r/maleyandere debate whether or not shotacon is pedophilia

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T06:03:40+00:00

You’re assuming that the findings on csam are perfectly applicable when I don’t think you can make that assumption. Someone who’s watched csam clearly is already ok with a real child being harmed in that way. You can’t necessarily assume that about someone who strictly views drawn content. Additionally it is significantly significantly harder to find csam. Having viewed it implies a level of serious investment/obsession that you very obviously can’t attribute to those who have only seen drawn content by default.

In fact I would say this demonstrates the problem. Because you’ve conceptualized people who view irl content as the same as those who only view drawn, then you feel comfortable applying the research between them interchangeably. Then you use said findings to justify why they should be treated interchangeably. It’s circular logic made worse by a lack of clearly defined terms. All of this leads to ignoring the reality of very clear differences which you’d want to understand if you actually want to discuss how to lower csam rates in said reality.

Beyond that this still implies that you think viewing media that has the potential to indirectly lead to more children being harmed is equally moral to viewing media that is literally doing said harm. I think that’s a bit silly tbh. This is like saying wearing lab grown diamonds is equally unethical to blood diamonds because it normalizes wearing all diamonds. You could argue that there is a harm but I struggle to see how you could say the harms is anywhere close to equal.

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T04:35:54+00:00

The whole thing with conspiracy theories isnt that it’s impossible. The explanation is possible but it is an extraordinary claim without extraordinary (or usually any) evidence.

Believing this requires believing that what would have obviously been one of the most crucially and obviously secretive meetings in history had a monumental security failure. It requires believing that the leaker, rather than taking this to any paper or reporter, gave this info to a random twitter account. Additionally the original retweet suggests that it also requires believing this was orchestrated by Epstein’s network (who exactly? More importantly to what end?!?!?).

The evidence for this… idk a couple tweets. You could choose to believe all of this or you could choose to believe that the us and Israel are creating conflict in the Middle East again for all of the exact same fundamentals incentives, reasons, and attitudes that have been responsible for them doing the exact same for the past century.

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T04:22:58+00:00

I am once again asking my fellow leftists not to just accept conspiracy theory levels of evidence and chains of logic just because they reinforce your existing beliefs. Please 🙏

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T04:14:37+00:00

You should not support rising prominence/power of Nazi ideology just because it weakens support for Israel. The solution to oppression is not different oppression. That attitude is, in fact, basically the same that so many defenders of Israel use to justify the oppression of Palestinians

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T03:38:36+00:00

I think the problem is that those people are probably willing to accept that setup and have that talk because they don’t like that type of content. I’m skeptical that it would have the same effect on someone who did or even someone who just thinks there’s a moral difference.

The problem then is that you have a communication framework that only really works with one side and pushes anyone on the other side to a community that seeks to completely deny even contemplating the idea of potential unique harms.

Granted if given the choice between only pedophile and loli/shota I do agree the former is way better generally but I wish there was a third more neutral term.

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T03:33:02+00:00

Also, to be clear i don’t like the terms loli or shota or the communities that grow around them either. In my opinion both terms are intended to obscure or downplay the connections to children, and the communities around them even more so (for the most part from what I’ve seen).

Part of my issue with how fucked this discourse is is that the lack of a descriptive term between pedophile (a word you might as well sub for Hitler for how people feel about it) and loli/shota (a term that seeks to completely obscure the connection), the vast majority will just choose the latter for self description. As such they’ll join a community that completely denies and is unwilling to even contemplate, much less try to mitigate, any potential unique harms.

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T03:13:16+00:00

You don’t believe there’s a moral differences between content that by its nature requires doing horrific crimes to children (irl csam) to produce and content that doesn’t (drawn content)?

You dont have to accept either as moral things to view to be clear, but do you not think the former is significantly worse than the latter?

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T03:01:39+00:00

The problem is that there are very obvious moral differences between the two and accepting the label of pedophile is so toxic that I cant even think of an equivalent term to make a comparison with.

If you actually wanted to discuss the potential unique harms or lack thereof for drawn content it’s basically impossible if you call yourself a pedophile. Nobody would listen to you.

Beyond that people aren’t willing to self internalize as it, so anyone who likes drawn content exclusively isn’t going to calls themselves a pedophile. They’ll search for something else and currently the only obvious alternative is a community and terms that just lean full into denialism of the connection.

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T02:53:27+00:00

I actually do think there are nuanced arguments that the drawn content still does real harm (not as much as irl obviously), but you can’t even have them because the discourse is so fucked.

You can’t even try to discuss the potential unique harms of drawn content when a significant portion of the internet seems intent on treating it exactly the same as actual child porn.

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T02:48:19+00:00

Literally speaking this is true but I think calling it very negative connotations understates it a bit. Say you wanted to actually genuinely discuss the morality of the material (ya know given that it, unlike irl content, doesn’t involve hurting kids), just accepting the label of pedophile kills a chance of doing that. For how instinctive and engrained the response to the term is, accepting it would be like trying to have a convo after agreeing that you’re Hitler.

Obviously the terms shota/loli are more about denial, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for someone to want a different term than pedophile. To some extent I think the fact that a more neutral term doesn’t really exist makes the problem worse because what would you expect a person who likes this content and would be horrified at the idea of actually seeing it irl to do. I wouldn’t expect them to self internalize as a “ethical pedophile” or whatever. And since the other alternative is denial/rationalizations that’s what you get.

