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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

Reactions to this girl's channel went viral on YouTube a few months ago. The main instigator was this[0] slightly controversial video response to this girl's ASMR channel. The linked video went viral and got banned, then unbanned and demonetized. The main gist of the speaker here is that there's something fishy about underage girls making these videos. Some of this girl's videos are blatantly sexual (she re-enacts porn-plots, references Tinder, dating, etc.), and her viewerbase seems to know that and want that. The whole situation is a bit sketchy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M78rlxEMBxk (NSFW)

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Goddamn, I really really didn’t expect that level of extreme creepiness. The honey thing was weird, but the “sassy” policewoman thing? Wow. If you walked in on someone watching that, you’d be seriously concerned. Again, my asmptiom going into this was “oh boy, Internet moralizing and outrage again,” but it’s... incredibly sketchy. At best.

Moralizing has gotten a bad rap over the past couple decades, to the point of being almost completely declawed in progressive circles, but one can only hope that morals will grow their claws back soon enough for stuff like this to be stopped.

No matter how liberal you are, you're shooting you a future self in the foot if you profess a unconditional disregard of moralizing, because eventually you may discover that you do actually have morals. All it takes to get enligtened is for something bad enough to get spread around.

Edit: don't get misled by thinking I'm using the Twitter/Cable News vernacular, by liberal I mean "permissive," and by progressive I mean "in favor of changing things." Those categories could apply to the forces in any culture, even historical cultures.

I think it can be helpful to move away from pat generalizations like “progressive” or “liberal” for the most part. I have no doubt that if we first met while I was talking about my views on gender equality and redistribution of wealth you’d label me that way. If we first met while I was talking about my views on defense you’d label me right wing. If I was talking about my views on respecting trans people I’d be left again, but if we chatted about my views on Israel I’d be back on the right. I’m a passionate environmentalist who is passionately pro-nuclear, an atheist who is fascinated by and full of respect for faith.

I don’t think I’m unusual either, I think most people are defined by more than one stance, and I don’t think relative morality is the province of left or right. You’re making a good point about the merits of accepting the moral dimensions of life, don’t let politics dilute that message. Progressive, Conservative... only a crazy person is just one of those things.

Where have you gotten the impression the 'progressives' and 'liberals' would have any qualms about calling out how dodgy these videos are?

By "liberal" I mean more liberal than average, which requires pushing back or at least not supporting at least one taboo. By doing so you put yourself at risk of dismantling your own ability to keep any taboos around, even the ones that actually are right.

I'm not talking about political groups; by any measure in urban areas the political group called liberals would be just "normal," or "average." Progressive doesn't mean "Democrat," a Democrat in a blue county that believes things should be the same tomorrow as they are today is by definition a conservative.

What are these lost taboos you're referring to?

It sounds like you're saying people ought to go back to being homophobic, for example, because it will save us from a slippery slope to pedophilia?

What slope? Some people are already there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vux3-uFNtLw

Some people have always been there. That doesn't mean they got there because not being homophobic is a slippery slope.

Your video seems to be about a pedophile who is upset that the LGBT community isn't inclusive of pedophilia. I don't understand what point you were trying to make by linking that.

The point is that that some people are already using the good ideas like tolerance about what people do in the bedroom to sneak outright pedophilia in there. Where you see someone complaining that not everybody accepts it, I first and foremostly see someone who does accept the argument they are making, otherwise they wouldn't be making it. That doesn't not count just because not everybody on the planet agrees with them. And if you think that's just the one person that exists, rather than an example for many persons that exist, that's a very bold assumption.

And in Germany for example, there is quite the long and sordid history regarding that, among other things with people trying to legalize "consentual" [sic] sexual relations between minors and adults, but I don't know if there is anything thorough in the English language about it:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A4dophilie-Debatte_(1970e...

And that was directly in the wake of working against discrimination of homosexuality. For some naive people, it all fell under the umbrella of "being different sexually", and for pedophiles, that was how they tried to get a foot in the door.

This sentence

> Die Debatte über die Legalisierung pädosexueller Akte ist historisch eng verbunden mit der Forderung nach Abschaffung des § 175 (StGB)

translates to

> the debate about the legalization of pedosexual acts is historically tightly connected with the demand to get rid of [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175 ]

Or hey, this

http://www.taz.de/!5143954/

An article about an article that appeard in 1979 in the taz, declaring pedophilia is a victimless crime in the title. One sentence from that:

> Bei einem Blick in die Archive wird klar: Teile des linksalternativen Milieus sympathisierten mit Pädophilen - zumindest boten sie ihnen einen ideologischen Rahmen.

translates to

> A look into the archives makes it obvious that parts of the alternative left scene sympathized with pedophiles - at least they provided an ideological framework to them.

