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So some of you may have seen the latest round of pizzagate type posts on twitter revolving around Etsy digital images. It started with someone bringing back the Wayfair cabinets story from 2020, here's a "fact checking" post from the time as a reminder https://twitter.com/mediawise/status/1281711438462177281. Essentially the idea was that Wayfair were selling cabinets with the names of children on missing person lists for very large amounts of money, so really they must have been selling kids. Ergo, in plain sight paedophile ring.
Anyway, the latest round focuses on Etsy. There are a variety of 'digital images' of foods/children that are selling for $1000-$90,000 such as here: https://twitter.com/littleapostate/status/1734207558905106462 or https://twitter.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1734368320441192593/photo/1. It doesn't help that a lot of them are pizza related, so obviously catnip to Pizzagate believers- presumably this isn't coincidental.
So what is going on here? Assuming prima facie that these aren't children being sold via online distributor stores this leaves four main options:
1- The listings were real, you can follow links through to some of them (or see them on webarchive). But that doesn't preclude the possibility that they were made by the people whipping up hysteria or engagement baiting, or just trolling the internet nut jobs. All very possible options
The other options are much more interesting.
Scams
On the face of it, there are a few very funny scamming possibilities:
It could be a scam targeted at pizzagate truthers. They try and buy the $3000 digital pizza. png to see whether they get a child delivered, and in fact get a pizza picture. Scammer makes free money.
It could be a scam targeted at paedophiles! This would be funnier, as above but believe it and want to try and get a child delivered.
It could be some kind of weird automation thing, are there algorithms that buy things on Etsy?
It could just be trying to prey on people whom make a mistake or kids. But you could presumably just get a refund, so seems unlikely.
Only the first option really makes sense of these imo, if even one brainrotted internet person decided to fork out thousands to expose the Etsy paedophile ring you'd be laughing to the bank. Again though, I don't know how refunds work, so maybe they could just embarrassingly claim it back.
Money laundering
Fairly self explanatory- maybe the customer base is just other accounts set up by the same organisation, where the flows/receipts from Etsy can contribute to the image of a legitimate commercial enterprise. It might help evade certain checks, but surely the FBI or whoever would see something like this a mile off if it was genuinely an attempt to launder funds. Is there a possibility it's to do with capital controls from a foreign country?
Other illicit sales
There is also the possibility that they're selling another product, like drugs or weapons or so on. But this doesn't make a lot of sense either- why wouldn't they make the sales using the dark net or offline?
I lean strongest towards it being some kind of trolling/scamming effort by non-Pizzagaters, but the possibility that it is a false flag to whip up engagement is also possible.
There are a horde of bots, most commonly plaguing Twitter and Reddit, that exist solely to note highly upvoted posts on certain topics, usually with an image attached, and then post listings of said image applied to merchandise.
Someone posts a popular webcomic? A dozen shifty online stores print it on a t-shirt. Piece of obscure fan art? It costs nothing to have an automated pipeline photoshop it onto shirts, mugs, patches and the like, many legitimate sellers use templates themselves. If the business is so kind as to deliver the goods when someone purchases them, they're usually putting out tiny print orders to third parties and don't have to worry about stock or depreciation, let alone intellectual property rights.
And these days, with AI image gen, it takes about all of a second to rustle up a picture of Current Thing, if one doesn't conveniently exist.
I think there's a decent chance that some bot came across the names of the kids in an online context and decided to spin up a few items that are nominally child-related, or maybe it misfired even worse and put them on furniture and pizza.
At the very least it's not going to be an online pedo ring, so everything else is much more likely.
So how would the prices be derived with these bots? Certainly 3kUSD is far beyond print cost.
I have no idea, NFTs, at this point, are purely products for suckers, and I imagine most of them aren't that price sensitive, and some might even think that a higher listing price makes them more valuable.
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I’d consider another possibility— extortion against Etsy.
Etsy is a maker-space where craft makers can make a website to sell things. That means that in order to be appealing to makers, it has to be minimally vetted, easy to set up accounts, easy to use. But that also means that if I want to I can repeatedly make accounts to sell things that virtually scream child porn and it would be hard to find them all. So you can use that, and an alt on social media tagging various Q accounts and threaten their business. Give us money or be known as a child porn site.
