Yesterday morning the actress/scientology crank Kirstie Alley must have been feeling especially judgy so she fired up her Twitter and tweeted out a series of very strange tweets attacking what she sees as a perversely permissive society.
I want to know what on earth she was watching at 6:44 AM Eastern that was “perverse” enough to rouse her to tweet. Are the Teletubbies reenacting scenes from Salo? Has the Farm Report gone x-rated?
Gotta give her points for the Caligula reference; she’s gone old school.
“Morals are guidelines for better survival?” That is the strangest definition of “morals” I’ve seen. Must be a Scientology thing.
Oh yeah, it is, along with L.. Ron Hubbard’s creepy notion of ethics as whatever is good for Scientilogy.
I don’t think I want Scientologists to be teaching kids about morality and ethics or anything, really.
Or trying to stop schools from teaching sex ed.
I don’t think you’re kidding, Kirstie. I just think you’re a little, well, the politest way to say it is that you’re a little confused. Who out there is teaching the kind of “open-mindedness” that would lead to an acceptance of pedophilia? Is this some kind of underhanded dig at the LGBTQ+ community or drag queen story hour or whatever?
I’m guessing it is, because her Twitter timeline is full of jokes about the pronouns trans folks use.
By their endlessly repeated jokes ye shall know them.
I also noticed a non-ironic retweet of Candace Owens, which is definitely a sign that your life has gone way off track.
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I spent many years as a prosecutor. I prosecuted pedophiles, though not a lot. I remember well the Nursery School/Day Care Center hysteria of the 1980s, when accusations of child molestation against teachers and caregivers reached epidemic proportions. Of course, almost all of them were false. Many lives were destroyed based on lies.
Pedophilia is a relatively rare pathology. Some estimate it at 5% of the population, which I believe is much too high a number. But I’m not an expert.
QAnon uses accusations of pedophilia as a recruiting tool, but they are far from the first. It is an ancient libel, and handy if you want to immediately mark someone out for ostracism or (much) worse. And people need to be very, very careful about tossing such an accusation around. Pedophilia exists, horribly, and always has. But it is becoming as cheap an epithet as “fake news”, and far more dangerous. Alley isn’t helping.
Well, I do like his very inclusive policy as to who gets to be senator.
(Say what you like about Incitatus, but, in his political career, he never put a hoof wrong.)
@Alan
If a horse’s ass can be a Senator, why not the entire horse?
She’s a Scientologist, so if she announced the sun was going to be rising in the east tomorrow, I’d be getting up really early to look out my window.
Besides that, she’s always struck me as, um… not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Bad combination.
I’d say that children in residential schools have had ready access to the underbelly of humanity. And enslaved children. And child soldiers. Or does Alley just mean white children of prosperous classes in the modern industrialized world? (Who weren’t in the Cadet Org?)
I’m not opposed to a good “ok, boomer,” when appropriate, but I don’t think boomerishness is the issue here, Kirstie. I don’t think “we’re all heading to a terrible future where sexual abuse of children is considered acceptable by all” is a common boomer belief.
Are you kidding me? We made his modern-day counterpart president in 2016.
(for certain values of “we”)
If the right is so against pedophilia, why do they fight tooth and nail whenever someone suggests educating young girls about consent and red flag behaviors?
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
If the right is so against pedophilia, why do they fight tooth and nail whenever someone suggests educating young girls about consent and red flag behaviors?
Because making children (especially girls) repositories of vicarious purity—which serves as a justification for all sorts of authoritarian behavior—is so much more important than keeping them safe, which would entail actually teaching them about the scary things in life and thus compromising their precious innocence.
(At least the specifically sexual scary things; school shooting drills, for example, are normal if you attended school after 1999. I’m told that school shootings are as archetypal a nightmare motif for millennials and younger as nuclear war was for boomers.)
Or as I call him Tang Caligula.
@jsrtheta : 5% would be very high, yes. That being said, that depend on whether you are trying to count people that are attracted to children, or people that actually act upon that. Similar to how most people that think about murder don’t actually kill anyone.
As to if it’s a pathology, I am unsure but wary of that kind of classification. I mean, being an asshole isn’t a pathology after all.
The right is only really against a subset of pedophilia.
Okay, Kirstie, but it’s hard for me to think about your dire predictions when I’m still squicked out by the fact that Cheers hypersexualized women and treated incest casually. You were a star on this TV show, so your name is forever linked with this dialogue:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0539793/characters/nm0001101
Scientology itself has a history or protecting pedophiles within its membership because it is a high crime to turn a Scientologist in good standing over to the authorities.
There are some claims that Scientology appeals particularly to pedophiles with its view that children are immortal beings in small bodies, though I’m not sure any causal link has been established.
