quiet_NaN
13hr ago
Just noticing and then going tit-for-tat. There are some occasions where going tit-for-tat is a good move. I do not think that this is one of them.
Take tariffs. Tit-for-tat is fine, because you can make it explicit that your tariffs are retaliatory.
Contrast with terrorism. If members from group A blow up random members from group B, then there are generally responses which are much more efficient to stop these incidents than members from group B starting to blow up random members from group A (unless you are in Somalia or something -- and even then targeting the murderers would likely be strictly preferable). In fact, retaliation would be likely to increase the rate of incidents.
If Whites start to (more) openly discriminate against non-Whites, then of course the wokes will whine how unfair and racist that is and how the government should put its hands on the scales even more.
Now, if a Republican state was saying "as long as the federal government is openly preferring minority-owned businesses, we will openly prefer any businesses which do not qualify for preferential treatment from the feds", that would be a limited tit-for-tat, like retaliatory tariffs. Sure, the wokes would also whine how incredibly racist that is, but a smarter member of the public would recognize that the goal was to have a level playing field, not to establish the fourth Reich.
Realizing if you don't, you have no future.
Rumors of white genocide have been exaggerated, European-origin DNA will be common in the US population for the foreseeable future. For all the efforts to achieve equality of outcomes, the odds of a white person to make it big are still better than for a black person, which is possibly HBD-related. In the contemporary US, Whites might get a -2 racial malus to both sympathy and government handouts, but that does not make White characters unplayable.
Plenty of groups get treated unfairly, and in most cases, making their victimhood a core part of their identity is actively harmful. Women and men, straights and queers, all sorts of ethnicities, can legitimately claim that sometimes, they are treated unfairly. And that sucks and they should push for a better society, but in most cases they should play the game with the cards they have been dealt, rather than embracing their victimhood.
Telling the multi-ethnic society "your game is so rigged against us, we will not play" and going to raise chickens in some rural white-only community, or emigrating to Hungary does not seem an appropriate response to the present level of disadvantage.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Even if your claims of anti-white racism were true (the FAA hiring scandal is clearly an instance, and affirmative action can reasonably be described as both anti-Asian and anti-White, but that does not clear the "all levels of society" bar for me), I do not see how segregation would be the natural consequence.
The Black's response to facing racial discrimination was the civil rights movement, which was way more effective than any attempt to build a black-only community in the US or elsewhere would have been.
Even if you could convince the PMC that they were getting a Bad Deal wrt race in the coastal cities and that they should build their own White-only coastal cities in the middle of Arkansas with blackjack and hookers, I am not holding my breath for these cities to decide national elections. I would rather embark on a campaign of meritocracy and how racial discrimination is not cool even if it targets Whites or Asians.
At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think it is worse than that. This more seems like something designed as a coven from the very start.
Strict racial segregation in the US is not in overton window of the mainstream. Sure, caring about the socioeconomic/ethnic composition of your neighborhood is mainstream (and the line between good old racism and valid concerns about BLM riots or violent crime is at least blurry), but this is on the level of "I don't even want a black doctor in my community".
If you are willing to move to Bumpfuck, Nowhere, I imagine there are a ton of possible destinations which are low crime, low ethnic tensions. It takes a special person to pick the one which prides itself on being free of Blacks (and presumably Jews). Most likely, that person is a Neo-Nazi.
Everyone remotely mainstream might prefer a neighborhood where the overwhelming majority is White (and I guess there are plenty of rural communities where this is the case), but they will very much not want to live in Neo-Nazi Central any more than they would move to Corpsefucker Valley. Since WW2, being a Neo-Nazi has been low class. If I learn that X is a Neo-Nazi, my probability estimate of "X has a violent criminal past" and "X is in a gang" will skyrocket -- much more than it would if I learned that X was Black.
To be fair, there are also indirect effects to consider. Even if for some reason, you are fine with your kids going to a school where a majority of the children are raised on White supremacy, if you run any public-facing business catering to the mainstream, it will not survive the cancel mob. The wokes are not very big on nuance, after all. Telling them about your complicated philosophical arguments for an ethnically homogeneous community and how these are distinct from supremacist ideology will not stop them.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I am not saying that this is impossible, but why cover up losses of the Bin Laden raid, even from a helicopter crash? Between the White House, the chain of command and the intelligence agencies, there were probably about a hundred people in the loop. I have a hard time imagining Obama saying "I will not have this day of triumph be overshadowed by some fucking technical failure. Make the bodies go away, I don't care how." This would be a textbook case of the coverup being worse than the crime. Just announce that some people died in the raid and classify the details for a decade.
