoms and liberty.     On the other hand, most of the veteran posters here (excluding the trolls) have a history of being truthful in their posting and are willing to give links to back up their fact based comments.   They also are very diligent in highlighting their ‘opinions’ as opposed to ‘facts’ used to support their arguments.   

It a matter of ‘cred’.  The Lancet has a certain amount of ‘cred’ due to their history but that does not mean that everything they publish is true and factual.

I think that Scientific American has a lot of credibility on scientific subjects. But I also think that they've waded into politics on occasion, and if they run an article saying that missile defense system X is going to escalate the arms race and is therefore a Bad Thing, I see no reason not to take that with a very big grain of salt.

In some quarters, at least, while jingoistic patriotism counts as a "political opinion", and thus has no place in a "non-political" publication, pacifism is viewed as an expression of a universal human aspiration, and thus is not to be treated as the expression of a partisan view. There has been a big cultural brainwashing job going on in the colleges and universities of the Free World for many decades, with the result that among many members of the "elite", it seems simply bizarre to denounce Communism in the same unsparing manner that one would denounce Nazism, and, as a corollary of that, which remains significant even after the downfall of Russia (but not China), accepting America unhesitatingly as the champion of Good against Evil (in the form, at present, of al-Qaeda rather than the Reds) - freedom against tyranny, liberty against slavery - just doesn't come naturally to them.

I would be more inclined to believe a report of more civilian casualties than previously estimated in Iraq if it came from people who were likely to have struggled mightily against their pre-existing political convictions in order to reach such a conclusion.

Funny because I've heard from fairly credible folk that Scientific American isn't worth the paper it is printed on.

I think that Scientific American has a lot of credibility on scientific subjects. But I also think that they've waded into politics on occasion, and if they run an article saying that missile defense system X is going to escalate the arms race and is therefore a Bad Thing, I see no reason not to take that with a very big grain of salt.

A grain is sixty-five milligrams (or so), no matter whose tail you're salting.  Even on scientific subjects, however, Scientific American has published some real howlers.  Gotta be expected in any publication that tries to be "bleeding edge."  The publishers and editors of Scientific American want their rag to grab eyeballs, and they do it by going for the most attention-gettingly sensationalistic material they can assemble.  

That they're not quite down to the level of The National Enquirer is only because they want to maintain the image of credibility.  Note that the word is "image."  Real scientific integrity? Not at the expense of circulation, "impact factor," or the management's prevailing political prejudices.

In some quarters, at least, while jingoistic patriotism counts as a "political opinion", and thus has no place in a "non-political" publication, pacifism is viewed as an expression of a universal human aspiration, and thus is not to be treated as the expression of a partisan view.

Viewed by whom? My personal position anent pacifism draws upon Keith Laumer's Retief's War: "Ain't nobody as peaceful as a dead trouble-maker."

There has been a big cultural brainwashing job going on in the colleges and universities of the Free World for many decades, with the result that among many members of the "elite", it seems simply bizarre to denounce Communism in the same unsparing manner that one would denounce Nazism, and, as a corollary of that, which remains significant even after the downfall of Russia (but not China), accepting America unhesitatingly as the champion of Good against Evil (in the form, at present, of al-Qaeda rather than the Reds) - freedom against tyranny, liberty against slavery - just doesn't come naturally to them.

I would be more inclined to believe a report of more civilian casualties than previously estimated in Iraq if it came from people who were likely to have struggled mightily against their pre-existing political convictions in order to reach such a conclusion.

I'm disinclined to credit the people running the government of these United States as "Good."  Certainly "less bad" than their more overtly thieving, enslaving, and murdering colleagues in Pyongyang, Tehran, Tripoli, Damascus, and some cave in Waziristan, but letting the folks in Mordor-on-the-Potomac claim a pass just because they're careful to show clean hands after perpetrating violent homicide is pretty stupid.

I'm not anti-U.S.  But I'm sure as hell anti-U.S. government.  It's as much an error to mistake the politicians for the polity as it is to assume that a person afflicted with a humongous hookworm infestation is a nematode.  

