quiet_NaN
2d ago
Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.
For most behaviors, minors are exposed to plenty of real-world examples. Even in a world where driving licences were not a thing, kids would play Need for Speed (or whatever car racing games kids play these days) but still get exposed to thousands of hours observing how actual humans in the world drive their cars. They see their neighbors drive their cars every day. The two areas where most exposure is fictional are grievous violence and sex -- they will likely never see their neighbor use a gun to defend her property or have sex with her husband.
For grievous violence, this is not a big deal, because thankfully most teens do not have strong urge to kill people, and are also living in a generally peaceful society where their misconceptions are unlikely to harm them. The ones which do end up in professions where they are likely to encounter violence can be taught why emulating Rambo is a bad idea.
For sex, things are different, because a significant fraction of minors will end up having sex. Now, not all of the fictional exposure is hardcore pornography, there are plenty of Hollywood movies with fade-to-black scenes implying sex, and unless kids are watching John Wayne exclusively, these generally depict a somewhat more realistic standard of behavior than porn.
Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?
I am aware of that problem. Telling minors "here is an educational and super hot and naughty video about consent and sex" will by default be as successful as telling them "today we will have so much fun learning the 7 row in the multiplication table".
As I added in parenthesis, a better idea would be to just buy the rights to stuff which is both popular and also unobjectionable from a "displaying problematic behavior" perspective. The nice thing about porn is that there is an ungodly amount of it produced, so even if you filter out 90% as problematic, you still have more to pick from than you could ever afford to pay for (or that minors could watch before becoming adults due to the runtime).
A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.
I have two problems with that. First, will it change the outcome? So you ban the big free-to-view US sites. Does this mean that teens will go back to jerking off to pictures of women in swimsuits, as god intended? No, because the internet is literally full of porn. You would at least need a Great Texan Firewall, and even then, I suspect that horny teenagers will find a way.
The second problem is the claim that pornhub is making profits from sex trafficking and CSAM. In a very technical way, you are correct (at least about sex trafficking) -- since there is no good way to identify sex trafficking victims in porn videos, a fraction of the videos on pornhub likely contain sex trafficking victims and add to their bottom line just as all the other videos. But your framing suggests a moustache-twirling villain CEO ordering his underlings to get him more sex trafficking and CSAM because he wants more profits, which I think is kind of the opposite of what is the case. Pornhub will earn their cut whether the viewers watch free-range amateur porn, porn with sex trafficking victims or hardcore CSAM. They have zero incentive to dabble into the latter two, because this will bring the state down on their money-printing machine for sure. For CSAM, I would assume that they spend orders of magnitude more to filter it than they make on the odd video which makes it through before it is flagged. For sex trafficking, I will grant you that there is technically more that they could do to avoid hosting the odd video. For example, they could require a notarized statement about the identity, age, residence, location and travel accommodations for anyone in a video uploaded to their platform, and I am sure some anti-trafficking charities are calling them out to do such that. Obviously they don't do that because that would destroy their business. But that is different from consciously deciding that you want more sex trafficking videos.
Suppose I had an axe to grind against letter or parcel shipping companies (perhaps I think they ruin brick and mortar stores, or have some religious objection to cardboard boxes). Saying that parcel shipping is evil and should be prohibited, while it might be my true belief, will likely not convince a majority. Instead, I could go after something which is tangentially related and very unpopular: dark net marketplaces (for the record, I think DNMs for drugs are not very objectionable, and clearly better than dealers in street corners and all the violence that brings, but I recognize that is a minority view). If we take the reported gross profits of Silk Road (100M$/year), and conservatively estimate that drug vendors spend 10% of the Silk Road commission on shipping costs, this means that FedEx and co have made at least ten million dollars per year from drug trafficking!
This is your argument in a nutshell.
