I’m putting this at the top as your thread about the StC funds is soon to drop into the archives. It’s pretty much a reply to the post of yours you made to me although owing to having a lot to get on with today (and no time to post yesterday—busy weekend unfortunately), it only deals with my take on the way your doubts have again been the catalyst for some pretty off-the-wall behaviour of yours.

I’m not surprised that you’d accuse me of understating the spat about the overuse of the term anti, and the low signal-to-noise ratio of a lot of the recent arguments resulting from that. You’re determined it seems to see it as far more significant than it actually is, and to do so you have to do quite a bit of ignoring of your own. Taf-kat, one of the targets of the recent misuse the anti label and a poster you cited by name as having been “right all along”, also was threatened with a cooling-off ban at the same time as Demosthenes. I wonder if you’ve forgotten that a while back, taf-kat was the one guilty of accusing Dissident of being an anti as a result of refusing the grasp any of the subtleties of Diss’ stated positions. Taf-kat didn’t like one aspect of it, so Dissident was summarily dismissed as “anti-parent”. This all sounds rather familiar does it not, and yet taf-kat is the one who was “right all along”. Yikes.

A more sober approach would probably be to acknowledge that there is an inevitable divide in this community about kids’ place in society, and that from time to time posters on each side of the divide are going to make buffoons of themselves to varying degrees. The same posters then go back to making quite sensible points, and go back to debating rather than berating. Of course that wouldn’t lend itself quite so well to doomsday scenarios of open-minded fence-sitters transforming into rabid antis, or of the same people who occasionally lose their cool in cyberspace losing perspective in relationships with flesh-and-blood kids. Your whole approach to this issue smacks of somebody nursing persistent doubts, and becoming fixated on largely insignificant negative aspects of certain posters who represent certain views, in order to validate your doubts (while ignoring the very same real and imagined flaws in the behaviour of posters whose positions re-enforce your doubts).

Hence, “the jd thing” can be a straw that breaks the camel’s back, despite it having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how any of us would likely deal with sexual relationships with kids. All that happened was that he was nasty to you, as per his posting style. If it was a poster holding views more along the lines of Lux or tak-kat who was nasty to you, would that have made your doubts shrink? You took issue that (quite rightly) nobody else bothered to get involved in your flame war with jd, and said that it was another indication that your doubts were valid. But it wasn’t just those here who want child-adult sex to be legal who never got involved. Nobody did, including by definition all the posters who share your doubts that legal child-adult sex would be a good thing. Why didn’t their refusal to waste their time on yours and jd’s flame war reflect badly on their views on a totally unrelated issue that you were having trouble with? You chose which side of the divide was wrong when both sides behaved in exactly the same way. This is about you.