The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 59 Comments

Pretty Baby has been banned outright in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan. No less a moral arbiter than Rona Barrett solemnly advised her TV audience that the movie is ‘child pornography.’ Others have attacked its French director . . . as a combination of Humbert Humbert and Roman Polanski.”
Kristin McMurran, People magazine, May 1978

“Some people view children as the next sexual frontier.”
Stephanie Dallam, April 2002

“A Dutch study published [by Paidika editorial board member Theo Sandfort] in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them.”
Jon HenleyGuardian (U.K.), January 2013

“So it appears that younger youth are just as capable of making healthy sexual decisions as are older youth, and yet they are treated differently under the law.”
— Marina Adshade, Ph.D., Psychology Today, May 2013

If you had to fix a date in history when the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s reached its Jacobins-and-guillotines stage, when even those who had originally welcomed and applauded the revolution began to recoil from the perverse “liberation” they had wrought, the 1978 release of Pretty Baby may well have been the pivot-point. The AIDS scare of the 1980s would accelerate the counter-revolution — in fact, the disease was already beginning to spread in the late 1970s, although it was not until the ’80s that the pandemic was recognized — but it was Pretty Baby and headlines about child pornography that alarmed American mothers about the encroaching danger to their daughters.

Of course, the slow approach toward this red line had been going on for many years, but it had occurred on the bohemian fringes of society and had escaped widespread notice by the respectable bourgeoisie. During the 1960s, there was a lot of talk about “high-school dropouts” and “runaway teenagers,” and plenty of minors — 15 or 16 years old, some even younger — were among the hippies and flower children who drifted toward San Francisco in the 1967 “Summer of Love.”

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

Whether they were seeking enlightenment and world peace, or just “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll,” there were plenty of young teens who were drawn into the hippie orbit. The anti-Establishment mood of that radical youth culture was such that no hairy freak was going to alert police — “the pigs” — that his dopehead buddy was making it with a teenybopper not yet old enough to get a driver’s license.

“Hang-ups” about sex? That’s for squares, man.

During the classic rock heyday of the ’70s, one learns from memoirs and biographies, plenty of high-school girls were among the “groupies” who flung themselves at guitar gods and heavy metal icons. Legendary tales of hotel-room-wrecking rock-tour decadence occasionally include scenes of 13-year-olds quite eagerly donating themselves as love offerings to the platinum-album superstars of that era.

“Well . . . it was consensual.”

This attitude — expressed in many variations by the “Free Kate” fanatics who celebrate Kaitlyn Hunt as a heroic martyr for her jailbait romance with a 14-year-old — is really nothing new to those who have paid attention long enough. How strange is it, then, that more than three decades after that zenith (or rather, nadir) of the Sexual Revolution, somebody like Canadian economist Marina Adshade thinks we’re in need of a social-science lecture on this topic?

The basis of the age-of-consent laws, like the ones invoked in this case, is that young adolescents are less capable of making healthy sexual decisions than are older adolescents because do not fully comprehend the risks. . . .
So there must be pretty good evidence that younger teens are less capable of making healthily sexual decisions than are slightly older teens who are free to choose the nature of their own sexual relationships, right?
Not exactly and, in fact, comprehensive research using data collected from 26,000 high school students in British Columbia found that the sexual decision making of those who became sexually active when they were 14 to 15 years old was no worse than those who became sexually active when they were 16 to 17 years old.

Damn you, damn your “research” and damn Canada, while we’re at it.

As a general rule, the more you know about social science, the more skeptical you are about its findings, especially when confronted with studies that seem to contradict common sense. The media appetite for “counter-intuitive” research findings (as practiced by the fraudulent Jonah Lerner, for example) and the generally liberal leanings of academic researchers (we are not surprised to find the eminent professor of perversion Theo Sandfort on the Columbia University faculty) tend to generate a lot of studies (and publicity for those studies) that tell us sexual hedonism is essentially harmless, even for “younger teens.”

And if you dare so much as raise an eyebrow of skepticism toward this kind of “science,” you’re obviously a bigoted hater.

Beyond the shabby assumptions of the “comprehensive research” cited by Dr. Adshade — e.g., it’s OK for 14-year-olds to screw around, as long as they use condoms — we have to ask whether any common-sense law, belief or moral tradition can be empirically validated (or invalidated) by social science. Do we as a society wish to submit ourselves to the Scientific Consensus as the final arbiter of everything?

‘It’s Science! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’

Advocates of surrendering democracy to an elite of experts have usually been embarrassed by the results of their experiments, insofar as people can be bothered to notice the unintended consequences of this kind of “enlightened” social engineering. It often takes a generation or two for effects of trendy social policies to be fully developed, by which time people have become slowly acclimated to the changes. In the meantime, propagandists for the New Regime usually have succeeded in convincing us that the Old Traditions were hopelessly obsolete — horse-and-buggy stuff — if not also benighted and oppressive.