I love to come comment the great EFT comics, but when a patronizing, condescending clown playing the internet gurus insult your intelligence ... I send him fracking off.

I enjoy some off-topic chat, but mighty-walls-of-text written in the condescending self-righteous tone don't interest me ... responding is only feeding the psychotic behaviour.

I'm sure you don't appreciate either the Libertarian/moron standard ''OMG You are a statist COnservative'' monster smear failed as intellectualism ... best answer is to send him fracking off.

Later on, we see sams whine:

Do I really have to respond to this massive straw-man and paternalist condescension ?

...and then whimper:

I don't any label confirmation nonsense or nor I feel the need to respond to a clown behind his computer calling me ''a Authoritarian Conservative normative'' monster or whatever ... I come to comment about the comic, all else is BS especially if it is on sanctimonious tone.

In a later post, sams informs that he (she?) is alien to these United States, and dwells somewhere in Africa. 

This thread having been started by sams to address the supposed "pedophilia" involved in the kidnapping and threatened gang-rape of a 12-year-old Belter female (which stretches the definition of pedophilia way to hell out of shape, 'cause normal, healthy 12-year-old females in the Belt as depicted would tend reliably to be nubile if not of full adult stature, personifying the concept of "jailbait"), for this crazy person to make sputtering noises about how the posts I've contributed to discuss the moral agency of children and their abilities to emancipate themselves - and participate in consensual sexual activities, if they wish - are in any way "off-topic" is either hypocritical or insane.

Having gotten to know sams adequately in the past few days, I'm gonna go with "insane."

This being a venue on the Web, and with nothing but reasoned argument to offer in any exchange of ideas, I've striven here to present the facts of reality as lucidly and explicitly as I can manage.  sams, on the other hand....

Well, sams is obviously insane.  Whether in Africa or sitting in some fundamentalist Protestant clapboard church in Appalachia, what sams is regurgitating on the subject of individual human rights (and even a child in the first decade of life is a human being and an individual distinctly separate from his/her parents) is entirely in the social/traditionalistic "conservative" line of political authoritarianism. 

It obviously irritates the hell out of sams that I should state this obvious fact, though why he gripes about it I can only speculate.  Probably because sams is insane. Insane people don't think or speak or act logically. 

In the discussion of conditions on Ceres and in the Belt culture as the authors of Escape From Terra (which sams claims to enjoy, though why that should be - sams being the typification of a mundane cement-head if ever there was one - I've got not the first idea) have thus far depicted, there is no reason why human beings below whatever arbitrary "age of consent" beloved of sams and his fellow social/traditionalist "conservative" authoritarians want to impose would not become sexually active according to their capacities and preferences, with age-peers or with elders, as long as no violations of the Zero Aggression Principle (ZAP) were involved. 

With regard to arguments about how "intense" sexual relationships might become (because such "intensity" is not a universal or by any means a necessary part of sexual activity; refer again to the expression "a roll in the hay") in the effort to "protect" children and adolescents out of the exercise of their libidinal capacities, it is flatly impossible to prevent intensity from developing in the lives of these youngsters by criminalizing their sexuality. 

Infatuations ("crushes") are commonplace throughout childhood, including not only erotic limerences but also emotional fixations that can be - you should pardon the expression - intense as all get-out. Seldom do they last, and when they go through perturbations and eventually break up, the adverse responses of the persons participating (no matter what their ages) are commonly quite stormy, whether sexual activity had been involved or not.   

So what?  Who the hell thinks that this is not a normal and expected part of emotional and intellectual maturation?  Or, indeed, that it doesn't go on throughout life? 

I suspect that sams and his social/traditionalist "conservative" co-religionists are not only insane and stupid but also tragically incapable of honestly considering the real nature of human thought and emotion.  If they've had any responsibility in the nurture of children, they've not only done a thoroughly crappy job of it but they're blind to just how crappy a job they did.  Or are presently doing. 

