This is a colloquial discussion of sexual crimes against children, and your hypothesized edge case is so far off the beaten path it might as well be in Narnia.

It’s not just pedantry, it’s Lemmy. You really cannot get more colloquial than here.

No one is stopping anyone from getting help for anything, and it is ridiculous for you to suggest otherwise.

Getting help for anything is about hitting bottom, some limit against which you can no longer bear the cost of challenging. So if your real and genuine concern is truly that some offender be not offended by the colloquial use of the word pedophile, they should not be in this thread chock full of those very obviously mocking them, and neither should you.

It is a fine line, and I clearly said I am not defending abuse.

Funny, that’s never been an argument I ever had to make for myself, somehow.

I would argue you have jumped to the cliche ‘wont someone think of the kids’.

It’s no cliché for me. I live with a survivor. When it comes to sexual offenses against children, the kids are the ONLY ones I think about. Adults can take care of themselves, and so can you, which is why it’s amazing to me how offended you are by someone taking the children’s side.

So much so that you actually reduce the position of caring about survivors and their loved ones to merely, in your own word, a cliché. You can’t even discuss what I actually said; you’re forced to erect strawmen: “The downvoted response reeks of the old attitude of oh look a pediatrician lets beat him!” and calling any level of pushback against your insistence on honoring the nuance of pro-pedophilic understanding “the frenzy.”

I don’t need that level of distracting drama, and didn’t employ it: that’s ALL your own.

Life is not black and white, and taking the time to understand motivation of attacks does not mean you sympathize with offenders.

And it does not mean you don’t, either. But this wasn’t about taking time to understand, it was about holding up and defending your all-important nuance that moves eyes away from the crime and toward “understanding the offender.” I don’t stand for it where it’s just a feint to derail discussion away from the victims and onto an arbitrary line in the sand. That helps no one at all, and that’s where you are right now.

Funny thing, I can actually sympathize with offenders, and have specifically had to do exactly that in my own life to be able to support those offended against, which is a tightrope your rhetorical nuance doesn’t hold a candle to, and one you obviously cannot begin to understand.

And I would not ask you to: caring about the actual children whose lives are destroyed is just “cliché” to you, you’ve made that clear. By the same token, your claim to precious linguistic nuance means nothing to me at all, nor does your estimation of me personally: turns out you know nothing about me either.

They poster is not condoning or excusing just pointing out a nuance.

Right, but WHY?

Or to infer from a very similar argument, it’s not uncommon for someone to very carefully and pointedly draw an incredibly fine line between, say, pedophilia and hebephilia, as though that specific nuance – also entirely precise – is all that matters.

Yet when the reader pulls back a bit and insist on seeing it in full context, along with the tone and the direction of whatever the overall point was supposed to be, it turns out to be just a very lightly veiled defense of the entire idea.

The reason this nuance has never caught on in general conversation is because it moves the line from between people who do not sexually accost children and those that do, to something far more subjective and impossible to measure. I don’t give a shit who is attracted to children; I give a very large shit about the deeds of those who act on it.

Similarly, I don’t care about a chronological age that was assigned to subsets of offenders in the course of researching this unnatural and abhorrent behavior, and for the furtherance of understanding it; I care very much that the underage person upon whom this sexual behavior is being acted out upon is not of an age to be able to handle the early sexualization, confusion, and adult burdens that invariably come with it.

Because I flatly guarantee you, to that kid it does not matter one bit whether they got preyed upon the day before or the day after their eleventh birthday, or whether that chomo with his hand in their junk is feeling actual attraction to them, or not.

When hit with the reality of the damage the sexual predators of children actually do to ruin lives, that oh-so-important nuance falls away just as easily as the apologies of all the offenders who are then moved on to other schools, other churches, other daycares, other lives.

To that kid – and by extension to me, and to anyone/everyone else who cares very deeply about what that sexually predatory shit does to a child, not just at the moment it is done to them but easily for the rest of their life – that nuance that is so special to these people that they lift it up and explain it so carefully, that nuance you’re defending now, is nothing in the light of how what was done to that child is anything but the lowest form of evil shit one human being can do to another.

So you two keep defending that nuance like it makes a difference to anyone but an offender, and I will keep asking why.