Geezers may have some faint memory of the past as the “good old days,” but if they try to argue that Modern Progress is actually a bad thing — that this is not really progress at all, but in fact is a descent into decadence — the geezers will be demonized or ridiculed or otherwise marginalized as disreputable fringe kooks.

It takes a strong mind and a resolute determination, therefore, to speak out against the Cult of Scientific Progress when its High Priests hold every significant position of influence in society, especially in realms where their hegemony is quite nearly absolute. Academia has become the Church of the True Faith, where skepticism is heresy, and from this derives the tautology: “Only ignorant people disagree with this belief, because all the experts have endorsed the consensus” — when, in point of fact, advocates of the consensus belief have spent years if not decades orchestrating purges of their critics and blackballing their opponents.

What is true of the climate change consensus — perhaps you recognized the synopsis of their characteristic sophistry — is now a prevalent attitude in the humanities and social sciences. Even in the English departments, the political doctrines of deconstruction and multiculturalism now dominate, so that the teaching of literature and grammar has become subject to the diktats of commissars.

Our Pharisees speak of diversity while enforcing conformity.

Good luck trying to find a professor of sociology or psychology who will dare dispute the radical-egalitarian “liberation” perspective on sexuality, marriage, family and child development. Those hostile to the academic consensus are seldom found within academia.

All the more remarkable, then, that we can cite research showing that the traditionalists are right and the modernists are wrong. Contrary to the impression Marina Adshade, Ph.D., tries to convey, early sexual activity is correlated with bad socio-economic outcomes.

Whether the variable you measure is scholastic achievement, household income, marital stability, sexually transmitted disease — pick a metric, any metric — you will find that, generally, kids who start screwing around early tend to exhibit worse outcomes as adults than do kids who delay sexual activity. Let Dr. Adshade or anyone else seek out data on adults and find whether those who begin having sexual intercourse as early as 14 are really no worse off than those who wait until 17 or later.

As with any other general observation derived from social science, the overall trend doesn’t mean that every kid who gets past third base in ninth grade is doomed to a life of misery and failure and, of course, correlation is not causation: “Heather was an honor student with ambitions to become a nuclear physicist, until her freshman year at band camp she lost her cherry to a trombonist, and now she’s a crack whore giving $10 blowjobs down at the local truck stop . . .”

No, the cause-and-effect connection is not so clear-cut, but still I’d be willing to bet that a survey of truck stop hookers would find that most of them started having sex at relatively young ages, and that a rather large number of them were victims of outright child abuse.

But maybe it was that trombonist, after all.

‘Informed Consent’ and ‘Emerging Awareness’

Dr. Adshade certainly cannot be ignorant of the general data, so why is she touting this “no harm, no foul” research that would have us believe there is no especial harm in having sex with 14-year-olds? Are we surprised that she recoils from her own conclusions?

Would I feel comfortable with my fourteen-year-old being in a sexual relationship with an eighteen-year-old? No, I wouldn’t. But my discomfort, of that of any another parent, should not be the basis on which public policy is determined. It’s important that the age-of-consent is set based [on] empirical evidence clearly demonstrating that youth below that age are incapable of giving informed consent.

Oh! We must have “empirical evidence” in order to decide whether a 14-year-old is capable of “giving informed consent.” Otherwise, your ninth-grader is legally fair game, because it would be a barbaric travesty to punish the consensual partner of a 14-year-old, experts say.

“Help me find my puppy? . . . Get in the van.”

Parental “discomfort” cannot be the basis of law, Dr. Adshade tells us, because heaven forbid the interests of parents in supervising their own children should be considered politically legitimate.

What is going on here is that the social scientists are attempting to substitute their expertise for democratically enacted laws, to demote the ordinary American to second-class citizenship where, unless we can cite empirical evidence, we have no legal recourse to prevent our daughters from being ravished by sex-crazed trombonists. (Trust me about this problem — the plural of “anecdote” is “data,” you know.)

The “consent” that is truly at stake here is the consent of the governed, for which Americans once fought a revolution.

Are we a nation of laws? Do We the People have a right to be governed by laws enacted by our own representatives? Or does the self-declared superiority of social scientists entitle them to act as Platonic archons, without whose approval no law can be enacted or enforced? Shall the laws of the several states, variously establishing the legal age of sexual consent, be subject to veto by scientific consensus?

Shall the courts of Florida regard their law, which declares it a felony for an 18-year-old to have sex with a 14-year-old, as a dead letter because a Canadian Ph.D. disapproves of it?

Damn you, damn your Ph.D., and damn Canada, too!

Have we gotten so used to being bullied and lectured by these credentialed experts that we no longer have the courage to tell them to mind their own business, even when our own children are being endangered by such “scientific” nonsense emitted by academia?

But . . . Progress!

