2rafa
22d ago
It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.
What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard (a longstanding fraudulent German fake payments startup), an autistic Austrian-Czech who was obsessed with secret agents and James Bond, while he was abortively attempting to extend his scam to Russia, Russian intelligence compromised him with the help of an ex-pornographic Russian actress and several "retired" FSB officials.
Over the years, Wirecard helped move (with Marsalek's full approval) the funds of sanctioned Chechens, questionable Libyans, and shady Russian-Israelis between East and West, with the help of ex-KGB fixer Stanislav Petlinsky and his Israeli financier son. They had under their control the darling of the entire German tech industry, a man praised by Merkel, and a company so overvalued it was genuinely attempting to buy Deutsche Bank. They had thoroughly taken control of Austria's intelligence apparatus, which meant they had unlimited access to classified intelligence from Western allies, the entire European border entry database and so on. And then it failed, because it could not locate 1.9bn Euros.
It turned out that a great deal of the FSB program, as it happened, had only tangentially to do with what one might consider the interests of 'Russia' the nation. Much of it - including large elements of the assassination program - had to do with the grift, the transferring of money, the profiting of various senior officials, and the fear that MI6 or the CIA would buy the information on who was making money in Russia (and how) from defectors like Skripal and Litvinenko. A competent FSB would have furnished Wirecard with the money needed for KPMG to sign off its audit (something well-paid accountants are always desperate to do) by showing proof of the 'missing' 1.9bn euros. But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.
A tragic tale. Marsalek is now an Orthodox priest in hiding deep in Russia. Its inhabitants, that great people of so many contradictions, live to fight another day. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.
2rafa
18d ago
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
2rafa
23d ago
Violent crime is the biggest converter from lib to con because it disproportionately affects affluent urban liberals (who are more likely to live in big cities, donate to political parties, be involved in politics, be involved in media etc).
If you live in a distant outer suburb of Dallas or Phoenix it’s unlikely that the Summer of Floyd had much personal effect on your neighborhood, which had no homeless people or significant crime before and after 2020.
If you live in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or Santa Monica, or the Mission, or in the Loop, you will 100% have seen a significant decline in the ‘social fabric’ / urban quality of life since 2020. There are many reasons for Reagan’s landslide victories but a part of them were that rich urban Democrats had gotten very fucking tired of decay. Sure, Mondale still won NYC (although not the state), but Reagan got 40% of the vote in the city.
Even in Manhattan Reagan got close to 30%, Donald Trump got 9%. And Reagan wasn’t merely charting the decline of the GOP in NYC; he got like 50% more of the vote in Manhattan than the several previous Republican candidates. And that discounts the big shifts the Dems made on crime too.
Hanania has written about this, but big cities becoming shitholes is one of the surest ways to shift the country to the right.
I will solve the childlessness problem hypothetically (amounts and currencies can of course be adapted to a country):
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65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child. The tax drops by 15% per child for the first three children, with historic deductions so that people who still have 3 kids but do so late can claw back some of what they paid. Child deductions only available to couples married at (or within six months of) birth.
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Capital gains tax is doubled for those over 35 with fewer than two children, normal above. Normal rate only available to married or widowed people.
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Death/estate tax for childless people is 60% marginal on estates over $1m in net worth, falling by 20% and rising in threshold by $2m for each child until the fourth.
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75% of roles on boards of directors must go to married parents of at least two children. 50% must go to married parents of at least three children. The same applies to Congressmen and women and to senior positions / positions of responsibility in all regulated industries, and to all cabinet positions in the executive. 90% of senior positions in the military, state department and justice department must be occupied by parents of at least two children.
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Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).
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To qualify for any tax credits, a movie or television production must show or imply that at least 65% of characters with more than 10 minutes of screen-time described or implied as over the age of 27 have children. The same, in real life, applies to cast members with the same screen time threshold.
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Entry to any selective schools (specialized high schools, gifted programs etc) requires a child to have at least one sibling. Priority is given to those with two or more siblings.