I've only been reading the current medical periodicals for about thirty-five years now, and even in that brief period I've personally read a helluva lot of stuff that was presented with deliberate duplicity (not to mention a little bit of honest error), and it's been in The Lancet and JAMA and the BMJ and The New England Journal of Medicine and all over the rest of the "gold standard" peer-reviewed plenum.

That's a good point. What I've noticed from medical researchers who were not reporting tests of new pharmaceuticals seemed to me to be a whole lot of honest error. They thought they knew the truth, ad they got results which were compatible with what they already believed, and they published their results as if providing proof for their claims.

It was almost always easier for me to think they were kind of stupid, than deceitful. And I think part of the reason was that I didn't really have any skin in the game, and they did. I could look at research papers, and the papers those used as background, and so on, and see the rickety belief structures that were built up on inadequate evidence. But actual MDs, whose patients' lives depended on them being right, wanted intensely to believe that their training was correct and that they really truly knew what they were doing. I would have had nightmares if I had to guess at how to save particular patients who depended on me, knowing the tenuous web of assumptions the theory was based on.

So it wasn't surprising that the MDs were always sure they were right. And when a statistician told an MD that his data did not actually show what he claimed it did, what did he do? Of course, usually he got a second opinion. It wasn't uncommon for an MD to go down the row of offices, looking for a statistician who would give him the answer he wanted. And when the statisticians thwarted the dean of the medical school one time too many, he hired his own statisticians....

I found the epidemiologists generally better. Since so much of what they did was collect and interpret data, rather than medical treatment, it was a bigger part of their skillset.

Do I really have to respond to this massive straw-man and paternalist condescension ?

...(i.e., my dispassionately reasoned lucidly presented analysis of human nature with regard to both economic functions and sexual mores in the AnCap society characterized in Escape From Terra, wherein sams demonstrates no "straw man" fallacy whatsoever) we have:

Absolutely not. You have the right to not respond to anything you prefer to ignore. You have no obligation to respond to anybody.
(...)
People who think they should respond or must respond are troll-bait.

If a troll comes along and enrages you, and you respond to him and he enrages you more, and you keep coming back trying to prove to his satisfaction that you are better than him, in a way it is his fault for picking on you. But it is also your responsibility for being somebody who is easily trolled.

If somebody doesn't like you on the Internet, you have no obligation to make friends with him or defeat him. http://xkcd.com/386/

In general, when somebody on the internet says you are insane, he is only being rude. "Insane" on the internet basicly means "says things that don't make sense to me". In person, insane also includes "does things that don't make sense to me". The assumption is that if I don't understand it, it must be crazy.

I beg to differ.  When I describe sams as insane, I mean that his writings on this subject - the involvement of children in sexual activities (copulative or non-copulative), adult-child sexual relationships, pedophilia, and so forth - make no sense to anybody.  They have no support in objective reality, but spring entirely from sams' suppositions that the traditions and other usages he accepts without critical thought must be received without question despite contrary evidence which has undergone scrupulous verification and is appreciable by any honest person reading here, no matter how reluctant such a person might be to admit that understanding. 

Thus sams' emotional response to a subject that's really about as much a "moral" question as whether or not someone scratches when it itches.  In sams we find a disputant who typifies the presently prevailing idiocies about human sexuality, according the whole spectrum of lust - from flirtation through obsessive "sex addict" fixation - so goddam much psychological and emotional loading that he really can't seem to think or write reasonably about it. 

This is psychiatrically dysfunctional, right?  sams is insane not because he doesn't make sense to me but because he doesn't make sense - heck, he can't make sense - in this context at all.  Like the aichmophobe who can't even think about a butter knife without breaking into a cold sweat, sams is incapable of participating in a reasonable discussion of the subject at hand. 

His other claims about you do make a kind of sense. You have consistently taken the stand that the ways  our (sort of anglo-saxon US) customs have developed are workable and good, and that alternatives are probably not workable and bad. Most of the people here assume that coercion is bad in principle, and that all of our customs that involve coercing people are bad because of that, and that they can successfully be replaced by new customs that do not involve coercion except in response to prior coercion. (With a few exceptions or gray areas when you perceive threats of coercion.)

