Re: What age do you think children can consent?

Maybe the others too. They all have their own system of social engineering and utopia, some of them falling far to the right and a few (well, Dissident) falling far to the left. In the end none of these systems are viable because people are far too diverse and fickle. The best we can hope for are variations on a theme, so to speak, the theme being that which we already have.

I cannot speak for Dissident (though from what I know of him, I would say it's inaccurate on him too...) but I can for myself.

1) I do not pretend to understand people. I understand incentives, but that's the best I can do. I do not, and cannot, predict with any sufficiently good accuracy how well incentive structures (designed, preexisting or randomly / serendipitously arrived at) will work for anyone. For example, given that killing children has a lower penalty than raping children (or "raping", but that's not the point here), the incentives are such that a rapist gets a lower penalty if they kill the child and destroy the body or at least tamper with it enough to erase evidence of any sexual interaction - yet that does not, and never will, mean that child rapists will always kill their victims, much less that they will always destroy the body. Only that it would be rational for them to do it.

That is what incentives do: they tell you what the rational course of action is; not what anyone (much less everyone) will do. Someone might well have personal beliefs, or personal incentives that don't apply to the general case, or not know the actual incentive structures involved, or simply have different preferences with the same structure. Any of these, as well as random accidents, will change the outcome away from the "rational" equilibrium. To believe that the "rational" equilibrium always prevails would be to think that you understand people. I do no such thing. Autonomy precludes it; and it's not even only humans who are autonomous...

2) Because I regard understanding people as something unknowable, I do not engage in social engineering. I think ALL social engineering fails in solving what it attacks and often creates more problems by the side, precisely by assuming that people can be understood.

This is ultimately why I ended falling into libertarianism. To this day I consider myself a conservative, not a libertarian. I simply do not stand for Big Government Conservatism because I don't think it can achieve its goals and I think it creates new problems by the side. IOW, that it is indistinguishable from the liberal variety of Big Government except, usually, in support base. That tends to put one with libertarians.

3) I do not see this as any utopia. I see as utopia to believe that we can plan and manage society, whichever the end we are seeking by doing that - including ostensibly good ends with which anyone can agree: prosperity, security... and whichever the ideological rationale used to justify the planning, even rationales I in theory agree with.

Much less do I see this as a system. I see it as a rather explicit refusal of all systems, regardless of good or ill intentions, capable or incompetent direction, and ideological origin or support.

And of course, I do not see it as vulnerable to differences or to human fickleness; I see it as the only way that these human characteristics cannot undermine the whole of society when they happen in a vulnerable link in the system.

4) OTOH, I do agree with your pessimism that we will only ever see variations on a theme, that theme being what we already have. As Einstein said, there are only two infinite things...

(In that much more restricted sense, yes, I am utopian)

5) I think FTGL is far to the left too. In some ways even farther than Dissident. In others not so, but overall far enough that he deserves the mention!!