Re: What age do you think children can consent?

Oh yeah, there's sooooooo many people that do that, isn't there?

I bet there is more people who tie their kids in duct tape that than the kind of rapist/torturer/killers that trigger laws named after their victims.

(No, I am NOT talking of all non-consensual or coerced sex; only of the truly horrid cases, which even among non-consensual cases are still a tiny minority)

Well, if that's so, then they need to make themselves clear about the fact that they're underage and they want rights for kids. Otherwise how is anyone going to know?

I would assume that if they take their rights without asking, that they want them; but I will concede your point in admission that each of us has a political expediency reason to take the position we take.

I don't think that's true either. Most people are interested in politics in my experience, at least where I live. That doesn't necessarily translate into voting though, so you can't go by that as a measuring stick. Even if this was true though, it would not contradict my point. This is essentially the 'two wrongs make a right' fallacy.

a) Would you say that interest appeared, by the Grace of God, the night they turned 18?

b) I was not trying to be fallacious. I affirm it's a minority of minors because it is a minority of the general population. Same as red hair, eg.

It was one of the main justifications for going to war in both cases.

Rationalizations or ways to sell the act to the public are one thing. Reasons are another thing.

I've heard you make the exact same points in a different context.

That staying over there, after the bare military goals (overthrowing Saddam or the Taliban) were met; and trying to influence the eventual political outcomes domestic to each country by choosing acceptable and unacceptable winners; smells like cultural imperialism (and has at times been explicitly defended as such, eg by Hitchens) - does not mean that cultural imperialism was ever the goal. Saddam was by any standard probably the most broadly liberal of the Arab regimes (liberal, not democratic). And the most illiberal of all, Saudi Arabia, gets uncritical applause, alliance and subsidy.

Oh my gawd, do you think everything can be compared in every way to the liberation of some other oppressed group?

No, but the burden of proof is on you when you advance that something that has never happened with previous cases is going to happen this time. No two cases are identical, but all are similar, and they together have a cluster of features that most of them share. There is no important feature that is not repeated across most of them, and a sexual free-for-all isn't one of those.

And my specific example is thought on purpose: slaverists did argue that abolitionists had master plans for pervasive miscegenation; and even fabricated pamphlets purporting to be abolitionists to make the point.

You cannot tell me that this isn't going to have a profound effect on a lot of people and turn what as initially a hopeless situation for them into a desperate scramble.

Yes I can. Because it's never happened.

just what until there is one preteen for every one hundred MAPs desperate to get in her pants.

Just wow!

According to the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html), there are 32 million boys and 31 million girls in the USA (meaning, population aged 0-14, but I think this is a rather reasonable definition for this purpose). You would need over 3 billion MAAs per gender of attraction (that is, more than China and India together, for each gender) for your rates to hold. I don't think there are 3 billion MAAs in the world, at that, except under the loosest of definitions where an 18yo and their 17yo partner count. Even in countries further down demographic decline... the factbook has Germany as highest median age (except for Monaco, which I will discard because being a fiscal paradise it presumably has a bias in its population stats) - and a bit above 5 million boys and girls each; while the whole of Germany is 81 million. 7 adult Germans per German child. And this is the country with the highest median age. And before even asking yourself how many of the adults are MAAs.