I’d give anything to be in that room just so I could jiggle the body somehow and then watch them all pray for real: "Oh god, please let him stay dead, oh real Jesus please don’t wake him up now, we were only joking! Holy fuck, he could testify! Take him back! Take him back!"

Their loss, our gain.

The stupidity comes from trying to threaten a religious figurehead of a church of 1 billion people with assassination in our media enstrangled world when the president can’t even handle the bad polling from gas prices going up.

I have no doubt some of his inner circle would gladly murder the pope to make a point, but their evil is also grossly incompetent.

This, exactly. I’m not even a believer, but I know the history very well, and I’d readily bet on a group that has lasted in its current form for roughly a thousand years (see note below) and has something like 1.3 billion adherents, over a diaper-wearing kiddie-raping bully that hasn’t even made 80 and is firing his own cabinet members during the most stupid war he could ever have started while he systematically works to destroy his own country. They believe in an unconquerable god and heavenly king; Trump believes he is god and wants to be a king. In a war of ideas with a roomful of religious historians (aka Jesuits) Trump’s bullies are not winning jack shit.

Whoever mentioned Avignon meant it as a threat, but for anyone who knows history – and these cardinals certainly do – in 2000 years of Christianity, for the Catholics Avignon was a blip in time that the Church overcame and was made stronger by. Knowing some historically-minded Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox, too!) and how into the history they really, really are, the mention of Avignon is not nearly as much of a threat to the Pope as it is a reminder of the supremacy of the church throughout the ages, and how challengers come and go but the Church remains.

The cardinals really do think like this; this is not an exaggeration. That DoD fool only thought he was lecturing the cardinal, lol. I’ve been personally witness to sincere, hours-long religious arguments over historical concepts like apostolic succession (though not with cardinals, lol), and compared to that Avignon wasn’t even a hiccup. I’d put money on all those cardinals catching each other’s eyes and smirking when the Americans weren’t looking, because every cardinal in that room was thinking about papal history in the long term: in that context, the DoD rep was simply making an ass of himself.

Let’s see Polymarket take this one up. Pope v. Trump: who wins? It’s a no-brainer. I’ll take the guy in the white dress.

Note: I’m going with the Great Schism of 1054; others might calculate it differently

Too old and useless to go full Alexander VI, but yeah.

Also, unless the meeting is on your own turf, how do you diplomatically refuse to sit on a couch that was there with JD before you got there? I don’t think pope training covers this.

Especially in the Oval Office: chances are non-zero that any seat you might take in the room has had either diaper breach, Crown Prince Couchfucker after hours, or both.

A guy who has to dress in white for the job has to think about these things, because if he sits on the wrong couch in the white robe, when he stands up again now it’s HIS story. So in the end it’s gotta be either “I’ll just stand, thanks,” or like you said, not go at all.

The actual letter sent yesterday by Ro Khanna and Nancy Mace to Chairman Comer explains that the DoJ refusal to have Bondi appear has no legal substance at all. It’s an easy read, so I included the text along with the source. See it for yourself.

Note especially the assertion made in paragraph 5, “As you know, Congress’s oversight authority does not end when an official leaves office. In fact, just last year the Committee issued subpoenas to six former Attorneys General, spanning multiple administrations of both political parties.”

Source

Congress of the United States Washington, DC 20515

April 7, 2026

The Honorable James Comer
Chairman
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairman Comer,

We urge you to make clear former Attorney General Pam Bondi remains obligated to comply with the Oversight Committee’s subpoena and appear for her scheduled deposition on April 14, 2026.

We moved to subpoena Pam Bondi, and the Committee voted to approve this motion on a bipartisan basis, because the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) still has not complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act (Public Law No: 119-38), and because serious questions remain regarding the DOJ’s non-compliance and their handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates while she was Attorney General.

The removal of Pam Bondi as Attorney General does not diminish the Committee’s legitimate oversight interests in seeking her sworn testimony or the need for accountability and information about files withheld from the public by the DOJ. On the contrary, it makes her sworn testimony even more important, especially with respect to actions she took as Attorney General, matters already under investigation, and decisions made under her leadership.

When Pam Bondi appeared last month for a briefing, you reiterated you would continue to pursue her sworn testimony and would discuss holding her in contempt of Congress if she failed to comply. She also stated that she would follow the law with respect to her subpoena, which clearly requires her to appear before the Oversight Committee.