This idea that we must discard the traditions of the past and ignore the common-sense consensus of the citizens — because the past is obsolete and the citizens are bigoted rabble — has already taken us too far down a road proverbially paved with good intentions. That was what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was trying to say in his dissent in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by to day’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding. . . . The impossibility of distinguishing homosexuality from other traditional “morals” offenses is precisely why Bowers rejected the rational-basis challenge. “The law,” it said, “is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the Due Process Clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.”

Ah, the “rational-basis challenge,” riding in tandem harness with that wily beast, the Due Process Clause! But along the way (noted by the “…”), Scalia called attention to the Court majority as Dr. Frankenstein, creating a new monster, the Emerging Awareness Doctrine:

In all events we think that our laws and traditions in the past half century are of most relevance here. These references show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.

So, basically, any law enacted prior to 1953 — before “the past half century” that culminated in the Great Enlightenment of 2003 — is invalidated as not reflecting the “emerging awareness,” and who knows whither that awareness might further emerge?

At least they stipulated “adult persons,” but it was quite predictable that this new doctrine would cause some restless minds to start quibbling over definitions of such terms “in matters pertaining to sex.”

What is to prevent the Court, having declared its flexible notions about the time-stamped duration of “laws and traditions,” from then beginning to tinker around with the question of whether “adult persons” (age 18) might not also be entitled to “substantial protection” when conducting “their private lives” with not-quite-adult persons?

If Florida can’t draw the line at 16, where exactly can the line be drawn?

Given that a majority of the Supreme Court was able to locate within the Constitution a right to buttfucking — let’s not mince words, eh? — it’s hard to blame the supporters of Kaitlyn Hunt for hoping that the courts might somehow be able to find in there a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for high-school seniors whose “private lives” involve dildoing their 14-year-old basketball teammates.

Happy 14th Birthday! (Batteries not included.)

Why Do You Think They Call It ‘Jailbait’?

Look, if Kristin Ireland can get all teary-eyed and think of this stuff as a tragic “Lifetime movie,” why shouldn’t I imagine it as a sleazy 1956 exploitation flick? (Don’t judge me, haters.) Or perhaps we could go the “art movie” route with dramatic cinematography and existential dialogue: Deux Jeunes Filles dans l’Amour, we’ll call it — certain to be hailed as an artistic triumph when it debuts at Cannes.

Impossible, you say? Anything is possible, if in 1978 the French director Louis Malle could get away with casting 12-year-old Brooke Shields as a child prostitute whose virginity is auctioned off in a New Orleans bordello — and be defended for doing so by the 12-year-old’s mother:

When Violet (the role Brooke plays) chastely poses naked for the photographer Bellocq (Keith Carradine), Malle closed the set to everyone but himself and cinematographer Sven Nykvist. “I knew it would be tasteful,” says Teri [Shields]. “Anybody who calls it child pornography has not seen the damn thing. Rona Barrett is a fool. I don’t mind Brooke being called a sex symbol. But nymphet and Lolita rub me the wrong way.” Malle, who picked her over 300 auditioners, admiringly calls Brooke “a natural. She carried the entire picture on her shoulders.”

A 12-year-old in a nude scene. “Tasteful,” her mother said.

Well, this is art, you see, and if art won’t justify it, they’ll hit you with science, and if science doesn’t persuade you there’s nothing wrong  with it, they’ll stop trying to persuade you, and instead start protesting about their “rights” in an effort to compel you.

They want what they want, and they won’t let anybody stand in their way of getting what they want, and if you have no legal right to stop them, neither do you have a right to criticize them.

Nine times in her May 17 Facebook post Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother named the parents of the 14-year-old girl who pressed charges. She denounced these parents as “bigoted, religious zealots . . . full of hate and bigotry . . . delusional” for daring to object to what she called a “mutual consenting relationship . . . healthy and normal.” Her rant could only be described as a vindictive effort to demonize the younger girl’s parents, and for this cruel act of vengeance, the Hunt family gets rewarded with an invitation to appear on the Today show?

Such are the warped values which the apostles of Progress expect us to embrace: The parents of Kaitlyn Hunt launch a public crusade to make their daughter America’s Most Famous Sex Offender, while parents who tried to protect their 14-year-old from the corrupting influence of this tattooed teenage she-hooligan are condemned by liberals for the thought-crime of homophobia? And on top of all this — adding intellectual insult to moral injury — we get the Canadian Ph.D. taking to the pages of Psychology Today in order to minimize the harm and imply that Florida law lacks sufficient “empirical evidence” to be valid?

This entire Carnival of Dangerous Nonsense has been inspired by one simple fact: Kaitlyn Hunt got caught.

Let’s not kid ourselves: There are lots of 14-year-olds in Florida who have sex, and certainly a few of them are having sex with partners old enough to go prison if they were to get caught. But most of them get away with it, because they are not as stupid and arrogant as Kaitlyn Hunt, who knew what she was doing was illegal, who was warned by the younger girl’s parents to stop it, but who evidently didn’t imagine that anyone had the authority to stop her from doing what she wanted to do with anyone she wanted to do. She is the Veruca Salt of teenage perverts.

