Hey! This is a post that makes sense and deals with a single issue of manageable scope. This one is worth replying to.

"There is a distinction to be drawn between what I believe and what I think that most of society believes."

And you erase that line when you turn societal acceptance into evidence and you turn "society must have its reasons" into valid motives.

I'm sure I screw up now and then, but a lot of the time I choose my words carefully. I make arguments, and they have subtlety. You are allegedly one of the sharper thinkers around here, but you seem unwilling or unable to follow them at times.

I seek common ground where we have it. So we may disagree about the influence of self-interest on why we hold the beliefs we do. However, we could find common ground perhaps in how we think society is going to perceive those things. No, I don't have national polls of thousands of people to cite -- none of us do, so we make do with our intuitions.

Note the premise in my earlier post:
Even if I did have the hunch that with societal changes and the right tests it could sometimes be known to be OK in advance...

And I end up with, under that same premise,
The humble pedophile with pro-contact intuitions could say, "It seems to me like it ought to be OK, but society is full of smart and insightful people who don't think so, and I do seem to have a vested interest in the outcome, so I'll leave that question up to society and concentrate on things like the VP goals."

You have never said "what society believes erroneously." Nor offered proof that they're informed or correct. And yet your reaction to their assertions is to treat them as self-evident.

Well, no. I'm claiming as political strategy that you might do well to not challenge those beliefs now -- finessing our disagreement on the extent to which they are correct.

When you challenge the Pedo/Molester conflation you don't argue that this will only come across as a cynical lust motivated effort by molesters to make Nons relax their guard.

Yes, it's a matter of intuition, with some anecdotal support but still intuition. I have a strong intuition that the molester/pedo distinction will catch in the minds of many people, while "6-year-olds can consent to sexual activity with adults" will not catch on.

When we affirm that some myths are erroneous, you silence [us] by affirming false doubts.

Silence you? That will be the day!

I suppose only a few of you actually post your objections to my posts in heated terms. Maybe most others shrug their shoulders, say, "I don't agree with that" and go on to the next post without letting it bug them. The tribal instinct can say, "Ethan is the enemy, so anything he says must be wrong or intended to cut us down". But it doesn't have to work that way. I say lots of different things. Readers naturally focus on ones where there is disagreement. When people looked again at the top-level post
http://www.annabelleigh.net/messages/599148.htm
many admitted if they just paid attention to the words, it wasn't full of the beliefs they had assumed it was.

You sometimes accuse of me of just thoughtlessly parroting society's line, but you seem oblivious to all the ways in which I have disagreed with society's views in ways most of society would find shocking. Do you realize how utterly reviled this intro would be to much of society?
I do not believe my attraction to little girls is inherently evil. I know my intentions are good. I even believe that for a perhaps very unusual girl and perhaps very unusual man, it could all work out wonderfully. The possibility exists of end-to-end happiness. So I don't say to myself that my attraction is inherently impossible or harmful. I can feel good about it.