Likewise, if I imagine a general being killed by Russian ballistic missiles, in most cases the body will not be in a state where you can put him in his quarters and pretend it was a natural death. So your theory would need an epicycle like "he died from a heart attack when a missile hit nearby", which would be a lot less plausible.
Or take the ships. Hundreds of sailors will very much be aware if the ship was hit by a rocket. A missile hit likely looks very distinct from an engine failure on satellite photos. Then you need to find a civilian ship to stage the collision. The mundane explanation is at least plausible: Navy vessels generally run without transponders, so sometimes they collide with ships, and due to the Suez canal there are a ton of merchant vessels in the red sea.
For special forces killed during some off-the-book op, I can almost see it. But even then, the straight and narrow would seem preferable. X was killed in action in that month during a classified operation, more details in half a century. Covering this up as a training accident would be complicated. If they were killed in infantry combat, you will need to make sure that the bodies burn in the crash. You will also need to find a plausible helicopter pilot whose body you can add to the pile. Presumably you don't want to murder them for it? You will waste a ton of taxpayer money on blowing up the helicopter, and you need the cooperation of the deceased soldiers comrades who should preferably confirm your story of them being hale before departing from their base for their training exercise. These soldiers will probably not be very sympathetic to you desecrating servicemen corpses to cover some minor international embarrassment.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The NWS got the estimate of severity wrong for which they are being blamed by Texan GOP officials.
Is there any evidence that someone falsified the model output, decided to round 1.6mm/minute to 1mm/min or something like that?
If the complaint is simply that the model turned out not to match reality, that does not seem to be a remotely fair complaint. The job of the NWS to provide an estimate and an error bar. What is an appropriate response given a certain best estimate of a disaster probability is a political decision.
This feels like a bereft spouse yelling at a doctor "But you said there was an 85% chance he would survive the operation, so we thought it was safe. Why did you lie to us!"
I agree with the rest of your comment.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that this is related to an inflation of alerts. For the forecasters, the incentives are to always warn, no matter if it is "there may be ice on the road, drive carefully" or "a hurricane will flood 90% of the area covered by this cell tower in minutes".
Basically, I would be fine with being woken up by an alert which has a 10% chance to save my life. For a typical user, this will perhaps happen once in their lifetime, probably less. However, I do not care about weather alerts which may kill a handful of people in an area of a few 100k. Send me a text if you must, but if I die due to ice on the road because I did not bother to check my phone in the morning, that will be on me.
But as the incentives are structured in a way to always exaggerate alerts, you run in the "boy who cried wolf" problem -- nobody wants a phone which wakes them up whenever a weather event which might theoretically kill someone happens in their general area.
Of course, the outcome this would excuse is if you had a bunch of people who drowned after randomly deciding to camp at the river bank. What happened here was instead that the organizers of a summer camp for kids dropped the ball. A level of care which might be tolerable when you are out drinking and fishing with your buddies is not necessarily tolerable when running an organized event. Of course, for all I know, the safety concern level of the organizers was above average. "Site specific disaster kills your charges" is an exceedingly rare outcome, and was probably not even on the radar of most camp organizers a week ago.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The CW angle is that Trump and Doge downsized the National Weather Service. This made sense ideologically -- meteorologists are basically climate researchers, and thus likely to be more worried about climate change than immigrants, plus college-educated pronoun-bearers. And I am sure that some of the NWS people were installed there by previous administrations for political reasons (which I happen to be sympathize with). But separating the wheat from the chaff would require a scalpel, not the chainsaw of doge.
Anyhow, in this case, the Guardian reports that NWS cuts did not contribute to the tragedy:
Despite funding cuts and widespread staffing shortages implemented by the Trump administration, NWS forecasters in both the local San Angelo office and at the NWS national specialty center responsible for excessive rainfall provided a series of watches and warnings in the days and hours leading up to Friday’s flooding disaster.
The forecast office in San Angelo has two current vacancies – typical for the pre-Trump era and fewer than the current average staff shortage across the NWS – and has not been experiencing any lapses in weather balloon data collection that have plagued some other offices.
[...] In a final escalation, the NWS office in San Angelo issued a flash flood emergency about an hour before the water started rapidly rising beyond flood stage at the closest US Geological Survey river monitoring gauge.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I would argue that there are important differences here. A central example of Taqiyya seems to be to pay lip service to whatever religion the local strongman tells you to follow. At the worst, this creates an ambiguity about whom of the locals are still faithful to Shia Islam.