Can we create a noncoercive society? I'm reasonably sure it's possible, and I'm not certain people will get it right the first try. There are surely lots of things that don't work, some of them for reasons we will not understand ahead of time. Some for reasons we may never understand. Some things just don't work. So it may take time to develop whole societies that don't do coercion at all. We have a start with Quakers and Amish etc who already try to live noncoercively inside a deeply coercive society which possibly might be doing their dirty work for them, or might be just causing them problems.

Our old customs give us the results we have now. They have survived to this point, and it's an open question whether they can survive our new conditions. They do have a track record. Not great in my opinion, but there are survivors, which is better than some alternatives. Would it be worth it to look for something better? I say yes, and also it's important to keep the old ways going for a good long time in case there's something wrong with the particular choices we make when we create alternatives.

When you say the old ways are as good as it gets, of course people here will tend to get upset. I hope they will argue with you while it's fun for them, and quit before it stops being fun.

If it turns into a long argument where you don't have fun, and the other guy doesn't have fun, which one is the troll?

I think it reliable to conclude that sams' purpose in this forum is in substantial part to assert the supremacy of the out-of-date software on which his brain is running, the traditionalist "conservative" blank-out substitute for honest morality by way of which sams and his co-religionists evade acknowledgement of the criminality of their aggressively vicious interferences in the lives of their fellow human beings.

If we do not hear further from sams in this thread or on this subject, it won't be because sams is no longer having "fun" here, but because sams has been targeted accurately, cannot survive under such discernment, and must flee to preserve his fragile and diseased sense of self. 

What I've noticed from medical researchers who were not reporting tests of new pharmaceuticals seemed to me to be a whole lot of honest error. They thought they knew the truth, ad they got results which were compatible with what they already believed, and they published their results as if providing proof for their claims.

It was almost always easier for me to think they were kind of stupid, than deceitful.

No, it's deceitfulness.  Even if it's inadvertent - not consciously self-dealing with the overt intent to lie - the purpose of scientific method is to wring as much of the error-raddled unreliability of subjective prejudice out of the processes of inquiry and analysis as possible. 

The guy who evades the machinery and the intent of scientific method isn't conducting himself according to the ethical standards of science, good intentions be damned. 

In the most memorable instances of deviation from ethical practices in the clinical literature, the selective reporting of findings ("cherry-picking"), duplicitous number-bashing ("lies, damned lies, and statistics"), and wildly leaping conclusions to support recommendations in diagnosis and treatment that really don't have a damned thing to do with improving patient outcomes, have all been the results of deceitfulness. 

Honest error is just too doggone easy to catch.  If you stick conscientiously to scientific method, the checking function is strong. 

I found the epidemiologists generally better. Since so much of what they did was collect and interpret data, rather than medical treatment, it was a bigger part of their skillset.

Well.... Like 'em as much as you please. My personal and professional experience with the epidemiologists gives me to opine that they're as hot for eyeball-grabbing "high-impact" publication credit - and as susceptible to political bigotry - as anybody else in the sciences or in clinical medicine. 

You pays your money and you takes your chances.

So what?  Who the hell thinks that this is not a normal and expected part of emotional and intellectual maturation?  Or, indeed, that it doesn't go on throughout life?

For some strange reason, almost everyone in our society looks down on a 30-year-old teacher who has consensual sexual intercourse with even a 15-year-old student of his who happened to have a crush on him. That is considered a very inappropriate response to the situation.

Although you have made arguments which, on the surface, appear plausible that this is a culturally-conditioned attitude, which if viewed from the outside in an impartial manner, would be seen as insane - I think you should not be surprised that people are reluctant to accept that the normal view of the whole world is insane, and the view of a very small group of people, radically opposed to long-established practice, is, instead, the truth.

This remains true even if it is difficult to articulate precisely where your arguments, plausible as they may appear, are wrong.

Our standards of sexual behavior formed, of course, when neither effective contraception nor safe abortion were available. The hormonal changes of pregnancy are partly responsible for the intensity of a mother's love for her child; it is not true that a typical woman, if she is abandoned by the father of her child before giving birth, can simply put the child up for adoption and be none the worse for wear.