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I think it's a mix of trolling and a low effort scam. Post the auction with some code words associated with CSAM, hope someone bids. Deliver them the image of a cheese pizza as agreed. They won't be in an position to complain.
I doubt there are actually many purchasers.
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Is it possible anyone could actually believe that anyone would go through the extreme risk and effort to abduct a child and transport them for 4 figures? It doesn't even pass the smell test.
I've found the "official" conspiracy to be rather unlikely. I don't discount the possibility that they might be trafficking kidnapped children out of hand, but I don't see any rational way for any of this stuff to be involved in such an operation.
Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer. Buyers would have to be highly vetted and trusted. And any such buyers would probably want a lot more information about what they're buying and who they're buying it from than just a name that may or may not match up with a particular reported kidnapping victim and a semi-anonymous eBay or Etsy seller.
So there would have to be some other "real" marketplace where highly vetted buyers and sellers meet, with some way of inspecting the goods, reputations, etc and some way to arrange for deliveries. But if you have such a marketplace in place, what's the point of setting up these weird Wayfair, eBay, Etsy, etc items? Especially in public where any random yahoo can discover them and wonder what the heck is going on. Which gets us back to the old and strange point of it seeming far too much like a conspiracy to actually be one because any real conspiracy wouldn't be that obvious.
Possibly money laundering is the idea, possibly for such a scheme, but if you can manage to kidnap children in bulk, transport them around, and sell them to a market of buyers as an ongoing business without getting busted, surely you can figure out better ways to launder your money. If they have some kind of special juice with the Feds to get away with such a thing, why such a mickey-mouse level money laundering scheme?
This problem is actually extremely easy to fix. Assuming there is a pedophile ring running here, they're not going to be willing to take on new clients without extensive vetting and trust procedures. The way an arrangement like this would actually work is that the seller would maintain a whitelist of clients - and so if someone off the list makes an order, they get a 3000 dollar jpg. If someone on the list makes an order, they get what they were actually paying for.
The point of putting these things on public sites like Etsy is to provide a legitimate excuse for both income and outgoing expenditures as well as sales infrastructure. "Digital art" with a receipt from Etsy is a lot easier to explain to an accountant than a 3000 dollar cheese pizza or 5000 dollar hotdog that you've flown in from Chicago for some reason.
I know this one and Obama actually paid for a Chicago hotdog street vendor to serve hotdogs at the White House. At exorbitant cost to fly that street vendor's setup to Washington.
This one isn't some poorly disguised code for child sex slaves. It's literally a Chicago street hotdog guy flown to DC with his street stand.
I actually wasn't aware of this, the last time I checked there wasn't a good explanation. I just assumed it was drugs at the time, like most of the pizza-gate related emails.
Some of those emails are clearly a code for something. Weird shit along the lines of "but we only have one slice of cheese pizza available, will that be enough for everyone tonight?" They aren't talking about a literal slice of pizza. But why document some sort of conspiracy or presumably criminal acts by email using jivey coded language?
I don't think they would have any need to to order coke by email. I also doubt they are Satan worshipping pedophiles. I don't get it.
Yeah, like what the hell is a "pizza related map" and why would it be important that it is on a handkerchief? That was the biggest one for me - why would a handkerchief with a map on it be so important as to generate an email like the one it did? I also don't think it is children, but it is definitely something.
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I see absolutely no reason for them to draw attention to such practises, let alone by using names schizo normies might recognize, when they've already got a white list. Why the hell would you do that? There's no shortage of exceptionally ugly jpegs of monkeys out there that no sane individual wants.
You might as well just have it sold as an exceptionally unpopular side dish if we're talking pizza, maybe with mandatory sardine and pineapple toppings.
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My last paragraph basically covers that. But to elaborate, I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work. I think the right way is the other way around - you already have a pedophile child slavery ring, complete with kidnapped kids, vetted customers, safe delivery mechanisms, etc. With all that already in place, why would you choose to handle your finances in this way versus all the other options available to you? Why advertise with pictures of kids and cheese pizza instead of something completely boring and unrelated? Why aren't there 200 better ways to arrange this than to make suspicious posts on Etsy?