And of course Hubbard spent his last years surrounded by teenagers who waited on him hand and foot.
@Full Metal Ox – Also, we can’t have young girls learning how to question authority (aka older white males). It’s important to keep them naive and trusting so they can be groomed more easily.
My younger twin started having school shooting nightmares when he was in freaking kindergarten, after one lockdown drill. Fuck the Second Amendment, and all the gun-worshiping assholes who would rather have kids walking around fearing for their lives than spend one second being introspective about their own insecurities. If I could afford to move to another country, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
@specialffrog : scientology have some common points with organized religion it seem.
(not that it’s limited to pedophilia of course. Financial crimes covering are common too in boths churchs and scientology)
@Buttercup : sorry for your twin :(. What make it even more infuriating to me is that childrens have drills for a lot of different traumatic events like building fire, nuclear meltdown evacuation, etc. The only two drill I have ever heard traumatizing children are active shooter drills and drug-related drills.
As if the goal wasn’t to make them ready for that kind of emergency, but to scare them.
““Morals are guidelines for better survival?” That is the strangest definition of “morals” I’ve seen. Must be a Scientology thing.” Exactly! That’s a major religious doctrine of theirs, that survival is the overarching drive.
I’ve heard so many stories of ex-Scientologists having to buy dictionaries after they leave the organization because they are no longer certain of what words mean.
I only ever really saw Kirstey Alley as Lt Saavik in The Wrath of Khan, so all of these Scientology etc things always seem extra strange. I may have to start preferring Robin Curtis at some point.
Would it be too “open minded” to make sure people who are attracted to children can get help before they act on it? Because that’s mostly the kind of support I’ve seen anyone legit calling for, and I can’t see what’s wrong with that.
@Masse_mysteria : also, this is an implementation of the old fallacy of the slippery slope. The trick is making it look like that people are more tolerant because they accept a bit of evilness, so they could be elad to accept a lot of evilness.
Where in fact people have moral standard just as high as ever, but actually analyzing what formerly was taboo or otherwise off limit lead us to understand it wasn’t problematic.
I could gladly live the rest of my life without hearing another word from or about Kirstie Alley.
On a more positive note, I’d like to wish everybody here a Happy Independence Day.
@Ohlmann: You probably already know this, so this is more for the benefit of lurkers than anything… “Slippery slope” is one of those fallacies which is only usually a fallacy. If you can prove a reasonable chain of events which leads to the bottom of the slope, then it’s not actually fallacious (but that still doesn’t mean it’s correct, as “reasonable” is sometimes confounded by blind spots in our collective knowledge).
The vast majority of such arguments are basically an underpants gnome situation; there’s something vital in the middle which is really vague or glossed over or contains an unspoken PRATT (Point Refuted A Thousand Times, AKA something long proven to be false beyond all reasonable doubt but some people still believe it anyway) or even missing altogether. Regardless, this middle link is so weak as to be useless as proof, if not outright wrong.
In this case, there’s no reasonable path between “being open-minded” and “legitimizing pedophilia”. Or at least none which I’ve seen demonstrated anywhere, least of all Kirstie Alley’s take. It might make a little more sense from the perspective of Scientology “morality”, but given how morally dubious the foundations of Scientology are, I wouldn’t put any stock in it.
What’s “pediphilia”, anyway? A foot fetish?
That bit about support for pedophilia might have carried some weight 40-50 years ago, when there were organisations openly campaigning for pedophile rights and the lowering or abolition of the age of consent. Here in the UK, there was the Pedophile Information Exchange; in the US, there was NAMBLA. The former drew some support from non-pedophiles, and this famously caused trouble for the Labour Party later, when people remembered that one or two of its senior members had, in the 70s, spoken in support of PIE’s aims. Nowadays, though, it’s not the “open minded” who want to normalise pedophilia, it’s incels, libertarians, the “actually it’s called ephebophilia” crowd.
@Moggie: Foot fetishism is called podophilia. Pediphilia would probably be a walking fetish.
There was a time, in the 60s and 70s, where people were campaigning to treat paedophilia as just another sexual orientation.
There were people like that in the German Green Party when it started out.
As a whole we have come to the conclusion that the thing that makes a sexual act ethical is consent.
And as for shoving sexuality down kids throats:
Why the fuck do straights go ‘Oh, is s/he your girl/boyfriend?’ whenever a toddler plays with a kid of of the perceived opposite sex?!
You should stick to the incels and stop judging middle aged women who have opinions different from yours. You mock every woman who doesn’t subscribe to the new dogma, and don’t seem to realize that you’re part of the misogyny problem. Who TF are you to be the arbiter of what women can think? She may be a kook but why do you have to jump on it? Is WHTM the new place to hate on women? Stop it.