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Vaniver comments on Open thread, Feb. 01 - Feb. 07, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 01 February 2016 08:24AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 05 February 2016 12:06:16AM *  0 points [-]

Oh, very likely, but Clarity claimed that people were libelling Roosh for proposing to legalize rape when actually he's just proposing, er, to legalize rape.

I agree with this framing for this specific case, but I do want to point out that there are huge noncentral fallacy issues with this framing in general; if I say "hey, we should add an age difference exemption to all the statutory rape laws that don't have one yet" that would be arguing for legalizing some rapes (because it involves redefining rape).

(The steelman of Roosh is basically arguing that, instead of changing campus culture to reflect the law, we should change the law to reflect campus culture. So it's certainly skeevy enough that "legalizing rape" has fair connotations, and that's even before one drops out of the steelman lens and into the literal lens.)

Comment author: gjm 05 February 2016 01:49:59PM 1 point [-]

huge noncentral fallacy issues

Yup, I agree. That's why I remarked that I think a large majority of rapes fall into the category he's proposing should be legal, even if you adopt a relatively narrow definition of rape.

Of course, I could be wrong. (And I could have said more explicitly that "legalize some instances of X" is by no means always fairly summarized as "legalize X".)