As you know, Congress’s oversight authority does not end when an official leaves office. In fact, just last year the Committee issued subpoenas to six former Attorneys General, spanning multiple administrations of both political parties. The American people deserve answers about whether Congress was misled and whether information is being withheld by the DOJ.

We ask you to publicly reaffirm that Pam Bondi must appear on April 14 for a sworn deposition as ordered or face appropriate enforcement if she refuses to comply.

Sincerely,

Ro Khanna
Member of Congress
U.S. House of Representatives

Nancy Mace
Member of Congress
U.S. House of Representatives

Yeah. A friend of mine told me last year, just before the second term started, “Before this is over, everyone here not drinking the koolaid or rich enough to leave is gonna know what it feels like to be an abused spouse, trapped in a brutal marriage they can’t leave.”

At this point I’m not sure my buddy was wrong: isolating the US from all allies; ripping through our finances and savings; doing everything he can to make sure individuals feel powerless and alone; openly destroying/mocking us and/or whatever what we value, like the East Wing or the king airplane shitting video; pursuing the ICE murders, incarcerations, deportations and disappearances; making sure all internal sources of support (SNAP, SS, etc) for individuals are credibly threatened or gone . . . there’s a LOT of what he is doing now that could be tracked to an exact parallel in domestic violence situations.

Honestly, I’m all for it and wish the dems had been doing it even more.

Same here. And for the record, until now usually it has been Al Green introducing articles of impeachment alone, but doing it anyway because it’s the right fucking thing to do. I have nothing but the deepest respect for that, because it has NOT helped him politically, but he does it anyway, like the sign at the State of the Union address: where the fuck were his Democratic colleagues??? Even if it goes nowhere, I appreciate that there’s at least one Dem in DC not politely ignoring the total illegality and unconstitutionality of what the orange chancre does.

This time, though, it is John Larson of Connecticut introducing the articles of impeachment, a guy who’s been in Congress since 1999. I never heard of him, so I looked him up. And while this impeachment is still the right thing to do, Larson is 100% a party man, never steps out of line, and has never done this or anything like it before.

But in an unrelated note, Wikipedia says that, “For the first time since 1999, Larson faces serious Democratic challengers.” Better late than never, but I have to ask myself, would Larson even be bothering if his own ass weren’t on the line because progressives – not R’s, not D’s, but progressives – are overturning almost every single election they’re appearing in with shock wins, often with unexpected double-point leads?

I’ll take a Hail Mary pass, but it would go over a lot better with me if I didn’t think he was doing it solely to save his own seat.

What gives you the impression that Bondi is fractionally competent

She actually has experience, if not discernible skill, at heading a government legal agency: she was Florida AG 2011 - 2019. Before that she was a prosecutor with actual litigation experience who appears to have come up the ranks. She was also able to use her position to enrich herself and protect Trump, which may seem easy on the face of it, in Florida especially, but there are still various obstacles like competent judges, opposing attorneys, and state laws to navigate, which she did. She also argued against the appointments of both Habba and Halligan, which suggests she understood what a train wreck that was going to be, but was overruled by Trump.

and what gives you confidence that her replacement will be less competent?

That is a LOW fucking bar, lol. It’s like asking if a cockroach can excel at limbo. So regardless of who is ultimately chosen, “Yes.”

Are you suggesting otherwise? I don’t share your faith that Bondi was too incompetent to be easily bested in incompetence by any replacement chosen. As I said above,

When all a “leader” values is loyalty and everything else is a distant third – like prosecutorial expertise in a HIGHLY technical field such as criminal law – they should expect their opposition to rejoice when they’ve fired someone even fractionally competent, because it’s a complete own-goal that will pay off royally for anyone in opposition to the administration.

I said that because almost all of Trump’s legal picks share a specific characteristic, and it’s not smarts. And there’s another thing to consider: this appointment may be different because he picks men when he “wants something done” and women when he wants a meat shield, but specifically when it comes to picking disposable attorneys, Trump evaluates legal talent with his eyes.

She’s an evil Zio neolib like the rest of the Democratic Party. Crocodile tears

That’s literally MAGA speak with different slurs, lol

Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Triumphbogen

That’s just inadvertently hilarious. Especially because the entire article is an obvious reference to Trump’s own aspirations to the same gaudy spray-gilded trailer-palace chic.