Should we pity her? Should we consult social science or invoke comparisons to civil-rights heroes on her behalf? Please.

Whatever happened to common sense? Where does Kate Hunt think the word “jailbait” came from, and what makes her think she’s exempt from the consequences of its definition?

Believe it or not, common sense actually used to be common enough you could find it all over the place, even in rock-and-roll songs:

What crazy stuff.
She looked so tough,
I had to follow her all the way home.
Then things went bad.
I met her dad.
He said, “You’d better leave my daughter alone.”

That song was a hit for the Coasters in 1957, two years before I was born, but ancient wisdom gets shoved aside by fashionable nonsense, some of it masquerading as science, and some of it parading as “social justice.”

Well, those teenage perverts had better stay away from my daughter. I might call the cops. Or I might just shoot first and explain later.

Damned trombone-playing freaks . . .

 




 

 

UPDATE: I had mistaken Dr. Adshade for a psychologist — Psychology Today, right? — but it turns out she’s actually an economist:

Marina Adshade, Ph.D., has spent the last ten years teaching economics and engaging in original economic research. In 2008, she launched an undergraduate course titled Economics of Sex and Love, which invited her students to approach questions of sex and love through an economist’s lens. The class was an immediate hit with students and, by the time the first term started, had generated international media attention. She has a Ph.D. from Queen’s University and currently teaches at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia.

Good grief, they let this weirdo teach undergraduates?

Well, it’s Canada, eh? They’re not even a real country, anyway.

UPDATE II: That Mr. G. Guy wonders why we let “people from other countries . . . tell us how to make our laws and run our country?”

Because Americans have lost all sense of pride in themselves, that’s why. No one with a modicum of self-respect would take advice from a Canadian. They’re worse than France. At least there’s an ocean between us and the stench of the French, but there’s no natural barrier to protect us from the Canadian Menace.

 

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Comments

59 Responses to “She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science”

  1. Mike G.
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:14 pm

    Science doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it. It all boils down to correct moral values we are taught as children by our parents, teachers and Pastors/Ministers.

    The fact that this Canadian Psychologist is in favor of possibly lowering the age of consent laws makes me think she has another agenda in mind, Perhaps she is a “Predator in Waiting” herself, but feels restrained by “anachronistic” laws against adults having sex with children.

  2. robertstacymccain
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:27 pm

    Oh, she’s just signifying her membership in the ranks of the enlightened.

  3. Mm
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:37 pm

    What is a “healthy sexual decision”? Who gets to define that term? Is it one size fits all? Doe they mean healthy physically, or healthy emotionally, mentally, and spiritually? And how to strangers who have never met your child know what is best for that child? How do thousands of free-Katers know the maturity level of her victim and the negative psychological impact that being prey has had on the girl?

  4. Latest Ruse To Lower Age Of Consent…Science | That Mr. G Guy's Blog
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:37 pm

    […] Stacy McCain has just written a long piece about the latest gambit by the supporters of sexual predator Kaitlyn Hunt in their quest to get her out of the predicament she got herself into by having sex with an underage girl. It’s long, but well worth the read. He gives an historical perspective to how we got where we are today: […]

  5. robertstacymccain
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:40 pm

    Well, of course, they jumped onto this “Free Kate” bandwagon knowing nothing more than what they read on her mother’s Facebook page or her father’s online petition, and to such crusaders actual knowledge of the situation is irrelevant to the warm feelings of self-righteousness they derive from their crusade on behalf of “social justice.”

    These are liberals, after all: Expecting them to pay attention to facts is really too much.

  6. Mike G.
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:48 pm

    Or she could be signifying her own moral turpitude.

  7. Kevin Trainor Jr.
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:57 pm

    Kevin Trainor Jr. liked this on Facebook.

  8. Charles G. Hill
    June 8th, 2013 @ 11:59 pm

    How did those 14-15 year-olds fare? “No worse,” says Dr. Adshade. Now there’s a standard we can all embrace: “no worse.”

    Remember when we were supposed to want the best for the kids?

  9. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 12:06 am

    Is there any longitude to this study? Or are we just talking near-term effects?

    “Well, the 14-year-olds who screwed around didn’t get chlamydia any more frequently than the 17-year-olds who screwed around …”

    What the hell, huh?

  10. Mike G.
    June 9th, 2013 @ 12:14 am

    Who knows what diseases are lurking in the shadows just waiting for the proper time to come out.

    AIDS wasn’t even on the radar during the sexual revolution of the 60’s and early 70’s. And the disease I got, Hep C*, although hard to transmit sexually wasn’t even a known disease until the late 80’s and there was no reliable test for it until the early 90’s.

    * I wrote about how I got Hep C on my blog and the treatment I went through. I just finished my treatment last week. http://thatmrgguy.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/i-have-hepatitis-c-thanks-uncle-sam/

  11. Adjoran
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:06 am

    “No worse” is an absolutely meaningless term without the specific behaviors the “researcher” considers “bad” enumerated. It seems even likely she would consider acceptable a wide range of practices and promiscuity most parents would not.