The grand ayatollah proclaiming false doctrine would be much more serious than that, because it would create ambiguity about the teaching of Shia Islam.
Indeed, WP states (My emphasis) :
By Shia, acting according to religion is incumbent on every one, but if the expression of a belief endanger one's life, honor and property, he can conceal his belief as the verse 16: 106 implies. It is as a weapon for the weak before the tyrants.[186] If Dissimulation cause the disappearance of the religion or the fundamentals of the religion, it is forbidden and Muslims are to give up their lives but if there is no advantage in their being killed, it is to dissimulate. There is no place for Dissimulation regarding the teaching of the doctrines of the religion.[187]
Obviously, this is also doctrine, so if a religion allowed preaching false doctrine, this would be suspect. Realistically, clerics will balance temporal advantages and the need to keep their faithful unified. If pretending to be anti-nuke had caused the world to send tons of HEU to Iran and sped along their nuclear weapon program by two decades, then perhaps a cleric might be tempted to proclaim false doctrine (at the cost of his followers forever worrying if he and his successors mean what they preach).
But the world predictably did not update on the fatwa a lot, it being proclaimed was not the difference between life and death for Iran. Not worth setting up a precedent weakening religious unity for.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Generally, religious people actually believe in their religion. Politicians lie all the time, like Ulbricht denying the plan to build the Berlin Wall, Bush lying about Saddam having WMDs or Putin denying his intent to invade Ukraine. Clerics deceiving their followers about matters of religion are at least rarer.
For a theocracy like Iran, having the leaders following god's will is their fundamental claim to legitimacy. When religious leaders reveal that a proclamation of doctrine (e.g. a fatwa or encyclical) was just a ruse to mislead the unbelievers, they are making a mockery of the religion. Nor do they control their population to a degree where they can just retcon everything -- "We were always at war with Eurasia" / "The ayatollah had always said that nuclear weapons are great tools of the jihad".
This does not mean that I would update very much on an anti-nuke fatwa -- I would certainly read the fine print, consider how often these things are overturned and so forth, but I would likely update a fair bit more than I would on Putin's claim that his troops were just conducting a military exercise.
Of course, a fatwa against nukes would also be a good reason why Iran -- despite having reached 400kg @ 60% enrichment, which is very much within grasping distance of a nuclear weapon stopped just short of building nukes for now.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So your claim is "Iran has the bomb but it is useless to them".
So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?
Also, it is not widely claimed that Iran has bombs, which would require some explanation. Does Mossad know? If yes, then why do they not make that claim? How can it be both in Israel's and Iran's interests to keep the world in the dark? If not, then how were they able to hide it?
Does the US know? Am I supposed to believe that Trump could avoid blabbering about it? Was Trump's bombing targeting finished bombs, or was it just a charade and if so for whose benefits?
that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days)
This seems plausible. 400kg of 60% U-235 corresponds to roughly 240kg pure U-235. If you start from natural uranium, you would have needed to process 34 tons to get that much U-235. If your bottleneck are centrifuges rather than raw uranium and fluorine (which seems likely), you will likely have processed twice that much because squeezing out the last 0.1% of U-235 is just not worth it.
Naively, I would expect that separation efficiency is proportional to the product of the fraction of both species, so the easiest percentage gain is going from 49.5% to 50.5%. However, you do not have to go back to 99.3%, because 85% is enough for a weapon. Plus you are dealing with much less material.
(Actually, the WP article on SWU contains the relevant formula. Producing 400kg 60% enriched U takes at least 34t SW. Splitting that into 140kg 85% and 260kg 46% takes about 140kg SW, or just 0.4% of the total separation work. Even separating it to the point where your tails are just 0.7% again will just take 1.3t SW.)
There is still some overhead, probably. Perhaps the Uranium is not stored as UF6 but in a more reduced form, and it certainly will take processing after it is sufficiently enriched. The mechanics of a bomb can be prototyped with depleted uranium, but at the end of the day you either need to test your device or trust your computer models. With regard to the latter "someone falsified a fission cross-section in literature" seems like an unlikely story, but so does "someone hacked the air-gapped Iranian centrifuge network".
quiet_NaN
3d ago
States are made out of individual humans which make their decisions, not some abstract grand strategy player. For example, 9/11 was only a papercut for the US, something on the level of an animal killing a villager in Age of Empires, perhaps. But it still ended up shaping a decade of US politics, because people care more about this kind of things than deaths from traffic.