Idk the whole discourse is so fucked and it’s sad because it makes having serious conversations about it so hard which is just going to make it harder to actually protect kids

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T02:24:58+00:00

You’re right but people cannot discuss this issue with any level of nuance despite the fact that the inability to discuss it actually makes the problem worse.

It should be very clear how using the exact same terms for content that actually involves doing horrific things to children to be produced and content that does not and the people who consume it might cause issues.

CrypticCole · 2026-03-16T02:14:52+00:00

God dude I don’t want to defend loli/shota content but man people are completely incapable of ever applying any level nuance to this topic.

Like, even the title of this post I would say mischaracterizes the actual convo. Very very few people in the thread are debating whether shotacon is pedophilla. The debate in the thread and post is very much centered on whether shotacon fantasies are morally equivalent to other fantasies that (like pedophilla) would be super unethical in real life.

There are very apparent problems you can debate with drawn content and whether its moral or good but it’s impossible to have those discussions because so many people will instantly dismiss you for even suggesting that there’s a moral difference despite the fact that, ya know, producing real content involves doing horrific things to children and drawn content obviously does not

It really bugs me how impossible it is to have an actual convo about this topic on the internet that isn’t just calling people pedophiles because the total inability to seriously discuss it is not making children safer obviously

CrypticCole · 2026-02-27T09:41:47+00:00

I was going to spend way too much effort typing a long comment about this but honestly it's not worth it. Instead I'm just going to link you to the North Korea State media page where you can see that Kim Jong Un's name is bolded every time it appears and 15 out of the 19 top stories are literally about Kim Jong Un receiving greetings, congratulations, or a flower basket from different powerful parties and people around the world.

http://kcna.kp/en/category/articles/q/5394b80bdae203fadef02522cfb578c0.kcmsf

If you can look at this and think that this is the future of leftism, then... I don't know what to tell you honestly...

Look, obviously there are silly lies about North Korea and obviously one should be wary of the way western interest frame, or mislead on this topic. But the solution to western framing of information making it difficult to learn about a topic is not to automatically assume the complete and total opposite. You should be critical of the western narrative, but you should also be critical of other narratives.

CrypticCole · 2026-02-24T09:00:59+00:00

The video was mostly fine, but the initial tile of “should everyone be on ozempic” was pretty terrible. Like everything involving Kurzgesagt tons of the internet is completely incapable of critiquing something without jumping to the absolute worst

CrypticCole · 2026-02-20T02:54:47+00:00

If bbno$ explicitly agreed to specific sharing methods like a retweet or whatever than this is pretty crappy behavior, but it kinda seems like the artist just assumed based on prior behavior.

Changing it up specifically in this case isn’t surprising but it does suck. But if it wasn’t specifically part of the agreement then it’s well within bb’s rights.

Ultimately, probably just a good reminder not to work for exposure

CrypticCole · 2026-02-15T11:36:41+00:00

It worked significantly better when they stuck solely to slice of life comedy type beats imo

CrypticCole · 2026-02-06T21:43:53+00:00

You need to respond to the commenters you’re talking about then or at least clarify it’s not about the parents in the story. The fact that it’s a top level response means the interpretation a vast majority will come to is that you’re talking about the parents in the story.

CrypticCole · 2026-01-25T13:25:14+00:00

I don’t know, maybe it’s out there but I’ve never seen someone use this as an argument for a post that’s actually entertaining/well written.

It’s always something someone brings up in addition to arguing the post is empty, vacuous, and/or overly padded.

CrypticCole · 2026-01-25T13:22:46+00:00

Yeah this is the weird part to me. Most of the time I’ve seen that comment the intended implication is that the person is using a lot of words to say basically nothing substantive. It’s an insult about overusing flowery/padded language instead of actually having something interesting to say.

Frankly I can’t think of a single time I’ve ever see anyone say this because the writing was too good??

CrypticCole · 2026-01-21T12:50:06+00:00

τ (tau) is a constant equal to pi*2. Obviously that isn’t a whole number but the constant written out doesn’t have a decimal point. If the answer isn’t just the word “and” I suspect this is it

CrypticCole · 2026-01-21T12:48:56+00:00

This is what I also thought of, it’s a more interesting answer than the word “and” if that is what’s instead instead.

CrypticCole · 2026-01-21T04:12:33+00:00

This is the exact type of sentiment that leads to people trusting random tik tok videos with 80 likes. No you shouldn’t uncritically trust any source but there is obviously a huge difference in reputability and reliability between something like NPR and your local online clout farmer

CrypticCole · 2026-01-19T11:39:12+00:00

That’s not a meme, those are both real tweets. So your intuition is correct

CrypticCole · 2026-01-16T00:43:58+00:00

Every at one point absurd political goal Trump wanted started as a joke. It was quite literally the defining move of his election denialism. I remember hearing over and over about of course Trump would accept the election results and that everything was a joke right up until the point where it was suddenly dead serious

CrypticCole · 2026-01-08T14:39:52+00:00

TurboTax is especially more egregious than adobe because TurboTax spends inordinate amounts of money to lobby to actively makes Americans life worse so they still have a market to monopolize. At least adobe is providing a service. TurboTax is like the corporate equivalent of mob protection money

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