  12. Adjoran
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:18 am

    While I’m sure the pedophiles were entranced by “Pretty Baby” it wasn’t a movie that glorified it, as I recall. Malle certainly wanted to shock his audience, and probably as much for financial as artistic reasons. But my recollection is a feeling of pity for most of the characters, and revulsion and scorn at those who took advantage of Shield’s character and others. So I would disagree the movie is part of the cultural “normalization” or “emerging awareness” of childhood sex.

    If anything, Shields’ later movie “The Blue Lagoon” seemed to treat youth sex more “non-judgmentally,” although even in that there were constant indications the young couple weren’t mature enough for an adult relationship. If you could stay awake long enough to see them.

    Is any treatment of the issue purely exploitative? What about “Lolita” years before?

    At some point there is a danger of falling into the category of the patient taking the Rorschach Test and seeing sexual symbolism in every ink blot. “You seem obsessed with sex,” the psychiatrist remarks at the end. “ME?” objects the patient, “You are the one showing me all the dirty pictures!”

  13. Adjoran
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:19 am

    As if the two were different things?

  14. Adjoran
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:23 am

    Of course there are 14 year old girls of different levels of maturity, but it is a subjective standard – don’t ALL offenders echo Kaitlyn’s “She acted older” in some fashion? So there is an objective legal standard because the alternative is no standard at all.

    It should be noted that NOTHING in all the Hunt family’s whining has come close to showing any particularly precocious maturity on the part of her victim. They just make the claim – like their initial claim the ages were 17 and 15. Experience tells us it is probably just as dishonest.

  15. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:29 am

    Wait — you’ve seen all these movies? Part of your personal DVD collection? I mean, I don’t want to be judgmental or anything … 😉

  16. Finrod Felagund
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:31 am

    Not all trombonists. I waited until I was 22 as it turned out.

  17. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:38 am

    The exception that proves the rule.

  18. Jimmie
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:41 am

    “Not exactly and, in fact, comprehensive research using data collected
    from 26,000 high school students in British Columbia found that the
    sexual decision making of those who became sexually active when they
    were 14 to 15 years old was no worse than those who became sexually
    active when they were 16 to 17 years old.”

    Obviously, the message here is we should ratchet the age of consent downwards, right? Obviously.

    But, and here’s a crazy idea, what if we kept on studying folks’ sexual decision-making, find out at what age that gets measurably better, and set the age of consent there?

    Now there’s no way we’d do that because the AoC would end up somewhere around 25, which is silly. Equally silly, though, is trying use science to quantify something like the age at which you cease to become a child and begin to take up adult responsibilities.

    We’ve managed pretty well as a society to ease kids into adult responsibility through various age-based laws. Most of those have come about through rough eyeballing and hard life experience. As they should. The age of consent is 16-ish because we’ve decided that’s where kids should *begin* to come out of their parents’ protective umbrella. How hard is that to understand, really?

  19. Nick Temple
    June 9th, 2013 @ 3:39 am

    I had to go to the wayback machine to find this http://web.archive.org/web/20090118042209/http://home.att.net/~r.s.mccain/kinsey.html

    Kinsey’s Crimes Against Children
    The damage we let that pervert do, keeps advancing

  20. Common Nonsense | hogewash
    June 9th, 2013 @ 6:29 am

    […] Stacy McCain has a post up tracing his version of the history of the Sexual Revolution. He has a somewhat different take on the current situation from Mr. O’Rourke. […]

  21. Pablo
    June 9th, 2013 @ 7:37 am

    So this 28 year old perv was banging a 15 year old, taking pictures and sending them to her father. Check out his arraignment, noting his remark at the 30 second mark upon having been advised as to why he is being charged.

    We’ve progressed beyond protecting the children. Why haven’t you h8ers caught up?

  22. Da Tech Guy On DaRadio Blog » Blog Archive » Free Katie failing: Entertainment Industry Hardest Hit
    June 9th, 2013 @ 8:14 am

    […] Today Stacy McCain gets to the nitty gritty (and I mean gritty) of the Kate Hunt case. […]

  23. rustypaladin
    June 9th, 2013 @ 8:21 am

    Dr. Adshade said her study found that 14-15 year olds did no worse in sexual decision making than 16-17 year olds. Great. Awesome. How did they compare to 18-20? How about 25+? There is a reason car insurance rates drop substantially at age 25. Dr. Adshade’s study might be a better argument for raising the age of consent than lowering it. It demonstrates that young people are dumber longer than scientists want us to believe.

  24. WJJ Hoge
    June 9th, 2013 @ 8:21 am

    Never look at the Trombones; you’ll only encourage them.–Richard Strauss

  25. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 8:27 am

    When I was in high-school band — and yes, I played the trombone — our section had some of the most incorrigible sex fiends in school. The drum section, well, they were just a bunch of outright hoodlums. All the “good” kids in band played clarinet or trumpet. My buddy, the biggest dope dealer in school, played saxophone. He married a girl in the flag corps who just happened to be the first girl I ever French-kissed. Go figure.