Of course, if I was Texas, I would not just outlaw these companies (which would be seen as partisan and un-American), I would simply pass legislation which forces these companies to do everything in their power to stop drug parcels, i.e. mandate that ever parcel is inspected with a CT scanner by a trained operator. Oh, you can't operate profitably under these conditions? Real shame, that, but we are not going to cut you some slack when drug shipments are involved.
Meanwhile, most of the drug sellers would just switch to use the US postal service (which is not covered in the Texan regulation) and send small quantities of drugs in letters.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines.
I would think that as a matter of law, most SC cases are at least somewhat controversial.
Per WP:
Each year, the Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions for certiorari; in 2001 the number stood at approximately 7,500,[2] and had risen to 8,241 by October Term 2007.[3] The court will ultimately grant approximately 80 to 100 of these petitions,[a] in accordance with the rule of four.
They are obviously not going to pick a lot of the clear-cut cases where the circuit courts are all in agreement about what the law is and the SCOTUS would concur. They will likely prefer cases which allow them to steer things more than saying "every court is doing fine, keep doing what you are doing".
From your neat dashboard, it seems like only 16 out of 62 cases are affirmations (which I understand to mean "there was nothing substantial wrong with the lower courts judgement"). This would be a scandalously high rate of reversal, except in the context that for 99% of cases, the lower courts judgement stands because the SC does not grant the petition for cert.
Of course, while e.g. the major questions doctrine may be controversial legally, it is not one of the big battlegrounds of the culture war, which tends to be focused more on the object level. I can totally buy that the 6-3 split is common for CW cases.
It would be interesting to establish a metric how CW a case is. Perhaps the amount of discussion it generates on social media within 48h of publication might be a decent proxy. Or one could arbitrary define and case related to gun rights, abortion, minority/LGBT rights, immigration as CW and everything else as non-CW.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
Telling a business to do age verification is equivalent to a ban if that will sufficiently impede their business model. Most of the subscription-based porn sites will likely be fine, but I imagine that the legal sites offering free porn will pull out of Texas, which was probably the intent all along.
I wonder how much this would generalize to other unpopular stuff some people say is corrupting the minds of the youth.
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Reading the motte could certainly be damaging to some minors. I wonder how many people would participate if they had to send a picture of their driving license to the mods first.
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Pictures of guns will turn our kids into school shooters (I could claim). Tell all the gun manufacturers, gun nuts influencers and gun safety people that they need to put in age verification or pixelate any weapons.
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Rainbows and LGBT propaganda brainwash kids into being trans (I could claim). Just let any websites which discuss these topics implement age verification.
I would be more sympathetic to the attempt to make the internet kid-friendly if it was not so obviously doomed from the start. The thing is, the internet has been a cesspit of pornography since even before the web was a thing. Pornhub is only the tip of the iceberg, outlawing them will not change a thing. At the very least you would need a Texas-wide firewall which bans 20% of the international websites (and good luck with keeping the filter list up to date).
Either keep kids on a whitelisted tiny sliver of the web (and pray that they do not outsmart your filter) or teach them why it is a bad idea to search for beheading videos or bestiality porn.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
I would argue that while presenting unsolicited sexual material to either adults or minors can indeed be harmful (to some degree -- I remember seeing porn ads when I was downloading cracks for games at age 12 or 14, and mostly went eeeewww and got on with my life, but it did not traumatize me. Getting DMed a dick pick would certainly be worse, though), things are often different when users actively search for such content.
Sure, there are things which are likely harmful to the person searching for it, a 10-yo searching for rape or beheading videos is probably better off not finding any. But I do not think that any person of any age or gender who is searching for "naked woman" is likely to be harmed by pictures or videos of naked women, even if they are sexually suggestive.
Quite frankly, I believe that sexual content consumed by minors is too influential to leave it to chance and adult entertainment companies targeting an adult audience. The sooner we accept that the effect of age verification laws is not that horny teenagers will not view sinful material, but at best that they will learn how to connect to a VPN service, the sooner we can start producing more age-appropriate porn for minors.