You think replacing Bondi with Blanche is “progress”?

I do. Todd Blanche is nothing, just a jumped up criminal defense lawyer. You seem to be unaware that people of conscience walking out of Trump’s administration on the justice side has already resulted in major losses for the administration, because he replaces them with talentless hacks whose sole qualification is loyalty to himself.

Two state AGs, Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan, have been forced out of their illegally held positions as a result.

And at least two revenge prosecution cases near and dear to the orange pustule, those of James Comey and Letitia James, were also thrown out because of the sheer incompetence of the lackeys appointed to the positions vacated by people of conscience. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying, except they’re so incredibly shitty at what they do now they can’t even get grand juries to indict.

I’m not even counting how almost all the career prosecutors walking out of the Minnesota AG office completely crippled the DoJ’s goal of investigating and charging Renee Good’s wife, as well as stopped in its tracks any hope of making that state a showpiece of legal retribution against its many activists and protesters, which is what investigating and (they hoped) charging Good’s wife would have kicked off for them.

All gone, simply because the people with experience and a working conscience left and took their combined experience and institutional knowledge with them.

All of this, including Bondi’s firing, is yet another stake in the heart of this administration’s revenge prosecution program. And wherever it happens, high or low, it’s a BIG step forward in making sure the fascists are crippled from using the courts as tools of control and retribution against the rest of us.

TL;DR: When all a “leader” values is loyalty and everything else is a distant third – like prosecutorial expertise in a HIGHLY technical field such as criminal law – they should expect their opposition to rejoice when they’ve fired someone even fractionally competent, because it’s a complete own-goal that will pay off royally for anyone in opposition to the administration.

Our blessed lord and slaver.

When he at some point dies, i am sure that some people will be waiting for him on the third day to come back

Well, at least the ground will be soft from all the tributes. He’ll have a choice to make: rest in piss or scrabble back up through it, undead motherfucker.

I’m actually hoping for the undead scenario, because of all his kids that will be so enraged about having to wait for the estate cash that they’ll just try to kill him again and again – but before they can, they have to fight off that wife of his wanting to slurp up the undead soul out of his rotting carcass first.

That is absolutely a movie I’d watch. Or, the president can make my dreams come true, lol

So did I: this is supposed to be a representational democracy, with representatives picked locally, with elections held by each state, to represent their individual constituents at every level of government, near or distant.

If the people want a president gone, their representatives are supposed to be doing that for them. That is their specific job. Or to put it another way, if Congress were actually doing what they were elected and constitutionally empowered to do, there would be zero No Kings protests, because they’d have already used their powers to impeach.

The check on the elected representatives is that they are supposed to be disposable when bad, swapped out for better representatives through elections, which is part of why their term length is relatively short.

It used to work.

Truth. Aileen Cannon is so thoroughly corrupt and dedicated to covering up Trump’s crimes that her gag order on Jack Smith meant he could not even describe the contents of his report to Congress under subpoena in a deposition.

Yes. It’s a feature, not a bug, and the propaganda is made to do this by design: if you can keep someone in cognitive dissonance, you can feed them whatever cognitive slop you want, and then they have to find a way to explain it to themselves and keep believing, or face the consequences of realizing the whole thing is a lie, which are usually too high to bear. And it just piles on.

This is part of why the Trump Republicans hate James Talarico so much: he is showing the MAGA crowd you can (and should) be able to keep your Christianity and still ditch Trump, the two are not connected in any actual way except by propaganda. I think urban folks don’t realize just how hard this conflation of MAGA and Christianity has been pumped in rural regions: to leave Trump is to face hellfire. To many of us that sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I’m not joking: they’ve made it so that to be Christian is to be MAGA, and to ditch Trump is to desert Christianity itself.

Strangely enough, the cognitive dissonance is also the weakest point in the whole scheme, and is why the trip out of cognitive manipulation often starts with the tiniest, often unnoticeable piece that doesn’t fit: it sticks in their head and refuses to be argued away, and then something else happens, and something else. Cult deprogramming is all about this, allowing people physical space and time to find their own way out of the mental hole without ever actually forcing them to do so.

It’s why getting rid of the news as infotainment is so critically important if we can ever get out of this mess: that’s the source of the propaganda that keeps it going for the hardcore MAGA believers no matter what their orange god does.