  26. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 8:28 am

    Obviously, this is why you don’t have a Ph.D.

  27. NeoWayland
    June 9th, 2013 @ 8:30 am

    Morals change.

    Prior to the 1950s, it was morally questionable if a “black” man married a “white” woman.

    Woodrow Wilson segregated the civil service in 1913. Before that appointments were on merit.

    Professional women were frowned on through the LATE 1960s.

    Morals change.

    I’ll tell you right now my views of nudity and sex are different than most of the people who read this site. I agree that there should be an age of consent and that adults messing with kids should not be allowed. I’ll even overlook the cases of parents and grandparents being busted when they tried to get pictures developed when the pictures had kids taking a bath or urinating on a campfire.

    Yep, there should be an age of consent.

    But this business of Wisdom of the Ages from a Holy Book won’t work. If your argument is the “Divine told me so,” then people will ignore you. It’s one of the oldest justifications, and it’s brought nothing but sorrow and bloodshed. Whatever you may personally believe, it’s not enough to convince people unless they share your beliefs.

    No matter what the inspiration, it’s still what we humans say and do.

  28. Mm
    June 9th, 2013 @ 8:58 am

    Good piece by RSM, thanks for linking it. One of the key take-aways for me is that if you give someone a clipboard, a lab coat, and claim “science,” people will believe anything.

  29. WJJ Hoge
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:02 am

    I was in the Trumpet section until I switched to Tuba. Make of that what you will.

  30. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:06 am

    I’ll tell you right now my views of nudity and sex are different than most of the people who read this site.

    Thanks. We’ve notified the FBI.

  31. Alessandra
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:09 am

    What a beautiful piece, McCain!

    From the study: “Young youth in this study were equally likely as the older (16-17) group to have sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol (which one quarter of them did during their most recent sexual experience).

    =============

    Since Ms. Adshade considers this to be healthy behavior, little else needs to be said about her arguments.

    And I’m sure pretty soon she’ll do another study showing that 12 yr olds are just as capable as 14 yr olds to make decisions about sex, so…

    It’s clear that those defending Kaitlyn would encourage, aid, and abet teenagers in committing many kinds of sexually exploitative and abusive actions, including every single statutory rape in society. This is, after all, the liberal recipe for sexuality regarding teenagers. Despite their ridiculous protestations that they are not in the same boat as the NAMBLA folks, liberals who normalize homosexuality show us that, in practice, they want to largely achieve what NAMBLA failed to do. They want to have sex with minors and claim to be oppressed and misunderstood if they aren’t allowed to – the only difference is the cut-off age, since NAMBLA also included smaller kids. Furthermore, NAMBLA consistently pushed to lower consent age for sex – exactly one of the issues in this case.

  32. Alessandra
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:12 am

    Some missing data – Submitted by ethy on May 28, 2013 – 2:37pm.

    The study Adshade cites as showing no difference in sexual-decision making between younger and older teens does in fact report significant differences. Specifically, it found:

    “younger females were more than twice as likely (16.1%) to report forced sex in their lifetime than older females (7.3%) … younger females were signi?cantly more likely to report having had unwanted sexual intercourse because of drug or alcohol use than were older females
    (18.3% vs. 11.3%).”

    The author’s conclusion acknowledges that those differences support the hypothesis that “younger adolescents are at greater risk of exploitation.” They state that as follows:

    “This study did find some support for the rationale that younger adolescents are at greater risk of exploitation than older teens. However, when considering the number of adolescents affected by this legislation, the change in age of consent may not have been necessary.”

    While they do opine that Canada’s raising the age of consent from 14 to 16 might not have been necessary, that’s just a debatable opinion, not data itself.

  33. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:17 am

    Heh. Interesting you should find that. That was on my old (pre-blog) personal site. The Washington Times, back in the day, didn’t archive most articles past a week. Then, they started archiving everything but in 2007, they switched hosting and — how I cussed a storm when I found out about it — decided to ditch their pre-2007 archives in the process. Then in 2008, they did a re-design on the site and lost still more archives.

    Most of the work I did at the Washington Times — hundreds of articles — is now only available to those with Lexis-Nexis — although I occasionally pull one from my personal batch (got the Lexis-Nexis pulls before I left the paper) and republish it.

    The Reisman article came to mind as I was working on this post, because of course she was the one who blew the whistle on the pro-pedophile movement in 1977, and subsequently did a controversial project as part of the Reese Commission study.

  34. NeoWayland
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:19 am

    If I were worried, I wouldn’t have told you, would I?

  35. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:24 am

    Right: Common sense would tell you that such differences would exist, and the study actually found the data, but these particular data didn’t make the “topline” findings of the study, which were all that Dr. Adshade cared about: “No harm, no foul.”