So, that already happened. And it absolutely was fueled by being overzealous about being liberal and progressive -- that's not what made anyone a pedophile, but that's how some people fell for the schemes of pedophiles, and let themselves and their networks be used. That's a fact. I'm not familiar with similar things in North America but I wouldn't outright bet on not finding anything if I had the nerve to go looking, which I don't at this time.

edit: there's ignorance, and there's active suppression of information. what a cesspool.

Just look at all the comments calling it out getting downvoted into oblivion, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168083

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168256

They don't say what they disagree with, but they punish the poster. That's much more active than just having a qualm about calling something out, it's attacking people who call it out.

And of course, this thread isn't very active to begin with, yet is already getting flagged by many, even jumped from the second page back to the first, but will still remain penalized and at best at bottom of page 1 for a little while [edit: nope, vanished from page 1 in the time it took me to write the rest of this comment, there you go]. Again, apart from the people who have qualms calling anything out, additional activity to suppress the calling out that takes place. That's not an impression, that's a fact.

More generally, consider how 'pointing out that something could be rephrased as "think of the children"' is some kind of mic-drop killer argument for many here, as if that would automatically disqualify anything, like a Nazi comparison does in the minds of some:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22think%20of%20the%20children...

Even if it sexual, why must it be stigmatized?

Many people (myself included) find the sexualization of 13-year olds immoral and worthy of being stigmatized.

Hopefully that’s not too surprising of a statement (regardless of your personal views).

Its not surprising but why?

Hey man, I appreciate the intellectual curiosity and desire to challenge commonly held beliefs.

This is clearly a topic with extreme potential for heated, off-topic debate. I don’t think Hacker News is the right forum for this discussion.

If “you have something genuinely new to say” [1] by all means, feel free to share it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OK, if 13 year old girls do soft porn videos, totally on their own, I'd call that empowerment. I don't get the distinction from 13 year old guys doing videos about whatever they're into.

But if parents of 13 year old girls are encouraging them to do soft porn videos, that's exploitation. However, check out the pre-teen "modeling" thing in the US. That's basically soft porn, and it's popular.

How is it “empowering” for a 13 year old to do soft porn videos on her own? Can you imagine the amount of pedophiles crawling out of the woodwork to see that, and the dangers it might expose her to?

We have come to such a low point of moral thinking that “who will think of the children?” has become nothing but a meme. But teenage suicide and psychological ills of all kinds are at record record highs, so perhaps it is worth our while to think of the children after all.

It's a tough question.

OK, so I'm making this up, but if I were a 13 year old girl today, and I knew that I could make $1K per day doing soft porn, I wouldn't think twice. I mean, I'd be very careful to stay as anonymous as possible. But seriously, doing YouTube videos is orders of magnitude more secure than hosting a webcam on your public IP address from home.

Maybe you'll call bullshit on that. Because, you know, I'm male. But when I was 13, I was hacking on unexploded WWII munitions that we found lying around in the woods. And that's gotta be at least as hazardous as making soft porn for YouTube.

Also, when I was in my mid teens, I had a 13 year old girlfriend. And she would definitely have made soft porn for YouTube, if it had existed then. Even without the prospect of making $1K per day.

So yeah, it's a tough question. If you think that 13 is too young, what's an OK age?

> Can you imagine the amount of pedophiles crawling out of the woodwork to see that, and the dangers it might expose her to?

With that reasoning, they ought to be wearing burquas.

But the beauty here is that you get to monetize the pedophiles. And of course, good OPSEC is essential, given the dangers.

So the fact this girl uses her meatspace name is an OPSEC fail.

I get that this attitude outrages many people. Especially, I would guess, parents. Because children ought to be protected from themselves.

And maybe it's just that I've never been a parent. So what I remember is what it was like to be a child. Indeed, some would say that I still am a child, and I'm OK with that.

Anyway, when do we get the right to exercise free will? When I was about eight, I felt that I had it. And many religions do think that sinning becomes possible at about that age. So what's magic about 18 or 21?

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