I don't know if actual child slavery rings exist, but drug dealing rings definitely do. They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money. If "fake art" is going to be your jam, better to arrange a private, appointment-only gallery, which is still a pretty legitimate-looking thing but doesn't involve potentially tens of thousands of strangers checking out your product, screenshots getting posted to Twitter, all the critical data on servers of third-parties that will hand it over to the FBI on demand, etc.
For the record, I don't think this is a pedophilic operation and I agree with you that they probably wouldn't do things this way - I just assumed the pedophile ring was real for the purposes of the discussion. That said...
There have actually been several cases of this happening where I'm from. They've been selling fake products on UberEats for a while and there have been multiple busts - check out this story for one example, but it is far from the only one: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/uber-eats-driver-s-one-star-review-for-refusing-to-deliver-crystal-meth-20230430-p5d4dd.html
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I have never bought a slave, but $4k seems oddly low of a price for one in the modern west.
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Contract killings can be had at that price. It’s not implausible that kidnap-for-hire would be at a similar price level.
If you're paying for a contact killer online, at any price, even on the Dark Web it's almost certainly a bored fed on the other end of the line.
There was news recently that the Indian government got baited when they tried to put out another hit on a Khalistani terrorist in the West, so not even nation-state actors can pull that off. When Mossad offs Iranian HVTs, they're sending their own men undercover or using plants in deep cover.
The Dark Web is only a reliable source of drugs and stolen credentials.
I wasn’t thinking online, I was thinking in bad neighborhoods in the United States. People will sometimes kill for a thousand dollars or even less.
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Now I want a comedy movie about an assassin who has all the badass skills but is struggling to keep his business afloat. He's finally got a job, but there's a ton of security and the overheads are killing his margin! Call it "Will Kill 4 Crypto" or something.
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The price is determined by what the market will bear.
Libertarian Police
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Judging by online reaction there are a hell of a lot of people who believe it. Some believe a CP version (also doesn't pass smell test). It's been amplified by some DR voices online, presumably just as engagement bait.
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Is it possible that this is someone who doesn’t understand NFT’s trying to hop on the bandwagon way too late? The overlap between those two groups is almost certainly not 0, and if I had to hazard a guess as to which website they would try that on, it’d be etsy.
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People desperately want to believe “elites” are the ones molesting kids when in reality it’s likely (as with all other crime) to be disproportionately underclass men who do so. For every Epstein or Prince Andrew there are thousands of nobodies in trailer parks and ghettoes across the West who mostly never get caught and who cumulatively harm vastly, vastly more people. “The elites are more debauched/degenerate/satanic” is the classic peasant conspiracy; there has never been much evidence for it, and for every Byron or de Sade there were countless unrecorded cases that were only less salacious because the people involved were nobodies.
As regards strangely high eBay or Etsy (etc) prices, this has been a thing for decades and while it’s occasionally a (usually very unsuccessful) attempt at money laundering, it’s often just mentally ill individuals. The same thing is true if you look at weird eBay where people “pay” insane amounts for things - the purchaser is usually challenged in some way and the money never changes hands because they don’t have it. I remember being maybe 10 and asking my father what happens if you win a bid and don’t pay, and him saying the government takes the money from you. Alas, that generally isn’t the case.
I suspect it's actually a bit of a horseshoe. The elites are jaded, rich and hedonistic; the underclass are jaded, poor and hedonistic. It's the people in the middle who have aspirations and a position to protect.
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How can you just hand wave away all the corruption surrounding Epstein? This isn't a left or right thing either ... Just look at the plea deal he got in Florida. It amazes me the level that this is ignored because it can't be used to make one side look bad.
Yeah, but there are tens of thousands of 'elites', so the rate of any particular offense is still lower among them than it is among the lower classes.
Nobility ought to have more scrutiny on them by virtue of their peerage, philandering peasant is droll while an unfaithful count is a scandal.