In a society of peasant farmers, before there were careers for women as typists and stenographers, because women were not suited to at least some aspects of the heavy physical labor of farming, a woman's ability to play an economic role usually depended on her ability to be a good wife to a responsible husband.

He would support her and her children because they would also be his children - the fruit of his loins as well as of hers. And because she would be sincerely and genuinely emotionally attached to him.

It's been found empirically that it helps if they're virgins.

Now, though, that women are to be independent citizens in their own right, instead of marrying off 13-year-old girls, families send them to school. Ages of consent that are rather high in historical terms have come about as a result of attempting to reconcile the current situation with the habits of the past. While I won't deny that some sort of re-thinking may be in order, I see no reason to rush in with anything that is highly likely to expose many young women to predatory exploitation. Male sexuality is sufficiently intense that it is well known as a common stimulus to aggressive and untrustworthy behavior.

I think that most here are trying to parse things a bit too fine concerning age of consent and child abuse in an AnCap society.  Granted that there are many shades of grey in the current world and even in the USA the legal definition varies wildly from state to state.   However I’d think that 99% of situations would be pretty much cut and dried.   I’ll cite two examples from recent history. 
1.   Elizabeth Smart who at 14 years of age was kidnapped from her home by a religious fanatic and repeatedly raped over several months.    IMHO on Ceres this would be an open and shut case  with the perps Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barzee handed over to the Smart family for justice.   Were it my daughter I’d put a bullet into both of their brainpans and have the bodies hauled to to the recycling center.
2.   Nora Louise Kuzma aka Traci Lords who left home at 15 to escape abuse and wound up posing in Penthouse and making porn movies.    Again an open and shut case regarding her chosen profession.   On the other hand as there is no statute of limitations on Ceres, she could go back and claim arbitration against the bastards who first raped her at age 10 and continued to molest her until she fled her so called home.   Also IMO on Ceres there would have been an intervention shortly after her first rape and probably before it happened.

2.   Nora Louise Kuzma aka Traci Lords who left home at 15 to escape abuse and wound up posing in Penthouse and making porn movies.    Again an open and shut case regarding her chosen profession.   On the other hand as there is no statute of limitations on Ceres, she could go back and claim arbitration against the bastards who first raped her at age 10 and continued to molest her until she fled her so called home.   Also IMO on Ceres there would have been an intervention shortly after her first rape and probably before it happened.

I'm not optimistic about interventions in a place like Ceres.

But she was the case I had in mind when I noted that a young girl of 15, fleeing sexual abuse at home, usually ends up on the street as a prostitute.

Traci Lords was one of the "lucky" ones - she avoided that.

But on a place like Ceres, other young women in that situation would have the even better option of working at the equivalent of McDonald's, which our system denies them. So this is, in my view, one of the strongest arguments for moving in the direction of AnCap.

Regarding our current situation with the kidnapping, threatened rape, torture and murder of a 12 year old…shades of grey?  Are you fracking kidding me?   From the moment they laid hands on her, Rhonda and her culpable cohorts are subject to the long walk, shortening, the last jump etc.   Not to mention Rhonda’s very public violation of ZAP.   I dunno what Sandy has in mind to resolve this arc, but it’s sure to be interesting. 

In a society of peasant farmers... [emphasis added]

Is this where you're getting your idea of human "normal" from?  Why should the last 7000 farmer years be more normal than the last 200,000 hunter-gatherer years?

I think human-normal is tribal.  For most of our human existence, the father might be any one of a handful of males in the tribe, depending on whether the mother snuck off with a beta male or stuck with the alpha.  Any child in the tribe was, if not the actual progeny of a given male, at least related, hence worth helping care for.  Virginity thus irrelevant.  And even in some agricultural communities it's happened that a woman who had already borne a child or two had proven her fertility and was thus worth marrying.  With respect to knowing the father, a virgin is useful; with respect to barrenness, a virgin is a pig in a poke.