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For every child after and including the third under the age of 18, graduates of four-year college degrees can receive $8,000 per year in student debt forgiven. This stacks for married couples where both partners have student debt, and for graduates of medical schools or STEM programs at top-50 (US News) universities, it rises by an additional 50%, meaning that some PMC professional couples could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt completely wiped out, never paying anything, if they have three or more children. (Two doctors with 4 kids under 18 would see $48,000 per year of college debt wiped off).
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A 10% state levy on home sales by childless adults over 30 funds mortgage subsidies for married parents of three or more children on a variable basis depending on the money raised the previous year. Married parents of 2 or more children who have had a child within the last 48 months pay no capital tax on primary home sales.
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White House, senate and congressional internships, state-funded scholarships, Supreme Court clerkships and other prestigious positions for young people are limited to those with at least one sibling. A core part of pushing up birthrates is convincing parents of only children to have another, so it has to be stigmatized.
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For constitutional reasons, exemption from some policies is available for those “constitutionally incapable” of having children. These exemptions must be filed for with a $10,000 processing fee, do not apply to inability to bear children related to any decisions taken by the individual (eg. gender transition, voluntary castration) above the age of federal criminal responsibility (12), or to psychological or material conditions like ‘asexuality’ or just being ugly. All decisions have to be approved unanimously by a panel appointed 50% by congressional republicans and 50% by congressional democrats. The presumption is that in cases of genuine medical infertility that is likely from childhood (ie not discovered later in life) the state will know about it years before any exemption may be needed.
There needs to be a stage in between prison and freedom
I’m unsure why this isn’t discussed more. Historically, there were many alternatives to jail that were used to control unruly people and populations. The death penalty was one, of course (we still have it in the US but it’s used so rarely that it doesn’t really impact anything, and most other developed countries have abolished it). But the others - exile, internal exile, population transfers more broadly, asylums (abolished since the 1980s) and so on have ceased.
Jail sucks, especially American jail, and I don’t think that people who - through no fault of their own - have high time preference and impulsivity deserve to spend their whole lives there in a small cell, no nature, no greenery, no alcohol or drugs (other than what can be smuggled in or made locally), no real employment at normal wages, no privacy, no exposure to sex or romance for straight people and so on. That does sound terrible, and it’s a shame we condemn so many to it.
At the same time, that doesn’t mean I want to be exposed to the problems of the criminal, drug addicted or homeless underclass. They should be allowed some joy but separated, in every crucial sense, from the edifice of civilized society and from people who Follow The Rules. A kind of sealed reservation for people who aren’t the worst of the worst violent criminals (who should remain in jail or in the noose) but who are manifestly incapable of living among law-abiding people with some propriety. An American Siberia.
2rafa
20d ago
Surgery isn’t a new treatment for BIID; I covered this some months ago in my post on an interesting nullification fetish criminal case, but there have been scattered cases over the last thirty years of surgeons agreeing to amputate in cases of this condition.
The interesting dynamic, which I noted at the time, is that the surgeons typically shrugged and were willing to do it, while the psychiatrists were more opposed.
2rafa
8d ago
Would even a conventional war between NATO and Russia really be decided by artillery shell production rates?
2rafa
23d ago
Buenos Aires had a homicide rate about the same as NYC in 2022 (so post-Floyd).
From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.
One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did. Only about half, possibly far fewer, of Italian Argentines were from the South - more than 40% were from the north, 10% from the middle. Meanwhile almost all Italian Americans are from Campania, Calabria and Sicily.
It’s Italian-Americans who, if you look at the regional performance of Italy, should be in the shit. Yet the Italian Argentines, many of whom are descended from northern farmers and merchants who left in the mid-19th century, seem to have been unable to arrest the decline of their country.
The Spanish genetics are also broadly from the highest quality regions of that country (still with the highest incomes), like the Basque Country. Argentina doesn’t merely have mediocre PIGS EU handout genetics, it actually has cradle-of-the-Renaissance, competent-Milanese-industrialist genetics. It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.
Coffee by itself has a bitter, unpleasant flavor and I’m convinced people who like it do so primarily because of the positive association with energy, alertness, productivity etc. that caffeine obviously has. It’s no different to an alcoholic who eventually develops a taste for a really disgusting kind of hard liquor because they associate it with being drunk.