I don't even disagree! But my claim, if true, disproves every single claim about how the ruling class is uniquely corrupt because of epstein. It doesn't say anything about our political system or elites beyond that some of them are human and fallible.
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it's what happens when you live and breathe Burger politics. Unless it wan be weaponized to harrass those other guys it is ignored.
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People naturally hold elites like billionaires and royalty to higher standards than losers. They enjoy wealth, power and luxury from their lofty positions, they also have greater responsibility to be pro-social. Who wants to pay taxes to paedophiles?
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Especially in the US there are probably a lot of people who would rather blame lizard people than face the reality that their own ideology is at fault. You can't have complete separation between church and state while the state enforces Christian morality. Much of the American right clings to the constitution and libertarian ideas while wanting society to enforce their morality.
If the state is supposed to be not involved in religion, who says gays can't marry?
Because that’s not what marriage was until yesterday. Ask someone in 1890 why gays can’t marry, and he’ll explain that people should be happy on their wedding days- it’s a joyful occasion. Clarify that you mean homosexuals, he’ll probably say ‘oh poor girl, her husband’s proclivities are a bit out of bounds’. Clarify again that you mean two male homosexuals marrying each other, he’ll say that marriage takes a man and a woman, you’re talking about something different.
This is one of the reasons why I have trouble taking social conservatives seriously when they talk about protecting marriage by making sure gays can't get married - they lost the "protecting marriage" fight several decades ago and there's no meaningful reason to oppose gay marriage when you look at what marriage actually is now.
Personally my answer for them would be to create an explicitly opt-in secondary class of marriage that functioned like marriage did in the past. I don't know how long they'd be able to keep it up in the face of regular society, but I imagine it'd be popular enough with islamic immigrants that they'd be able to call any criticism of it racist.
So some sort of privately certified pre-nup?
The problem here — as with every "you can get a traditional marriage if you want one" argument — is enforcement. Indeed, I've seen people try to argue "a properly-written pre-nup is all you need to make your marriage as it would be before no-fault divorce" online — at which point everyone else points out Diosdado v. Diosdado, and they either fall silent or resort to 'well, the Diosdados must have not done it properly; it must be possible somehow' sputtering.
Generally, it looks to me like the sort of "parallel society" thing that only really works for Hasidim and Mennonites.
Thanks for that cite, literally an eye-opener.
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I wonder if an arbitration requirement would play well.
There is also a similar church court system in many paleo-protestant communities.
Sure, but how powerful is the threat of ostracism/expulsion in those communities to provide enforcement of the court's decision, as compared to its effectiveness in maintaining an Amish Ordnung?
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A-ha! Perhaps you can skirt it by not calling it marriage? One the one hand they completely de-sacralize the thing, on the other they want to impose their own rigid interpretation of what marriage should be. I say go all the way and pretend it’s an ordinary commercial contract between economic entities that might as well be corporations. This is not legal advice.
Except, for one, there's the various "common-law marriage" statutes vis-à-vis long-term cohabitation and "if it looks like a marriage." Then there's the sort of things that don't really fit on an "ordinary commercial contract between economic entities" and aren't really enforceable outside family law — most things involving the kids, for example.
Yeah, you're definitely right on that.
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So there has to be a definition of our culture and norms. That is different from having a completely neutral state. By defining WASP culture as the norm, the US would have to either be somewhat religious or somewhat of an ethnostate.
You would either have to say Afghans not welcome because they are in the wrong ethnic/religious group or have to accept that marriage can include polygamy.
I’m more than willing to bite the bullet that polygamist groups aren’t welcome in the US, and historically when it’s been a major issue the general US has too.
–Chief Justice Morrison Waite, in the US Supreme Court's decision in Reynolds v. United States
(Now try to imagine a modern Supreme Court decision making this sort of 'this just isn't done in our culture' argument in a decision.)
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The state because there is no state interest in a homosexual couple. State marriage only exists to manage procreative couplings. That it is not narrowly tailored doesn't matter. Also the state has other strong interests in deterring homosexuality.