I do not think that viewing PIV sex on video after searching for it is intrinsically harmful. The stuff which is harmful is all the stuff where porn differs from what one would recommend as sex acts for beginners. A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control? Nada (except for BDSM porn, which typically discusses boundaries explicitly on camera). She implicitly consents to everything, has no boundaries and is solely responsible for contraception. Getting her off? She just gets off being used by you, man, no need to learn anything about female anatomy or psychology. Pillow talk? Just call her a dirty whore.
Then you have all the kinks which are mainstream in porn. Incest? Super hot. Unhealthy power dynamics? "I would do anything to get a passing grade in your class ..." Spying on women? When caught, they are flattered and will have sex with you. Respecting your partner? Nah, they like to be degraded. Now, there are plenty of kinks which are fine between consenting adults who are into them. But the context "this is a thing which most women are not into" is generally missing in porn.
Just hire some 20yo porn actors and make them act out healthy sex scenes (where the actors play a couple (or actually are a couple), discuss boundaries, contraception and all that), put them on the web in 4k (or even better, find popular but healthy sex tapes produced (semi-)commercially and just buy the rights) and tell the minors in sex ed "it is actually normal and healthy to be interested in how sex works, if you are interested here are some videos which are more realistic than what you find on pornhub.
Sure, some will still prefer to watch gangbangs in 480x320, and for a few unlucky ones the good porn might actually be a gateway to the mainstream stuff, but by and large this will do much more to prevent minors from getting wrong ideas about sex (or see seriously disturbing stuff because they were curious how sex looks) than Texas just making the big US porn vendors do age verification and pretend that this will prevent any horny teen from watching porn.
But my suspicion is that the Texas move was never about protecting minors in the first place, it was about getting the filth off the Texan internet by pretending to care about minors seeing boobs and dicks.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I have just looked on the list, and I have to say I am a bit perplexed why typical use for condoms is so ineffective (13 out of 100 -- only a bit better than pulling out).
My theory is that there might be confounders, because condoms also protect from STI while most other methods do not, so they would select for a more risky sexual lifestyle in general. Relying on a guy you just met to have a condom and use it correctly is likely riskier than relying on remembering to take a pill a day.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Per WP, the typical-use Pearl Index of "Symptoms-based fertility awareness ex. symptothermal and calendar-based methods" is 24 (i.e. 24 pregnancies per 100 women per year), which is slightly worse than Coitus interruptus. Contrast this to a good method like IUD (0.8).
Awareness methods are only good enough if getting pregnant is not that big of a deal. For example, if you have access to abortions and no objections to them, or if you plan to have a baby with your husband in a year anyhow and would only be mildly inconvenienced by an earlier pregnancy.
For a teenager who is strongly pro-life, but not sufficiently abstinence-only that one can rely on that (which basically is most teenagers), relying on this method seems like a good way to end up being a single mom at 16.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Probably true, most women I know are STEM-adjacent. In these circles, not having a boyfriend or husband and not being on the lookout for one either is well within the spectrum of accepted behavior, certainly more so than constantly getting your heart broken by hot men interested in sex.
It might be different for, I dunno, the typical social circles of someone working for a nail studio?
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Okay, you did not say that one can thus safely disregard opinions publicized for ulterior motives. I am sorry for for misrepresenting your views.
You did claim though that Aella decided to blog on substack with the motive to promote her OF.
I am arguing that saying "Aella performs on OF, therefore every decision she makes is with her subscriber number in mind" is overly reductionist. You might as well say "@quiet_NaN is a man (true), so he wants to get laid (probably also true). Him writing this post is obviously an attempt to gain status on The Motte to boost his attractiveness (false as far as I can tell)."