And as for the 30-y-o with the 15-y-o, age has only really mattered in the last hundred years or so.  Heck, Georgette Heyer, writing romance novels in the 1930s, thought nothing of pairing a 17-y-o heroine with a 34-y-o (or older) suitor, and when I say "thought nothing" I mean that there is nothing in the story even hinting that it's at all inappropriate.

Finally, "normal" does not equal "healthy".  Shoes are normal and they are very bad for your feet, legs, hips and back (unless they are heelless).  I do think normal American attitudes towards sex, and the sexuality of children especially, are deeply unhealthy.

From the moment they laid hands on her, Rhonda and her culpable cohorts are subject to the long walk, shortening, the last jump etc.

I want brain surgery for Rhonda.  I'd like her incapacitated, drooling & unable to tie her own shoes, but able to remember that she used to be capacitated.  Death's too easy.

I think human-normal is tribal.  For most of our human existence, the father might be any one of a handful of males in the tribe, depending on whether the mother snuck off with a beta male or stuck with the alpha.  Any child in the tribe was, if not the actual progeny of a given male, at least related, hence worth helping care for.  Virginity thus irrelevant.

This, like primitive socialism, is a PC fantasy, much like Margaret Meade's Samoa. 

In the Samoa Margaret Meade supposedly observed (while getting drunk and adulterously screwing her Samoan servant) teenagers had casual, relaxed, no strings sex.  In the Samoa recorded by missionaries, travellers, and colonial authorities, the penalty for adultery was death for the woman, and extremely brutal and horrifying death for the male.  At marriage, a woman's virginity was publicly examined.  Failure to pass the public pubic exam resulted in on the spot execution.   Married women always had to be under the supervision of their husband or their husband's close kin.  Merely having the opportunity to engage in adultery was subject to punishment.

When the Samoan myth was exposed, the myth was then moved to earlier times not subject to such inconveniently severe scrutiny.

The extent of male investment and female chastity is culturally determined, rather than innate in our nature, and varies dramatically from culture to culture, with no very obvious tendency to be greater or lesser in primitive or modern societies.

Human societies have had diverse sexual practices, and societies where the hippy norm applies that everyone screws in a great big pile did exist, among both primitives and moderns, although the Samoan norm (the actual rather than mythical Samoan norm) was probably more common. However, human societies with relaxed sexual practices fail to build, fail to defend themselves and their women, and fail to reproduce, disappearing from history - see JD Unwin's study on this topic "Sex and Civilization"

The basic problem probably is that human females do not reproduce very successfully without substantial male investment in children, and males obviously are more inclined to invest in their own children.

In addition, there is considerable specialization of roles in the upbringing of children.  Women specialize in taking care of children physically, while men teach them to be adults, and in particular teach boys to be men.  Thus a society that is short of male investment in children is apt to be not only short of children, but even more short of warriors.  This is as true for hunter gatherer societies as it was true for the later Spartans and the later Romans.

Female chastity and male investment is a prisoner's dilemma game.  Obviously both men and women are better off if women are faithful and men invest, but if a woman is faithful, a man has an incentive to halt investment after she is pregnant, and if a man invests, a woman has an incentive to get pregnant with someone else while attributing the pregnancy to her husband.

Prisoners dilemma games are subject to multiple equilibria, hence the diversity of sexual standards in diverse societies.  Undesirable equilibria are common when the game has a known and near ending (a women's short period of fertility) and undesirable equilibria need to remedied by social enforcement, which social enforcement has usually been provided by fathers, a system called "patriarchy".

Is this where you're getting your idea of human "normal" from?  Why should the last 7000 farmer years be more normal than the last 200,000 hunter-gatherer years?

Our bodies and minds, indeed, evolved over the period of existence as hunter-gatherers. Our cultures, however, our societies, our "great religions" - these all developed during the more recent period of agriculture, writing, and civilization.

Our cultures are not necessarily a good fit to our biology. But civilization has been so successful that a return to the primitive does not seem to be an option. Of course, it could be said that, to at least some extent, AnCap does have that as its ideal, since civilization was synonymous with the rise of the State.