A flat white with (relatively little) sugar is tasty, sure, I drink coffee all the time. But ‘milk and sugar’ have a much better record for being naturally tasty to people than hot, bitter, heavily diluted, nutrition-less bean stock.
The Huffington Post apparently did a video where adults try coffee for the first time and hate all but the stuff that tastes least of coffee (the mocha).
2rafa
29d ago
Having kids is high status among the rich. I’m not sure how widespread this knowledge is but in wealthy social circles in NYC, London etc being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker, since each additional child (including the first) is a few million in costs (once larger housing, 15 years of private school tuition, more rooms on vacation, flights, clubs, college etc are accounted for). If you see a 32 year old secular mom who has 4 kids in Manhattan, you’re looking at someone who has a lot of money.
The problem is that as you say, a DINK couple making $350,000 a year together would have to make like $1m a year or more to have the same lifestyle with 4 kids, assuming they intend to raise them in the manner normal for the upper-middle class.
My “medical cannabis” prescription was approved. I’m not a huge stoner but I don’t like feeling like a criminal and, while the penalties for possession in the UK are very low (as far as I understand it you just get a warning and the cops confiscate it) I think it’s embarrassing to buy drugs like a sixteen year old when you’re approaching thirty. I also want to avoid smoking if I can avoid it but the vapes available on the UK illicit market are pretty much all dangerous synthetic cannabinoids where you have no idea what’s in them; the only way to get safe vape oil is legally.
The process was very straightforward. You have to have tried treatment for whatever condition (anxiety, ADHD, back pain, Long Covid, whatever) before, so I said I needed it for ADHD because the medication had not satisfactorily resolved my symptoms. This was indeed true. They checked my medical history (I think this is to detect schizophrenics who can’t have it), had one consultation and then approved it.
Interestingly, while my ADHD diagnosis consultation to get lisdexamfetamine cost £900 or something like it and took an hour, the medical weed one only cost £200 and took like ten minutes. After this you order what you want from an online store and it gets delivered to your house.
One interesting thing I’ve found is how few people in Britain even know that legal weed is a thing here at all. On the subreddit it’s common to see stories of police raiding people’s houses or even of people being fired before those involved are informed of the person’s prescription. It’s been legal since 2018 but is only available privately, not on the NHS.
I think weed is particularly dangerous for young people because it kills motivation. That said, as a gainfully employed adult, I find it strictly preferable to alcohol for most occasions because of the lack of hangover and lack of calories. Booze is more fun, almost always, but I’ve been more alert, have found waking up easier and have done more in the morning since replacing drinking at dinner with it (on perhaps 4/7 nights a week).
The board is more right wing but a lot of the most low-quality racist users have also left and/or been banned. There are far fewer slurs and there is far less generic trashy racism than there was on Reddit. I’m surprised people don’t remember what it was like to have constant drive-by posting from people unfamiliar with the subreddit and rules who came over from MDE, Opie and Anthony and other DR shitposting subs.
I pretty much never report anything these days. I’ve literally reported maybe three or four comments in the last couple of years here, whereas on Reddit I’d report regularly. You may remember I was highly opposed to the move from Reddit and predicted it would be the death of the community; I have been pleasantly proven wrong.
Arguing that the CRA was unconstitutional doesn’t mean it was immoral or even a bad idea; I think a lot of federal authority is unconstitutional but agree that it’s in effect necessary for the functioning of America as a modern state. But the CRA should have passed as a constitutional amendment given its sweeping constitutional scope.
2rafa
23d ago
The difference is that NK has been under one management since (effectively) 1945. The East German effect is well known, even if Korea is the most extreme example.
Argentina has had many governments, many skilled and intelligent senior officials who have genuinely attempted to transition to a prosperous market economy even if stymied by various longstanding political movements and interests. That they’ve all failed to arrest the catastrophe is kind of unique. Everyone knows communism is retarded, the conundrum with Argentina is that even economic mismanagement in the first world (see Greece and Italy pre-Euro) shouldn’t lead to Argentina-esque conditions for 70+ years in a row.
2rafa
8d ago
According to the internet the Wonderlic test, which is an IQ test, is used by a large number of major American corporations, from Bank of America to American Airlines to Abbott medical. Dozens of other major corporations have their own in-house cognitive assessments. The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test. The US military and many parts of federal and state civil services use IQ tests. Somehow these places did not stop using them under legal pressure despite the disparate outcome standard being in place for fifty years or more.
