Re: A good post

This will be my last post in regard to the latest scuffle. you can have the final word--I know you'll take it anyway.

Baldur gives you much too much latitude, which is why you give him this praise.

No, I give him praise because he's an honorable person who doesn't take sides concerning the validity of arguments, and because he's a generally nice guy. Many of the pro-contacters here (not all of them, but quite a few) are arrogant and immature and not the kind of people I would want to have a beer with, much less leave a young daughter in the company of. You guys tend to be your own worst enemies.

My dislikes for you go into your reasons for switching from pro-contact to anti-contact, which I believe were in no way honorable.

Yeah, whatever.

If you actually gave some unique arguments to the anti-contact side, then maybe I would listen. But I think that after all of your time in this community you should know better than to expect people here to respect the same five basic anti-contact arguments, none of which are based on science or fact, and none of which are friendly or harmonious to civil rights.

It's not about the uniqueness of an argument but the strength and validity of it. While most anti-contact arguments are ridiculous (and I will be the first to demolish them), there are a couple which are solid enough to warrant consideration. Furthermore, it is abundantly clear to me that many of you guys really aren't about child liberation but about getting sexual access to kids. You can dress it up however you like, but it's clear that's what it is. There are people out there who genuinely care about giving kids more rights who aren't MAPs; some of them agree on the sex stuff and some don't. But why is it that almost all of the MAPs I've encountered here and at other boards are all about giving kids all this freedom? The sheer percentages stink of ulterior motives.

But I think that after all of your time in this community you should know better than to expect people here to respect the same five basic anti-contact arguments, none of which are based on science or fact, and none of which are friendly or harmonious to civil rights. You need to expect to see hostility to the anti-contact position due to how strongly so many of us feel about civil liberties and how much we respect younger people and their emancipation. Not everyone can turn their backs on these principles without a second thought.

I don't expect you all to agree with me on everything I believe, but it's not out of the question for me to expect civility. I always give it until the point when it becomes clear that some of you are going to be vicious regardless of how I treat you. You're digging your own hole when you pretend like you guys have honorable motives and then spew bile at me and others who are genuinely concerned about kids' safety, as well as the viability of this movement. Making a claim like 'GC has cultlike aspects' is not a personal attack against anyone here; it's an observation based on certain patterns of behavior. I'm not casting moral judgment when I say it--I'm basically stating that I'm worried about how this movement is going. But you turn that around and make personal statements about me, as if that somehow makes you right.

And I have rarely seen any pro-contact person show the singular lack of honesty, ethics, and emotionaly instability that the anti-contact posters routinely show. Your past behavior is a testament to that. Not all pro-contact people are trustworthy (some of them are simply blabbermouths), but I would take a chance to trust one of them after I got to know them than I would any anti-contact poster who is self-loathing and who is opposed to many of the principles I hold most dear in the world.

Right, and that's because you wear blinders. You should recognize the flaw in that position just through statistics alone. When has it ever been the case that all or most people who agree with you are honorable and all or most people who disagree with you are lowlife scum? Never. It is much more likely that most people on both sides are operating according to their own moral compass and have the best of intentions. There are plenty of people who don't on both sides, and just as I pointed out above, the percentages indicate that many of you may ultimately be operating from selfish motives. We all do that to some extent, but in this case children's bodies and minds are at stake. That's a huge consideration and one that should never be taken lightly. The fact is, there's so much distortion, intentional and unintentional, on both sides that we need a lot more impartially gathered data, and it's just not going to happen in this environment. We should work towards demolishing the destructive taboos toward us first, and then it might be possible to sway the culture into undertaking the massive long-term studies that need to be done.