Why is there always someone eager to demonstrate a weirdly expansive knowledge of ages of consent?
Generally this topic perhaps more than any other suffers from semantic ambiguity, due to an unwillingness to put a lot of thought into it and bad faith arguments, which both stem from how incredibly uncomfortable and emotional the real consequences surrounding the topic are.
Examples of distinctions that are usually not made clear in contexts where they should be:
- Abuse vs pedophilia.
- Colloquial vs objective definitions of pedophilia.
- Legal vs moral.
- Feeling vs acting.
- "Prepubescent child" vs "person who has secondary sexual characteristics and/or is fully sexually developed, but whose mind may not yet be - or certainly is not - physiologically and/or sociologically developed enough to express independence in the face of even mild sexual advances from an adult, or to make sound decisions about sex (for sometimes undefinably subjective meanings of 'sound decision')".
People opining on age of consent sometimes have a good point, often not, but I think in either case they are usually honestly trying to bring more clarity to an important topic.
Either way, it would seem in this case it may be both.
Not really.
First, because “libertarian” and “socialist” aren't opposing poles (libertarian socialism is a thing), and, second, because non-libertarian socialists aren't particularly against (or for reducing the age set in) age of consent laws. And, third, even anarchists, who are the polar extreme of libertarian socialist tend to support age of consent laws, there only consistent opposition to current ones is, as with other laws of current societies, objection to the structural basis on which they are made and enforced, content of the laws aside.
EDIT: Similar things may also be true of libertarians not being as anti-age-of-consent as portrayed as I have noted about socialists; I have had somewhat more contact with broad leftist communities than broad libertarian ones outside of their overlap, so I may be more susceptible to misestimating the prevalence of certain views in the libertarian community because they are highly visible when espoused because of how transgressive they are.
Part of what's strange is how often age of consent comes up in these circles. It's not something most people think too much about. Last time I was worried about age of consent laws was when I turned 18 a few months before my girlfriend.
> tend to support age of consent laws > objection to the structural basis on which they are made and enforced
You'll get a laundry list of reasons why our existing laws are oppressive, passionate assertions that adults and minors can have positive sexual relationships with each other, delineations of pedophilia, ephebophilia, etc. All followed up with a vague caveat that age of consent laws might not be inherently bad, but usually with no attempt whatsoever at suggesting what they should be. Seems a strange place to just stop your little thought experiment.
Then you have people like Vaush who just can't stop saying things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Cjw7Fq6VA
Age of consent comes up a lot in libertarian (including both right-libertarian and anarchist/libert5-socialist) circles because it's an easy emotional “think of the children” gotcha that the groups are, because of their opposition to status quo government authority subjected to continuously.
It also comes up a lot because libertarian groups (on both left and right) are about fundamentally reorganizing the structure of authority in society, and it's an obvious and (for most) important issue addressed by the status quo system.
People reimplementing (or designing a reimplementation of) a system should spend a lot more time thinking about things the current system treats as a solved problem than end users of the existing system do.
> All followed up with a vague caveat that age of consent laws might not be inherently bad, but usually with no attempt whatsoever at suggesting what they should be.
I've rarely found anyone in either community that wouldn't state their preference on age of consent laws when asked, what they tend not to do is express what they should be for all communities, because they tend to oppose the idea of centralized legal standards for all communities (both left and right libertarians have frequently spoken up to support intervention if the practice in another community is seen as widespread violation of moral consent, but not reducing that to some legalism. I think people have trouble understanding that libertarians have a different view on the relation between morality and law than people who are less libertarian, and therefore mistake libertarian reluctance to demand universal legislation on certain issues with libertine moral neutrality on them.
> Then you have people like Vaush
Vaush is a rather controversial figure among anarchists.
Also small nitpick but one cannot be "more" or "less" ideological, we all are whether we like it or not, it's just the question of which ideology you are. You might say, "well I am not one of those fanatics on either side of the horseshoe," but that doesn't make you "less" ideological, it just defines your ideology.
Ideology =/= belief system. It is rather the implicit, subconscious framing you have to the world that informs the belief system you arrive at ("rationally" or otherwise). So, in fact, denying you have ideology, or having "less" ideology than the radicals, shows that the influence of ideology on you is stronger than otherwise :).