It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Why is it interesting that Tor relays are mostly in "large, developed countries" and not the country with strict internet censorship, i.e. the great firewall, that presumably blocks Tor ... or Russia, a single country with less population than half the US? That's what you'd expect.
Not to say US intelligence hasn't tried to deanonymaize tor users, of course they have, and there are accounts of attacks on Tor where large percentages of new nodes are potentially malicious.
That is another explanation. That being said, these countries are more or less allies of America and the French or German or Australian versions of the NSA are cooperating with us. Hell, even famously neutral Switzerland helped us during the Cold War. If these dudes found out about a gigantic, well-funded pedophile murderer website…the guys running it, and a lot of their customers, would have law enforcement knocking at their doors.
You still have a bunch of dedicated hobbyists going up against large, powerful national governments with lots of resources and the backing of the general public…people would be literally calling for these guys’ heads.
The only way this would be possible, I think, is if these people had powerful patrons protecting them. I don’t know if that would mix well with just any evil shitbag with a laptop and a few hundred bucks’ worth of crypto being able to log onto these sites…I don’t think it would. Mr. Evil Pedo gets busted by law enforcement. There’s a good chance he sings like a canary…and if he doesn’t, there’s the next guy, and the next…someone’s going to spill the beans in hopes of a lighter sentence. Feds use that dude to go after bigger fish, with the cooperation of the NSA and the other alphabet soup boys.
There’d have to be a fairly large conspiracy and powerful people protecting something like this…if peasants (that means us) found out about this shit we’d be pissed. Could be a reasonably plausible way to get the American people to give up a lot of our civil liberties and accept an NSA headquarters at every police station or something, to be honest.
To sum up: you’ve still got like 100 militia dudes, who are decent at fighting but not professional grade, going up against hundreds of high quality professional soldiers. These guys are dog meat without a hell of a lot of help.
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