Getting nuked would be like 9/11, but worse. Normally, this is the place where I would say that there is no way Netanyahu would survive this politically, but given him doing just fine after the Hamas attacks suggests I do not have a working model of Israeli politics.
Politicians pay attention to tail risks, and try to avoid them. For a conventional Iran, the 1% most unfavorable outcome for Israel of an Israeli airstrike is that Iranian rockets fired in retaliation kill a couple of hundred Israeli. For a nuclear Iran, the 1% outcome is that they nuke a few Israeli cities, killing tens or hundreds of thousands.
The other thing to remember is that there is an escalation ladder even once the nukes start flying. For example, a nuclear Iran might nuke an Israeli airbase in retaliation to a conventional bombing. In this situation, Israel would not get a pass for whatever retaliation they might visit on Iran. Glassing Tehran would not be an option, at most they could nuke an Iranian base. Even if things get to the point where cities are nuked, Israel might get away with killing 10x as many Iranians as they kill Israelis, but not with 100x. If they glass all of the Iranian cities, they will get the same repercussions than if they had nuked them without provocation, so whatever considerations are keeping them from nuking Iran right now would still be the same.
Finally, we can use past prisoner exchanges to get an idea of how much citizens and enemies weight in the Israeli utility function (to the degree that it is coherent). The exchange rate peaked in 2011 at 1027 Arabs per Israeli, but has cratered since Hamas has taken their hostages. But I imagine that killing 2M Iranians for 100k Israeli, while being a favorable exchange rate given both population sizes, would not be seen as favorable by Israel.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
do gay or trans versions of those get commissioned? should it recognize any kink at all, if in very 'correct' ways?
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.
There's even been some, albeit mixed, efforts along those lines (one 'documentary' is very popular among het breeding fans, which... uh, Shinzo Abe meme, but probably not intended).
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.
You even get really awkward discussions about what the 'correct' age for this involves, and that's not a fun thing to even consider.
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.
There's a lot of motions in both law and psychology about how any exposure to even 'normal' sex early on can cause harm, but then we're relying on a bunch of (mostly 1970s) psych research, and I would prefer not to.
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 :)
quiet_NaN
9d 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
9d 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
10d 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
10d 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
11d 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
11d 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
11d 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
11d 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
12d 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
12d 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
12d 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
13d 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.
I will register the unpopular minority opinion that I dislike the TikTok ban.
Fundamentally, it goes against the ideal of a marketplace of ideas. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. and all that.
Worried about TikTok promoting harmful behavior? Set up a general framework which video platforms liable (e.g. once they have been notified). Worrying about kids getting addicted to short videos? Ban short video platforms generally.
Plenty of countries ban or restrict foreign-produced or foreign-owned media. The Chinese can not read the Guardian. Russia severely regulates any NGOs which come within a mile of foreign funds. No Netflix for North Korea. And so forth.
In my mind, restricting foreign media is a sign of weakness. If North Korea gave its subjects access to Hollywood TV and CNN, their own propaganda would indeed look stale by comparison, so they ban foreign media not mainly because it has the better arguments (though of course it has), but because they could not match its visual appeal.
The US is both a champion of the marketplace of ideas and a dominant global cultural force (two facts which might be related, somehow). Netflix exists in 190 countries. Hollywood productions probably reach the majority of the world population, spreading Western ideas around the globe.
If that country says "actually, the most popular mobile app being foreign-owned is a, flips through excuse calendar NATIONAL SECURITY RISK, so sell it to a US company or we will ban it" is absolutely pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I do not like short video apps particularly, but I also do not think they are intrinsically more harmful than Skinner box games. TikTok was clearly targeted because it allowed China (through recommendation algorithms) to decide what political speech Generation TikTok would be exposed to. Telling a generation "you are not allowed to use your favorite app because Red China might expose you to wrongthink" is pretty fucked up. If TikTok is a direct unfiltered channel into the viewers mind unlike all the media formats which we encountered before, then it should either be banned or be placed under the control of the US ministry of rightthink, not just sold to some random US firm which might not be that much more trustworthy.
And yes, I also hate the precedent this sets for free exchange of information, because the West just lost the moral high ground. Any tinpot dictator can say "Sure, I ban X/Bluesky/Meta/Google, but you see, I consider a dominant foreign media app a NATIONAL SECURITY RISK, just like the Americans do."
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