But no. "State marriages" have always allowed postmenopausal women, etc. These hypothetical state interests don't align with the actual laws and norms of American or broader Western culture throughout its history. In fact I'm very suspicious that this was invented very recently to dunk on gay people in a way that would never be applied to postmenopausal women or combat veterans whose balls were blown off.
The fertility argument appears so suddenly and arbitrarily. So narrowly tailored to strike at one particular small group.
Allowed is different than cared about and encouraged. Again, just because the state wasn't going out and checking to see every bride to be was still on the rag doesn't mean anything.
If you think babies are not the main state interest in marriage, what do you think it is? Making it hard for two people who shacked up with each other for a long time to financially separate from one another, thus wasting massive amounts of state resources?
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But infertile opposite-sex couples could always get married...?
Such as...?
I have a pet analogy I've been using for over a decade on this point, and I recently encountered a term that helps better encapsulate what said analogy is gesturing toward: "ordered toward"
Consider hand grenades. Then consider a movie prop "grenade" that looks like the real thing, but isn't. The law treats those two things very differently, and for a clear and obvious reason: real grenades explode, fake movie props don't.
But, one might argue, some subset of "real" grenades are "duds": due to manufacturing defects, the effects of time, or whatever, don't explode when you release the spoon. But the law makes no effort to carefully identify and separate out the duds, to be classed with the movie props as "non-explosive" — instead, it classifies them with the fully-functional grenades. Therefore, the law can't actually be about "explosive vs. non-explosive," and the line drawn between real and movie-prop grenades is illegitimate and should be removed.
Of course, most people would likely reject this argument. The key is precisely the phrase I spoke of before: ordered toward. A real grenade is ordered toward exploding — even if, thanks to our living in an imperfect, entropic universe, some subset fall short of that purpose — while a movie prop is not ordered toward exploding. For a "dud" grenade, the "non-explosiveness" is incidental, accidental. For the look-alike movie prop, the non-explosiveness is inherent.
In short, this is an argument that teleology can constitute a valid "joint" upon which reality may be "cleaved," particularly when it comes to law.
(It continues to dismay me how many secular people firmly accept the creationist philosophical principle that "purpose" requires a conscious purpose-giver, when an important element of the theory of evolution by natural selection is that it provides an explanation of how an undirected, atelic process can produced directed, telic entities. The usual rejoinder people make, when I argue this, is to conflate the process of natural selection with the products of natural selection; which, as I like to say, is like confusing tennis shoes with a tennis shoe factory.)
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Testing for fertility would be an extremely invasive process that is also rather error-prone, both points being especially damaging when applied at scale to the entire population. Continuing to not condone same-sex marriage implicates none of this, as the state can simply look at the 'sex' field in the government-issued documents that the government already has, which is not at all invasive in light of what is already required of marriage applicants. This 'gotcha' was never anything more than an ill-thought-out 'gotcha'.
It's especially silly wrong when one considers that there are actually situations where, believe it or not, the state requires individuals to show that they're infertile in order to get married. That is, in many states, close relatives are allowed to get married if they can show that they are infertile (they would otherwise be prohibited from marrying). This reasoning follows pretty simply from the idea that the state is using marriage policy to encourage responsible procreation as well as the dual objective, discourage irresponsible procreation. The state acknowledges that there are strong liberty and privacy reasons why they cannot simply ban sex between close relatives, but thinks that such activity leads to irresponsible and dangerous procreation. Perhaps one might think that it is enough of a deterrent to simply remove the stamp of 'marriage' from such couples (though on your theory, one can't imagine what the grounds of such a move would be in the first place), but it has actually long been recognized that the state can go even further, using marriage policy to incentivize such couples to perhaps even pursue sterility by artificial means. Obviously, such a goal does not exist for homosexual couples; they seem to be just irrelevant for the purposes of marriage policy. There is no plausible way to argue that since the state uses marriage policy to encourage close relatives to sterilize themselves rather than procreate irresponsibly that they must somehow also incentivize homosexual relationships for no apparent reason.
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That the law was over broad for its purpose is not a killer argument. Many laws are over broad for their intended purpose. Also for much of history this wouldn't be a worthwhile inquiry for the state.