If getting people to subscribe to her on OF (rather than substack) was her motive, then she is not doing a very good job of streamlining the process. In her non-paywalled substack, she does not even mention that she is on OF, per a quick web search. But you can figure it out easily enough:
- first you have to click on her profile, which will take you to https://substack.com/@aella
- then, you click on the link which will take you to https://knowingless.com/
- then ignore all the links on the side sending you to twitter, discord, surveys and so forth and click "about"
- then click on the fifth link on that page, with the text "became one of the top Onlyfans earners until my attention span ran out"
- then click on the fifth link on the article from 2020
- voila, you are at her OF page (the link to her free/preview OF page is also in the article)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The thinking easily becomes I want x while completely ignoring what incentive structures they are creating.
I think that this generalizes to many progressive causes. For example, minimum wages are great until you solve for equilibrium. Or take affirmative action: in a world of strict meritocracy, I would be indifferent between going to a Black or Non-Black physician. In a world where it is public knowledge that the standard for enrolling in medicine depends on your race, I suddenly have to update on the race of the doctor.
For a non-progressive example, consider Israel-Hamas hostage swaps. They create terrible incentives, but why should you care about the hundreds of citizens which might get killed in the future due to your actions when you can score a political victory by bringing home a soldier right now?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Personally, I think at this point, it is easier to just wait until the patents of the GLP-1 drugs run out.
Generally, shame is a double-edged sword, because it can enforce norms which are pro-social just as well as norms which are net-negative.
I mean, sure, Japan has very low obesity rates, because most kids would rather kill themselves than being the fat kid in the class, and their shame culture might prevent casual sex, but it is not much use with the TFR, for example.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I agree with your solution, but I’m going to push back a little- sex creates the expectation of romantic exclusivity, so these ladies are entitled to Chad’s undivided attention.
I think that both Chad and the women would agree on that, they just differ on the time frame. In most cases, the women are not starry-eyed virgins who believe that sleeping with a man they just met will create a relationship which will last until death doth part them. They likely had some previous sexual relationships which did not last, so they have enough data to establish a baseline. They might also have been wooed by a PUA before, in which case they would have excellent real world data on the long term prospects of a relationship beginning with sex on the first date. Chad's idea of the time horizon might be more like refraining from swiping on tinder until the post-coital cuddling.
And statistically, most average women are in a relationship with average men.
The problem here is selection bias. You might be correct that the average case is an average man and an average woman happily forever (or until the man replaces his wife with a younger model 15 years down the road, or the woman dumps her husband after he gets burnout). But this majority is unlikely to star in the drama described above very often.
or should I say higher, considering how much of it is driven by BMI
My ad-hoc model of partner selection would have two scales. One is a rather absolute scale, e.g. "Would your evolutionary programming tell you to forgo sex for years if this one was the only possible partner?"
The other is relative. "How does sleeping with that person affect your status in your group?"
Unsurprisingly, I think that men are mostly filtering on the absolute scale and women are mostly filtering on a relative scale.
As a thought experiment, consider a group of people of one gender partying. One of them is hitting it off with a person of the opposite gender who has a much lower SMV than the group, say overweight, and they leave the party together. The next day, they meet with their group, and are teased about the night. The group member says "oh yeah, we ended up banging, turns they are really great at oral sex".
If the group is male, my expectation of the response would be something like "congrats on getting laid, bro", with some more mild teasing.
If the group was female, my expectation of the response would be "that bottom-feeder will literally fuck any man with a pulse".
As a corollary, I think that giving all the overweight incels GLP-1 antagonists and bringing them to normal weight will not help them much getting into relationships. Their SMV is a result of their relative status, and while some fraction of women prefer (as in "revealed preference") to share a smaller group of hotter men, there will be an imbalance.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
So that's now two onlyfans performers who determined that a substack is a good way to advertise to some potential clients. Aella and this one.
I find your ad hominem disgusting. While I do not have a paid subscription for either Aella's substack or OF, I read her free substack articles sometimes, and find them interesting in a way which does not make me want to subscribe to her OF.
