it's just such a sad waste of human capital, they were one of the smarter and more interesting people I'd ever met and because of the choices they made they'll probably never become the functioning valuable-to-society person they could've been

maybe I shouldn't feel bad for them but consider the fact that if they didn't get in trouble with the law or somehow miraculously find a great therapist or coach or something they are probably still out there hurting people because who is going to stop them? they couldn't stop themselves even when everything was on the line, why now?

It's entirely possible it only went far that one time that we have good documentation for but if it happened once that means it could happen again

I've given it a lot of thought over the past year and still I don't know what you do with these people, outside of trying to make sure they have as good of a support system as possible to A) keep them accountable to themselves and B) because people in good mental health who are secure in themselves are generally less vulnerable to giving in, probably

Even if we were to decide from some magical utilitarian calculus that "kill/jail them all" were morally desirable, that's not a practical policy. you can't read people's minds

Sometimes you have to trust people, that's life, there's nothing you can be certain about. but there's an enormous number of possible situations and there's no manual for how to take in all the factors. there's no easy answer. "never trust them" doesn't work, then they'll just never speak up to try to get help and lord knows some of em can't help themselves

they won't just go away if you stop thinking about them, they can and will find ways to hurt people in the shadows no matter how great the punishment for getting caught. at the same time, extreme social stigma for pedophilia is a good thing because it strongly discourages people who are on the borderline of that sexuality from ever engaging with it,

and idk what it would look like for an ideal society to navigate both of these things simultaneously

the sad irony of what happened is that with the massive scale exposal forcing sini out of the community, while it was absolutely necessary to get them as FAR away as possible from a community full of teenagers and basically issue a massive warning to possible vulnerable future victims, it is also simultaneously probably destroyed their social life in a way

that probably made things kind of worse at the same time. It's comfortable to think that when you essentially punish somebody that harshly it teaches them their lesson or whatever but I don't think it always works that way. when somebody is mentally unwell they need healthy relationships of SOME kind, and I never got the sense that sini had good friendships

or familial relationships of this sort. if not, they're probably just hiding everything still and still operating off of the constant insecurity anxiety and guilt ridden mindset that is part of what would have made them so susceptible to the affection of random teenagers in their DMs in the first place

Probably some people still talk to them and they're probably all terrible influences by virtue of the fact that they still want to talk to an open pedophile after finding out what they did. or just talking to other pedophiles and getting brainwashed into thinking that society is wrong about consent or whatever. it's just so sad to think about

You just don't necessarily realize that the worst kind of person you need to warn ur kids about lest they be taken advantage of and traumatized doesn't always look like the boogeymen you imagine in your head

also above when I said "good friendships / or familiar relationships" I meant like, IRL, you never truly know someone but you can at least much more easily intervene into someone's life and get a gestalt impression of what's up with them if you can go check on them physically

I've been over this whole situation for a while but the part that still lives in my head is I think about some stuff I ranted at them before cutting contact shortly after learning everything, and I just hope that it like, helped. I'll never know. I just don't want to ever be a spectator to something like this ever again

In retrospect I think the biggest mistake I/we made was not taking it as a warning sign that sini felt the need to tell 100+ people about being a pedophile in the first place. And just generally not being able to fully shut up about it. At some point I saw a tweet that said something like "Compulsive disclosure is not brave vulnerability, it's just another

kind of deep insecurity". I think about that a lot. If you need to constantly burden everybody around you with your ongoing mental struggle and insist that they let you do this, it's like a desperate begging to be affirmed, like 'please tell me it's ok please tell me I'm ok',

and probably you wouldn't need that from anyone other than a therapist or maybe your closest family and friends if you were actually secure and comfortable with who you were. and yeah sure it makes sense to feel like shit about being a pedophile, but through this lens, the fact that they told all of GS about their shit AFTER having already offended actually

makes sense. obviously, if you're not an even worse person, having offended will make you feel incredibly guilty and shitty. that they felt they needed assurance from so many people that it was ok to be who they were can be thought of as strong bayesian evidence that they were NOT okay

I deeply respect the people that I am aware of who confronted them in DMs and tried to get them to reel this in or just probe them at all. even if it didn't end up changing how things went this time, I think in a better world somebody could have gotten through to them, and gotten this exposed earlier in a way that didn't cause a giant circus

I remember thinking that being willing to talk with and reassure them about something most people wouldn't touch made me a good person. but actually, telling someone no, pushing back on their worldview, directing the conversation in ways that might make them uncomfortable, asking that they explain or justify themselves, making demands of them;

that is actually much harder to do, at least for someone like me who is typically very agreeable and conflict-avoidant

There is nothing wrong with being kind, no kindness is ever wasted. But there's nothing kind about refusing to consider a possibility just because you don't like to upset people. Being confrontational would've been in their own best interest. Niceness is not necessarily kind