Disease control. Encouraging procreative coupling.
I don't particularly care what the interests of the state are, in terms of whether or not I'm for or against something. Hell, in plenty of situations, like privacy or free speech, the interests of the collective state and that of its individual citizens are diametrically opposed. So much the worse for the state, is/ought distinction etc.
That being said, the Spartan state encouraged homosexuality as a male bonding exercise, so it's hardly unheard of.
What it is, is irrelevant, from the perspective of whether citizens should tolerate it.
Same. I oppose homosexuality for my own private reasons which are non-religious, but are mildly aligned with the state's interests.
You might well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.
There is some evidence they encouraged some forms of M-M sodomy, but not obligate homosexuality as encouraged by the majority of gay advocacy groups in the current day, and certainly it would be a practice entirely orthogonal to a marriage between men, which would run afoul of even the Spartans IMO twisted position.
Well, we are talking about the state issuing marriage licenses. This sort of comment is like saying, "whether the secretary of state refuses to give blind people driving licenses is irrelevant to whether citizens should support blind people driving!"
Well the crux of the issue is whether the existence of gay marriage is causing "harm" to the majority of the other citizens. That's certainly false for the strict standard of harm my libertarian side espouses.
If they aren't bussy-blasting you, hypothetical (and the odd real ones around here) person who disapproves, suck it up. Err.. Not quite that way, but I applaud your spirit!
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Sure. The argument was about "why should the state care?"
It's consistent to say that the state should advance one set of values that serves their interests, while private citizens are free to hold other values that have nothing to do with state interests. E.g. the state has an interest in having a strong military and may choose to valorize soldiers with medals and memorials and holidays. Meanwhile private citizens may choose to adopt different values that don't glamorize dying in war.
I gave you an example of a state advancing homosexuality for what can be described as the sake of the state.
Idk about you, but I expect, being the citizen of a representative democracy, and likely to become a citizen of another one, that the state does its level best to align itself with the desires of the majority of its citizenry.
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Determining whether a couple is infertile in general is much harder than determining whether a couple is gay. It is entirely reasonable for the state to not want any marriages which do not produce children, but to allow the ones that it can't trivially detect.
The state can go fuck itself, frankly, if I ever get married or have kids it won't be to shore up the state. One wonders what's even the point of a state that places its own nebulously defined interest above that of its subjects.
Would that the pro-gay-marriage camp shared your disdain for state sanction. As it stands, forcing everyone else, including the state, to recognize gay "marriage" was an explicit goal. Partly, this was because state sanction included some obvious benefits, such as end-of-life care decisions, intestate succession, tax status, etc.
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Right, I think the argument that sterile couplings in general are socially bad is weak - it's very hard to see how a widowed man and woman marrying in their 60s hurts society.
The core objection to gay marriage - whether admitted or not - is that homosexuality specifically is bad, and I think attempts to abstract away from this are disingenuous.
My own view of the issue is that homosexuality is a disability. I don't think less of anyone for being disabled, and I don't begrudge them finding their own way to best live with their disability. But it seems perverse to me to celebrate disability. People advancing pro-LGBTQ stuff feels similar to me to the deaf people who want their kids to be deaf too. And to the extent that sort of thinking takes over society as a whole, it's bad because it means we've lost the ability to see that having a properly functioning body and brain is a good thing. We're becoming disconnected from what should be obvious reality.
So I come down on the side that the best outcome is for society to tolerate homosexuality (whose practitioners are mostly unable to change their own desires) but not to celebrate it (whether through marriage recognition or rainbow flags or propagandistic representation in popular media or whatever). People should be allowed to be weird, but being gay should be seen as weird.
So you support the modern Russian and Hungarian policy towards homosexuality? Nobody has managed to thread the needle on ‘freedom for gays, but not celebrating and promoting it’ yet. The closest is probably the eastern euro countries where public homosexuality has legal restrictions(eg no pride parades, can’t be out to minors) but there are no sodomy laws.
The closest in my opinion is Japan, in which public homosexuality is tolerated to the extent that it conforms to longstanding dramatic/performance norms (eg okage). Private homosexuality is permitted but not encouraged and generally considered shameful. The vibe as I understand it is "be gay if you have to, but keep it to yourself".
