The hypocrisy of the use of pedophilia in the American, British and other media and the pseudo-left, that if you frame it as "free speech- free press" that's not only good but also, by some supremely twisted thinking, sacrosanct but if a Catholic priest or other religious figure does it, that makes it the greatest of crimes, is something that is certainly worth considering.
I have one standard for all of it, it is all a crime against vulnerable people and it should all be stopped and punished.
It is in no way surprising or unexpected that Milo Yiannopoulos and Alan Ginsberg both framed their advocacy of child rape and other depravity as championing "freedom of speech". Here's what Ginsberg said in "Thoughts on NAMBLA".*
In the January 17, 1983, issue Time magazine, following the FBI disinformation campaign, attacked NAMBLA as a group involved in the "systematic exploitation of the weak and immature by the powerful and disturbed." That struck me as a fitting description of Time magazine itself. NAMBLA's a forum for reform of those laws on youthful sexuality which members deem oppressive, a discussion society not a sex club. I joined NAMBLA in defense of free speech.
Which is a blatant lie. It was a group that wanted and still wants to eliminate the age of consent and the legalization of adults having sex with children SO THEY COULD HAVE SEX WITH CHILDREN WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT GETTING ARRESTED. The only reason an adult would try to have sex with a young child is to take advantage of their inability to give an adult level of informed consent. There are people who are over the age of 18 who are unable to do that but it is a practical certainty that people younger, especially far younger than that, will not be able to do so and will be vulnerable to being duped or coerced or manipulated into or forced into doing things that are harmful to them and which will either injure them or, in many cases, end up killing them. That is not a matter of "free speech" it is a matter of child abuse.
These days such advocacy of child rape and exploitation will talk about "depriving them of their agency" which shows how the pseudo-scientific language of market economics is compatible with the libertarianism which acts as an artificial substitute for what used to be liberalism. I first noticed that when a middle-aged blogger with a PhD in economics from an Ivy League School wrote yet another of his posts decrying that it was illegal for men to have sex with young adolescents. On a "liberal" blog. I remember thinking that there was no way that men using young girls for sex was compatible with any liberalism I wanted anything to do with. Not long after that I began to realize that most of what was called "liberal" these days was really libertarianism, it took reading several essays by Marilynne Robinson and others to realize that con job and shift in denotation started in the late 18th century.
The reasons that age of consent laws should be set and should be set at a sufficiently high age to prevent adults from exploiting children are exactly the same ones ones that justify laws prohibiting child labor and other laws protecting children from the exploitation by adults. They are the same reasons that there should be different standards in judging criminal behavior by children because they cannot reason and think in a way expected of adults.
That the most overrated literary figure in the United States in the past century or someone like Gore Vidal makes a pitiful attempt to twist words to defend or promote their desire to exploit children, the slogan "free speech" will be the first one reached for because it is such an effective means of duping so many adults. Adults in large numbers fall for that absurd ploy as used by such con-artists, it was very effective until about the 1990s, when lots of adults would let it pass as long as it was not upper-class children who were the victims of it. Since so many adult fell for that dodge, imagine how vulnerable children are to the same kind of deception.
I distrust the FBI as much as anyone and think its present Director and large numbers of its agents probably belong in prison for screwing with the last election. I distrusted them pretty much from the early 1960s but if they enforced laws that prevented the rape and exploitation of children, I'm all for that. Ginsberg throwing up that acronym was another cover for what he was really advocating.
One of my old high school teachers told me she thought Ginsberg was "Overpraised and underworked" which is still the most valid critical assessment of his work I know of. Having done what few of those who pose as his admirers have done, read more than HOWL and a few of the other poems in that book, just about everything he wrote after that is complete crap. Someone sent me a link to the piece Ginsberg's college rival and enemy, the absurd Norman Podhoretz wrote several months after Ginsberg's death. I stuck it out and read the interminable thing which is really mostly about Podhoretz. While some of the background is interesting - if it's accurate - it really has nothing much to do with what I said. I'm a traditional American style liberal egalitarian, Podhoretz is a right wing elitist. We both might dislike Alan Ginsberg and his writing but I'm not sure we even agree on why he was a bad writer.
I think pretty much all of the beat stuff is awful. I completely resent the attempts of some really crappy writers and people trying to expropriate the greatness of the jazz that was being made in those years as if the incredible discipline and brilliance of - mostly - black musicians who were some of the greatest artists in the history of music was theirs to exploit. Nothing any of those white boys wrote comes close to the music as art or as virtuosic genius. None of those white writers put in the time or discipline or self-sacrifice to be able to do something in words that matches what those musicians did in pitch and time. None of them came up with results even approaching the level of the less profound jazz of that era. Words about music tend to miss it entirely, words mimicking improvisation by those who never mastered words are worse. Try reading more of Ginsberg than you'll find in a college anthology - if they're still bothering to include him in those, these days. I'll bet you'll find it even harder than I found reading Podhoretz.
* I will not link to pieces advocating the rape of children.
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