Edit: New last paragraph is probably more helpful than the rest of the original post.

The point was about the conflation of terminology in colloquial use, not limited to one specific instance. My “edge case” was that someone with bad thoughts or someone they might go to for support (not just a professional) would hear/read the conflation; in what way is that broad a scenario “in Narnia”?

I have no idea what your intent was in saying that this is Lemmy and language is used colloquially here. Yes, that’s what we’re discussing?

Attaching the meaning of “has committed sexual crimes against children” to a person who must admit to having sexual thoughts about children in order to get help for said thoughts is going to add to the difficulty of admitting that. Being thought of as someone who has committed reprehensible and criminal acts that haven’t actually done would certainly not be a motivation to speak up. It would be an extremely limited view of human behavior to assume every single factor can only have an all-or-nothing effect on what they end up doing. What is ridiculous about what I actually said, not just a strawman of it?

I’m sure the colloquial use of mental health terminology never impacted anyone who didn’t actually do anything violent or destructive, right? Surely we never had trouble with people not getting help for that, since obviously we “don’t care” about the people who only have bad thoughts, and the context is very clear that the words we used actually only meant the criminals. There’s never been a some sort of stationary bike of terminology or something caused by the use of words with specific meanings as something totally different, everyone knows that the language we use in one space would never affect how those things get treated elsewhere. And the queen handing out Turkish delight would never turn out to be evil.

One definitely does not have to “hit bottom” to get help, and in fact it’s often much more effective to deal with a problem before reaching the point of no longer being able to bear the cost of challenging it. My concern is not about “being offended”, it’s about doing what is actually effective to prevent people from acting on sexual thoughts towards children based on everything we know about preventing people from acting on other unhelpful thoughts. Maybe to you that’s less important than being able to mock sexual offenders online? Your use of the word “offender” (as in sexual offender, ie the distinction trying to be made, what my post never really said anything about) here would seem to indicate that you have either not paid attention to the answers when you “keep asking why”, or you actually consider the thought or attraction alone an “offense”. You seem to do more fighting any responses you get than trying to understand (even if still disagreeing with) them.

Maybe it doesn’t fit your image of those who disagree with you, but I do think those who have committed sexual offenses against children do deserve to be shamed for that, should face consequences, and I’m not particularly bothered by mocking or deriding them (especially in the case of “elites” or others who are definitely not wanting to get help for or “resist” urges). But I’m also pretty categorically opposed to “thought-crime”, so I personally hold a distinction between a term that means “has bad thoughts” and a term that means “does bad things”. And unless society decides to invariably execute or imprison forever any offenders, I think that there also needs to be some sort of treatment or plan to prevent someone from wanting to seek out another offense; and that just a risk of punishment or rules about staying away from children is a pretty crappy way of doing that.

Edit: I don’t think we disagree on the big things: 1) anyone “participating” in Epstein’s ring is a bad person; 2) the most important thing is a) preventing offenses against children and b) not compounding the harm after the fact. I think the disagreement is about if there is value to distinguishing between the term ‘pedophile’ as "a person with sexual thoughts or attraction towards children (ignoring the whole age/hebe- thing for now) and a term like ‘child molester’ (or similar) as “a person who commits a sexual offense against a child (again ignoring details like exact age of consent or whatever, below whatever one picks)”; ie is there a difference in how we would treat those people, what impact might distinguishing the terms have, in what situations would that impact apply, etc? My understanding is that we both recognize a difference in the definitions and would respond differently. I and others have said that it does make a difference whether we (collectively, in demonstrating language meaning by use) use the term ‘pedophile’ to mean the second definition, one who acts/assaults, instead of only relating to “is this person sexually attracted to children?” without connection to “has this person sexually assaulted children?”; also that neither definition falls completely within the other. (At least) I have claimed that maintaining a distinction does, in an indirect and as-a-general-rule way, contribute to the 2a goal of preventing offenses against children. You and others have said that, at least within the context of this thread since it was pointed out, it is not helpful to care about the distinction, and that taking the time and effort to do so detracts from 1a and (as I understand) 2b. Additionally, that the argument of distinction supporting 2a was not sound. I think the 1a-detraction only occurs if you pre-suppose mixed usage and conflated meanings, and consider engaging in other discussions like “is word choice important?” to be inherently taking away from the main idea of “bad people doing bad things”. I can’t claim any close knowledge about 2b, but I also don’t see any argument that everyone using only action-oriented (“child molester”, “sex offender”, etc) or intent/behavior (“grooming”, “predator”, etc) language (or even just generic derogatives), without using language that (is claimed to) also maps to non-included groups (ie ‘pedophile’), would further victimize someone; is that something you’d argue for? Overall, is that a fair statement of positions?