If you really think Aella wrote Chattel Childhood because she thought "oh, my onlyfans subscriptions are stagnating, so I will just talk about child torture" then you are out of your fucking mind.
You can pretty much dismiss anything if you can gesture vaguely at a potential conflict of interest. When Scott wrote SSC, he was very much part of the medical establishment, so we can safely disregard all his articles on mental health medication. When NATO suggested that Putin might invade Ukraine, they were clearly in a partisan position, no need to pay attention to them. Whenever Anthropic produces AI alignment research, we should ignore this, because they are also building AI systems. When Ford claims that an engine has a certain displacement volume, they should not be trusted, because they just want to sell you the car.
The farhakhalidi article is not OF bait. If you want to attract men to your OnlyFans, the obvious thing would be to do is to put a hot but SFW picture of yourself into substack and mention that you are on OF. She does none of that.
Or you could say it is all part of a 5d-chess move: dissuade women from dating, so more men will end up not getting laid and going to OF, where they might subscribe to the author. This might make sense if you had a world with 10k people in it. She persuades five women to drop out of dating, which increases the number of sexually frustrated men by two, who will randomly subscribe to one of the two OF accounts which exist in the world, so she gets a new subscription, profit. It does not work in a world where there are millions of OF accounts, and a ton of alternative sources of porn besides. She is literally increase her OF subscriptions more by posting a picture of her elbow there than by trying to dissuade people from hookups.
From the substack:
Second, consider that men’s psychological profile includes scoring higher on all dark triad traits – psychopathy, machiavellianism, and narcissism. These traits are distinguished by a lack of empathy and remorse, and a tendency towards deception and manipulation to achieve one’s aims.
While this is probably true in some statistical sense, I would argue that this is mainly selection bias. Dark triad traits are (I think) hot in men.
Now consider the dating marketplace and all the ways it privileges men’s psychological profile at the expense of women’s – the way he’s issued clearance to bottle-feed all of his desires, and the way she’s compelled to smother all of hers.
[...] All in all, the average woman is psychologically abused in the dating market.
As a man who dropped out of the dating market because the only relationships I might get are with women who are too neurotic to be net positive, and who is not going to organize his life around maximizing his SMV, let me say booo-fucking-hoooo.
The sex ratios in the sub-50 age brackets are balanced, so for every chad who manages to string five women along, there are four men who are not getting any. Society is not going to listen to them whine about that very much, because at the end of the day, nobody is entitled to sex. I find porn can substitute for sex and video gaming can substitute for the social interactions of having a relationship. It is not perfect, but so much better than being in a bad relationship.
I think that for evolutionary reasons, being sexually successful is hot in men. I am not kinkshaming anyone, if you are into men who can find a date and get laid every weekend, by all means go for it.
But just as low SMV men are not entitled to sex, women are not entitled to having a chad go exclusive with them. For evolutionary reasons again, most men have some inclination to take the harem route. The hot men who are inclined to a monogamous relationship likely are in a monogamous relationship, so the hot men in the dating market are mostly not interested in that.
Put frankly, if a woman prefers to date the hottest men who are willing to invest a few hours on dating for having sex with her, then she is actively selecting for men who have no incentive to go exclusive with her. If hookups are all she wants, that is fine, but if she is interested in an exclusive relationship, I would advise she lowers her SMV standards and compensate by requiring a longer runway before she engages in sex, thus making pursuing her more costly for men who are just looking for casual sex.
Also, there is no shame in being without a partner. IMO, anyone who can not function without being in a sexual relationship is definitely not relationship material. Looking at the romantic market and saying "the incentives are badly aligned, I am not going to try to participate in this" is something which women can do just as much as men. Just substitute porn with ao4 or something.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
So everyone is "wholly justified" in destroying everyone else? That is a bit of a nihilistic conception of justice, there.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.
As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes.