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That seems to be the position of most of the "conservative" sorts I know IRL. As one crudely but pithily summarized it: "I don't care if you're gay, just don't be a fag about it."
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Well, they could always be made to adopt orphans, and at least some gay or lesbian couples go through the trouble of surrogacy.
The orphans aren't already in enough trouble?
I find most of the assisted reproduction creepy.
I'd rather have a 50% of being sexually abused as a child than counterfactually not exist, frankly. I think most people, if they were honest, would agree. This makes banning gays from having assisted-reproduction children ... extremely stupid, imo, and the morality that leads you to believe it must be prevented extremely suspect. (Its' still fine to think gays are evil or whatever, that can coexist)
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No to both, not that I can particularly comment on what you consider creepy.
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If you've never been here; Why comment?
Fault for what? Pedophilia?
Are you saying that it's christian morality that is saying pedos are bad?
Do you actually know anyone on the American right? Lumping evangelical conservatives with libertarians is like calling Bill Clinton a marxist.
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Mentally ill individuals being targeted, making the listings, or both? I could buy that. It does seem particularly schizo.
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I'm mostly in agreement with you, but not here. There's plenty of evidence of elite debauchery. It probably less of the highest tier depravity (I.E. child exploitation) than the underclass, but there's plenty of garden variety extreme/demeaning sex with a collection of hookers and groupies.
The populations aren't much different in how much pain they cause other people through sex on a per-capita basis. There's just a lot more of the underclass.
I don't necessarily disagree (I think actual evidence is lacking either way), but the point of peasant conspiracies is that they essentially allege extremely outsized participation by elites in that kind of thing; even if we were to say that the rate of (whatever kind of) criminality was the same, that would still be greatly lower than that alleged by pizzagate and similar conspiracies (eg. that everyone who ever flew on Epstein's plane was molesting children).
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Never underestimate the stupidity or laziness of criminals.
Besides, even if the criminal knows how to set that stuff up, they can only go for clients who also know that stuff. I could definitely believe there's a black market with customers who are too stupid/lazy to use anything more complicated than Ebay or Etsy, especially if we're talking drug addicts.
Anyway - I assume what we actually want here is referrer tracking, to see where the people buying those things are getting linked from? i don't know enough about it to know how possible that it, though.
This is true, but doesn't distinguish between criminals. The degree of carelessness that is effective in a child trafficking ring is much narrower than that of a fraudulent ebay listing scam. I can easily believe that someone set up a bot to scam pedos trying to buy kids online. Even if they're caught, they're never anywhere near any actual kids. It's harder to believe that an established child sex slave operation would risk everything to cut corners in an online shopping cart app.
I mean, maybe?
The first time one of Jeffrey Dahmer's drugged victims stumbled out of his home nude and managed to make it to the police to beg for help, Dahmer assured them it was just a drunken lover's dispute and the police turned the victim back over to him without further investigation. He wasn't caught until the second time that happened years later.
There do exist competent police task forces that investigate their area of remit hard and track down the criminals, but my impression is that there's a rather small number of them nationally and they are pretty narrowly focused on one or a few cases at a time. I expect it's not actually that hard to fall into the cracks. But I could be wrong.
Not to say that the average child trafficker is as safe as the average small-scale pot dealer in a white neighborhood, or anything. Just that I'm not sure the magnitude of the difference is that great, or that it depends on the trafficker being orders of magnitude more competent and careful.
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The one with the kid and the chicken wings is clearly AI generated, so I dunno. "Money laundering" was my first thought, because why would anyone pay three grand for a picture of a pizza?
I suppose it could be some kind of scam, trying to convince people that AI art is the new NFT and if they buy this new limited edition image they can later sell it on for $$$$$, but on Etsy?
Well, maybe that's where the pigeons are both ignorant enough about cryptocurrency and have enough disposable cash to scam them this way.
Or maybe it is all AI and it's bot-generated content, both images and prices, and nobody human is really paying three grand for a cheese pizza.
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