    It’s also worth noting that the study relies on self-reported findings, so there’s that asterisk.

  36. Groty1
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:49 am

    Everybody, or at least those who have researched it, knows that the origins of “social science” began with the Frankfurt School. And the Frankfurt School was created by avowed Marxists with the explicit purpose of destroying the traditions of Western Civilization (Judeo-Christian morals and values, free enterprise, etc.). Having its origins in Marxism explains why 90% of the academics in the various fields of “social science” have a hard left political ideology. So “social science” research at its core is inherently political and often intentionally corrupt. Look at the now largely discredited Kinsey Report on human sexuality. Published in two volumes in 1948 and 1953, it was taught to be the landmark study of human sexuality for 20-30 years. Not until the ’70s did people start to look at how the study was constructed and question its findings. Today, most people consider it a terribly biased study (bordering on fraudulent because the methods employed to identify the survey participants were so grossly biased that it can not be considered a random sample) whose author was very likely a closeted homosexual who intentionally biased the study to change societal perceptions about sexual perversions, especially his own. And yet it was considered “the Bible” of human sexuality for probably a quarter century.
    I’m sure some social science studies are performed using sound methods, but be highly skeptical of them all.

  37. Alessandra
    June 9th, 2013 @ 9:59 am

    Another point- here are the criteria:

    Comparisons included: forced sex, sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs, multiple partners, condom use, effective contraception use, self-reported sexually transmitted infections, and pregnancy involvement.
    ===============
    That’s all, nothing else. You notice there is no context about the type of interaction or relationship, aside of the question if it was forced. So if it was a completely loveless experience, if it was a bad emotional experience, as long as it was consensual, it doesn’t get counted as bad.

    You can find many people who had sex early who will tell you that the experience was not good.

    Furthermore, an early experience robs the child from having a truly mature first experience with someone they are seriously involved with later on, as young adults. If they are peer-pressured into having sex early, they have this robbed from them.

  38. Alessandra
    June 9th, 2013 @ 10:14 am

    This is also important to note from the study:

    Finally, given that existing laws do not seem to be protecting the most sexually vulnerable group of children, those
    less than 13 years of age, future policy in Canada
    should focus on effective strategies to address the
    problem of child sexual abuse, including increasing
    the enforcement of existing child abuse laws.

    Unfortunately they discuss the issue more.

  39. Freddy At Night
    June 9th, 2013 @ 10:36 am

    Just say to ‘NO’ to Canadian buggery!

  40. Pablo
    June 9th, 2013 @ 10:51 am

    Eh. They already knew.

  41. Common Sense Junction Political Blog
    June 9th, 2013 @ 10:55 am

    […] This Week’s best blog post in all Blogdom: […]

  42. Jim G
    June 9th, 2013 @ 11:32 am

    As the author suggests, this kind of biased sophistry is not exclusive to the social scientist. We have seen the same kind of academic litmus tests applied in the hard sciences as well – look back to Lysenko and currently at climate change – to see the same kind of sterilized group-think. Skepticism, once the hallmark of legitimate intellectual pursuit, is now grounds for ostracism and banishment.

  43. RS
    June 9th, 2013 @ 12:04 pm

    The deference to “experts” is one of the main reasons our public school system is so screwed up. Parents, who normally took a profound interest in their children’s education have been bullied into believing that only the “professionals” truly know what’s best for their children. Consequently, parents are kept out of the loop while all manner of experiments predicated on the latest “scientific” research are practiced on our kids. When parents do discover what’s going on and try to push back, they are marginalized or vilified. What we’re seeing with this #FreeKate nonsense is the result of 30+ years of this. Unfortunately, the train has left the station and is long gone. The only hope for future generations is an alternative system, i.e. homeschooling or parochial education where common decency does not become jetsam in favor of the latest fad.
    BTW, there were 300 sets of parents who wanted their daughters to audition for “Pretty Baby?” WTF?

  44. DaveO
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:32 pm

    Who is going to pay for all the abortions, abandoned babies, and teen mothers that will be the direct result of all of this?

    We’re not talking marriage, or long-term partnerships here. Once Miss Pretty In Pink gets pregnant, she’s dropped off on a curb in Des Moines with a kiss and a promise to be back for the child.
    We can’t even pay for the retirement of the military and civil/foreign service, and we’re going to add tens of thousands of millenial trailer park queens?

  45. AGoyAndHisBlog
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:45 pm

    – “… advocates of the consensus belief have spent years if not decades orchestrating purges of their critics and blackballing their opponents.”

    Too true.

    However, this deceitful process belies the fact that cooler heads do, in fact, exist in liberal academe. And one, at least, has published research that is critical to the future of our society. Any society, if history is a guide.