Counterpoint: the two main participants in the Cold War, the US and the USSR, were both very active in fighting proxy wars with the other. Supporting Hamas against Israel is not that different from supporting Bin Laden against the USSR, for example. Both sides tried very hard to avoid situations where US soldiers would have a shootout with USSR soldiers, because both sides were very aware of the danger of escalation.
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well. Sure, the other side would support the opponents with weapons, and they might send the odd liaison or special op soldier, but these would generally not participate in the killing of US/USSR soldiers and if they were killed, their side would not sweep that under the rug.
So if Iran was a nuclear power, as far as the cold war etiquette between the US and Iran was concerned,
- the US supplying chemical weapons to Saddam would be within the norms, because the US are not the ones using them
- Iran supporting Hamas against Israel would be within norms -- a classic proxy war
- the US assassinating IRGC general Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020 would be against the norms -- like if Brezhnev had used a Soviet missile to kill Kissinger while he was in France
- Israel dropping US-manufactured bombs on Iran would be within the norms
- Trump bombing the Iranian nuclear sites would be against the norms
Another point of etiquette is that you do not try to critically destabilize a nuclear power, even through indirect actions. While their soldiers are out bringing freedom and democracy or the glory of communism to some backwater, they are fair game for your proxies, but you want your proxies to stick to their local theater, not engage in intercontinental terrorism. For example, you would not back 9/11, or arm Ukraine to the point where they might force a regime change in Moscow. (As far as cold war etiquette between a hypothetical nuclear Iran and Israel are concerned, the Oct-7 attacks would be debatable. Attacking civilians -- especially in the deliberate manner displayed by Hamas -- of a nuclear power is going to piss off that power, and you generally don't want to be anywhere nearby in the causal chain of events.)
Tail risks are an important consideration for military interventions. If you are pushing around a conventional enemy on another continent, the question to "what is the worst that could realistically happen due to bombing them?" is likely stuff on the level of "they miraculously manage to sink an aircraft carrier" or "the sponsor a terrorist group which manages to kill a few thousand citizens". If you try to push around a nuclear enemy, then even for NK the answer is a lot bleaker -- they might not be able to nuke you on another continent, but they will certainly be able to drop a nuke or two on your regional allies.
There is also a case to be made that the knowledge that your side has nuclear weapons will make you more careful when engaging other nuclear powers. At the moment, Iran can lob rockets towards Israel whenever they feel like it -- the tail risks are sharply limited -- Israel is not going to nuke Tehran over a few dozen citizens killed, at the most they will kill a few hundred Iranians in return. By contrast, if you are an actor who has some but not absolute control over a nuclear armed side, perhaps a general or military advisor, you want to be careful to avoid a spiral of escalation where your side might be the first to use nukes and gets destroyed in retaliation. Say nuclear Iran launches a few missiles, Israel responds in kind, and as usual their missiles are much more effective than the ones fired by Iran. Suddenly there is some possibility that someone will nuke Tel Aviv, and Israel will nuke Tehran in response.
In conclusion, no, a nuke does not make you completely untouchable, but it very much protects you from direct confrontations with other nuclear powers both by limiting their and your own conduct. I can totally see why the ayatollah regime wants nukes.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Agreed. In an exchange of missiles and bombs, Iran would be losing decidedly, so it makes sense for them to not engage in it.
From my understanding, this ceasefire is mostly that both sides will cease lobbing missiles at each other for now, not anything about Iran stopping their nuclear program.
If either side feels they have anything to gain by breaking the ceasefire (e.g. Israel seeing another opportunity to delay the Iranian nuclear program by bombing them), then they will break it.
While it is a defeat for the Iranian regime, it is a defeat that they likely can survive -- they ideology is not based on how they are technologically superior to the West, after all. I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
Of course Trump announces the ceasefire like he had just negotiated the fucking Good Friday Agreement, when all he did was bomb Iran without getting into an indefinite missile war with them, which few if any people claimed was the main downside of bombing them.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I am not watching the video, but I notice that the tweet said:
It will draw America into a war where they finally decapitate Iran and Syria.
The Assad regime did not end because Israel drew the US into a regional war. The US did fuck-all to bring about its end. In a nutshell, Israel took out Hezbollah, Turkey sponsored the Jihadists who defeated Assad and Russia did not offer less than usual military support to their ally because they were otherwise occupied.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Warheads on missiles are removable. All they'd need to do to launch a nuke is replace the warhead in one of their missiles with a nuclear one.
For a ballpark number of an early nuclear bomb, we might look at Little Boy, which weighted 4.4 tons. Sure, a warhead would have different design constraints than a bomb which has to fit in a B-29, but it is reasonably to assume that any early warhead would weight a multiple of its fissile mass, perhaps half a ton, not something you can easily move around.
More importantly, to play MAD, you have to have launch-ready nuclear weapons. You want to be sure that your enemy can not take out your ability to retaliate with a first strike. Iran does not have missile submarines and also does not have any aircraft which can be reliably make it to Israel, so the only arm of their nuclear triad would be ground-based missiles fired either from stationary silos or vehicles. Either of these only work if you get the missile in the air before your launcher is hit.
If you opt to keep your retaliatory warheads in a deep bunker safe from harm, you will find that you do not have enough time between the first warning of an impeding attack and your bunker being hit to take your warheads out of the bunker and mount it on a missile. Even if the warhead itself is kept safe, after being hit you will not be in any position to launch it -- your access tunnels to your bunker will be full of rubble, your nuclear-capable missiles and launch pads near the surface will be destroyed, and the only retaliation your nuke offers is blowing up your own bunker. All your enemy has to do is to make sure that you have other priorities than digging through rubble in a nuclear crater in the middle of a war which you are fighting with severely degraded capabilities, which seems plausible enough.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Regime change isn’t possible without a ground invasion
Yes
a ground invasion which isn’t possible
Debatable. Arguably, the US would pay a lower price in lives lost to occupy Iran than they did in, say, Operation Overlord.
Sure, currently the political climate is not very favorable to an invasion. The two failures of GWB are still fresh in the minds of Americans, and Trump did not campaign on military adventurism.
It would likely take a very stupid action on Iran's part to shore up US support for an invasion. Perhaps a 9/11 level terrorist attack, or a couple of 100 captured US servicemen being beheaded on video.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Ukraine's stated military objective is to keep independent despite Russia trying to annex them.
Hamas stated military objective is to destroy Israel.
Now, Ukraine's struggle is not an unmitigated success, sure, they lost territory but were still holding Kiev last time I checked.
Hamas struggle is an utter failure in military terms. If they murdered as many Israeli as they did on Oct-7 every day, they would still need two decades to genocide Israel. Nor is Israel going to use up all its bombs on Gaza and then being overrun by Arabs, or go bankrupt bombing Gaza.
I have long argued that Hamas theory of victory involves goading Israel into killing as many Palestinian kids as possible, thereby eroding Western support for them. This is a strategy which is notably worse than millennia of horrible warfare, and which I would label "crazy".
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The NPT itself does not specify any thresholds directly.
Each Non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes to accept safeguards, as set forth in an agreement to be negotiated and concluded with the International Atomic Energy Agency in accordance with the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Agency's safeguards system, for the exclusive purpose of verification of the fulfilment of its obligations assumed under this Treaty with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
But the IAEA-Iran treaty also does not specify any thresholds.
I was surprised to learn that Iran kept being a party to the NPT after Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. The 2025-05 report states that:
54 . Iran continues to cooperate with the Agency on matters of routine safeguards implementation, and the Agency implements a large verification effort in Iran commensurate with Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle and activities.61 However, in a number of respects as outlined in this report its cooperation with the Agency has been less than satisfactory, as described below.