    “If social justice researchers and activists [i.e., leftists -ed.] want to make progress and be consistent with their own values, they will have to understand, respect, and work with the moral concerns of people with whom they disagree.” – Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D. (a psychologist, not an economist, publicly pissing off all the right people)

    Haidt pisses off all the right people – leftists, atheist zealots, “liberals”, et al. – because he’s unlocked The Code. That Code – which is determined by human development, not political ideology – explains the existence of this perpetually adolescent morality which insists on “evidence based” justification for any and all limits on behavior (that “evidence” always carefully controlled by leftist academicians, of course). In doing so, the insights revealed by Haidt’s work provide the “Why” of the “What” that Diana West exposes so well in “The Death of the Grown-Up”.

    As a self-described, recently converted “former liberal” himself (uhm… can’t we ALL relate here??), Haidt is also clearly an expert at Speaking Truth to Adolescence. This is a trait that exists pretty much nowhere in the conservative realm, as demonstrated by the constant head-butting between Us and Them.

    I mention this because non-“liberal” individuals must consider this trait when reading Haidt’s published work. Simply put, Haidt’s doing HIS part: working to open the eyes and minds of “liberals” (as his were opened), using language and an approach that THEY respond to. It will grate, for that reason, but only superficially so if one digs even a little bit into what he’s actually saying. His prose – which stylistically smacks of the moral relativism that appeals to the left – must not stop US from benefiting from his research, and doing OUR part.

    If there’s any doubt, here’s the bottom line, where Haidt draws the crucial distinction between the “childhood concerns” which activate the pathologically permissive left and the “adult moral matrix” which characterizes, well, most everyone else:

    “Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other potential concerns are left undeveloped and unconnected to the web of shared meanings and values that become our adult moral matrix.”

    We ignore the tools Haidt has provided at our peril.

    http://bit.ly/16ET2DT

  46. News of the Week for June 9th, 2013 | The Political Hat
    June 9th, 2013 @ 1:49 pm

    […] She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science If you had to fix a date in history when the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s reached its Jacobins-and-guillotines stage, when even those who had originally welcomed and applauded the revolution began to recoil from the perverse “liberation” they had wrought, the 1978 release of Pretty Baby may well have been the pivot-point. The AIDS scare of the 1980s would accelerate the counter-revolution — in fact, the disease was already beginning to spread in the late 1970s, although it was not until the ’80s that the pandemic was recognized — but it was Pretty Baby and headlines about child pornography that alarmed American mothers about the encroaching danger to their daughters. […]

  47. Social Scientists’ Mad Experiments | The Necropolitan Sentinel
    June 9th, 2013 @ 2:25 pm

    […] reject empiricism. I haven't had much time this weekend, so I direct you to Stacy's, where he writes about the pseudoscientific normalization of young teen sex, despite studies that show early sexual activity often correlates with less-happy outcomes in […]

  48. Obsessed? Who, Me? : The Other McCain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 3:27 pm

    […] to mimic the Marina Adshade, Ph.D.. method — i.e., nothing is valid unless empirically proven by social science research — but […]

  49. robertstacymccain
    June 9th, 2013 @ 4:12 pm

    If you will read Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, you will find an excellent exposition of how the reliance on “experts” tends toward the inability of people to help themselves. If we think of people as naturally capable of solving the ordinary problems of their lives — and we are, after all the descendants of people who survived much worse problems than we face today — then we don’t wish to subject them to constant hectoring from experts.

    Think about this: Did your great-grandmother need a parenting book to teach her how to care for a baby? Did she need cookbooks to tell her how to fix supper? Think about all the things your ancestors had to do, back before electricity and indoor plumbing, and then ask yourself why all these “experts” think you are in need of their advice and supervision.

    It’s a scam, is what it is, and this racket of turning us all into clients of the Credentialed Class has the effect of creating a demand (in the form of helplessness) which the licensed vendors of expertise are only too happy to provide — for a fee. And if this self-interested rent-seeking by the licensed experts doesn’t gin up enough clients in a free-market environment — if we’re not buying enough expertise to keep them fully and lucratively employed — then they will find a way to get the government to subsidize the provision of their services.

    Of course, the rest of us are not so stupid that we can’t see what’s actually happening with this shabby scam. It’s about as honest as a three-card monte hustle, but when you point out the phony hypocrisy of it all, you’ll be branded an “anti-intellectual” and dismissed. Nobody’s going to publish you in the Chronicle of Higher Education once you say what everybody knows, namely that the Chronicle of Higher Education is an academic circle jerk for insider gossip.

  50. Nick Temple
    June 9th, 2013 @ 4:27 pm

    Kinsey was a disgusting pervert and promoter of pedophilia. He used data collected from child molesters with stop watches to construct tables of age and time to orgasm. One of those pedophiles was a mass murderer

    The jackass died from injuries sustained in some overly self abusing masturbation.

    There is a documentary on his pedophiles on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htAUysRPvNsveit

    Here is RSM’s review of the documentary from 1999:http://web.archive.org/web/20090118042209/http://home.att.net/~r.s.mccain/kinsey.html

    Then there is Judith Reisman who has been all over this since the 70’s

    http://drjudithreisman.org/