86 . In light of the above assessment, the Director General reiterates his urgent call upon Iran to cooperate fully and effectively with the Agency. Unless and until Iran assists the Agency in resolving the outstanding issues, the Agency will not be in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.
Or course, after the Trump bombing, they are now rectifying that mistake, and likely will not be a party to the NPT in 90 days.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
So, if hypothetically, the elected leader of a country opined that a polity should be removed from their lands and a Mediterranean beach resort should be constructed on their vacated lands, they would be justified in destroying the country of that leader? Asking for a friend.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
And inside those facilities there is a shitload of nasty stuff that could create what sjw call toxic working environment.
The activity of U-235 seems to be around 80MBq/kg. Not something to keep under your pillow, but also not something where any reasonably quantity will kill you within minutes.
Sure, for the centrifuges, you need UF6, but even that becomes solid below 56 degree centigrade.
To get to that you would also require hydrofluoric acid and fluorine, both of which are definitely nasty, but also things you can clean up even if you care about the environment or the life expectancy of your cleaners, which likely are not issues for Iran.
Hitting the enriched uranium would be hard in any case. The Iranians anticipated the possibility of an attack, so the obvious thing to do would be to dig a kilometer long tunnel, and have a few people whose job it is to carry the good stuff to a randomly selected point in the tunnel every half hour. Unless half of your guards work for Mossad (in which case you have a bigger problem), this should work well enough.
I think the main thing to hit would be the centrifuges. They are not very portable, require a ton of power and supervision and are nothing that the Iranians can easily mass-produce, so losing them would really hurt them.
Of course, we do not know if the attacks actually hit them.
In the long run, I expect the Iranians to win this one, because it is much easier for them to tunnel through another few 100m of bedrock than it will be for the US to bomb through that.
The alternative would be to settle for bombing the entrances of access tunnels whenever they pop up, but that would be a long-term commitment.
Sure for lesbians, gays and trans. Actors who are bisexual in that they have partners of different partners in different videos are also fine. I am under the impression that group sex is not something which a substantial fraction of minors will end up doing, so how to organize a safe and fun gang-bang is probably not required. Perhaps some light BDSM, if that is not too niche, safewords and all.
The idea is not to provide a nice version of every porn genre there is, because most of the kinkier stuff is unlikely to make it into their sex lives. Most people's first sexual experiences do not involve needle play and a couple who is into that is likely to search for best practices beforehand, while a couple who is into vanilla sex might be under the impression that as they went trough sex ed and watched some porn, they are sufficiently prepared. Focus on pacing, boundaries, contraception, lube and how to have a great time when PIV is too uncomfortable.
While from the WP description, this looks like a good effort, it is notably targeted at girls, which would still leave boys to learn sexual behavior from porn.
I think that until minors have unrestricted access to the internet, there is no reason to give them access to sex videos to prevent them from going to pornhub instead. Realistically, I would not want any 6-yo with unrestricted internet access. At age 12, a kid is going to have access to the internet. If you lock down their devices (and are more tech savvy than your kid), there will always be a classmate whose parents are less concerned and let them have a smartphone. Ideally, their smartphone would be configured so that it blocks hardcore porn but allows access to educational sex videos from that age, without the parent or state pushing this too much into the face of the minor. If they never google for "sex video" until age 18, no problem.
Humans have been around millions of years longer than privacy has, so I have every reason to believe that in the ancestral environment, children would be exposed to more sex than in the contemporary Western world (though with worse illumination, depending on the taboos of their specific culture). I think a kid of any age watching its parents have sex through their ajar bedroom door will perhaps pick up a fetish or two out of the experience, but not be traumatized for life. By contrast, being made to watch, being flashed or being made to participate in sex acts is obviously very likely to disturb the development of a child (especially if it is against the cultural norms of their society).
This is just my gut feeling, but I think that my gut feeling is about as valid as 1970s psych research :)
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