The sole requirement for employers is that they must be able to prove that test performance equals job performance. This is absurdly simple to do in any profession in which performance can be objectively measured (which is most of them).
The major lost cases (iirc a big one semi-recently was some firefighter or cop promotions in New England) are where this standard couldn’t be shown to investigators. If you can prove it the justice department will typically just move on and not even look further into a case.
In liberal cities, colleges are calling the cops because they don’t want to lose Jewish donors. I think if we have an in-part privately funded university system it’s fair to say “I’m not going to continue to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to you if you tolerate X” and then the university can decide if that matters to them. If it does, that isn’t blackmail, it’s how almost all charity works. If you donate a few hundred million to the NY Phil you can probably finagle some influence over what’s played.
In red states like Texas it’s manifestly true that the much more heavy-handed response isn’t being driven by Jews but by gentile GOP politicians. Most of them are zionist to some extent, but I think in (for example) Abbott’s case, it’s more that there’s a very big ideological divide between the right and these progressive student protestors and this is a way to hurt the outgroup to the delight of the base. Pretty much no protesting student is going to vote for a Republican candidate, and a lot of Republican voters dislike leftist college students.
Social engineering is not some impossible task, societies have been regularly, consciously selected for all kinds of things for the entire history of human civilization.
If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children. That is a question of incentives, most of them financial. Incentives and disincentives work, they’re why drink-driving rates have fallen by huge amounts for example, because of a feedback loop between high punishments, social stigma and shame. That same loop can be transferred to childlessness.
It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens (neither of these are remotely new to Western countries).
I completely agree. All political radicals face this issue, no communist thinks they’d be a manual laborer on the collective farm, they think they’d be a playwright in good standing or an academic or on the politburo.
But I also think you need to look at our current level of economic development. If a Western country became an absolute monarchy tomorrow there wouldn't be millions of peasants because farmwork has been largely automated; it would just look like a modern country that is an absolute dictatorship, and there are many examples of those.
2rafa
4d ago
I wouldn’t say that Christianity guarantees slave morality, Christians had after all conquered and subjugated the majority of the world a century ago. I just think it lacks any safeguards against slave morality the way that Judaism (with its inherent ethnonationalism and more vigorously harsh Old Testament) and Islam (with Muhammad the conqueror cemented as ultimate example for mankind) have. If your civilization has a brief slave morality cult or phase, there’s nothing in Christianity or Christian-descended secular society to say ‘stop’.
2rafa
12d ago
The Baltic offensive theory isn’t watertight. For example, CIA and MI6 intelligence is clearly good enough inside Russia to have been able to predict the Ukraine invasion several months in advance. We can only assume investment (both in covert sources and hacking/signals intelligence) has been strengthened since then.
At very short notice NATO could send an expeditionary force to the Baltics of at least 150,000 men. Even the European Union + UK, if America decided not to participate, could field at very short notice perhaps 75-80,000 men (UK 10-15k, France 20-25k etc). Given how much elite Russian military experience was killed in the first few months of Ukraine that’s a relatively tough foe for Russia.
The ‘Baltic Blitzkrieg’ scenario therefore only works if either Russia is able to plan, stage and execute the operation without any signs being intercepted by the West, or if NATO countries don’t even care to send forces to the Baltics to scare Putin off, which seems unlikely given it’s already happening.
2rafa
18d ago
One question I have is whether Assange’s conviction would even be guaranteed if he was tried in the US.
Here’s the indictment. Almost all the charges are ‘espionage’, and a lot of it seems to rely on proving that Assange knew he was damaging the US and essentially acted as Manning’s handler rather than just using Manning as a source.
That seems like a pretty difficult thing to prove, unlike Snowden Assange didn’t flee to an enemy state, and while he is an asshole it doesn’t seem likely he’s working for the Russians or Chinese. Assange can cite a history of years of working as a journalist/editor of wikileaks in the public interest before he was arrested. Is it not possible that Biden is worried about the risk of Assange being acquitted?
I agree that the dissident right is overdosing on hopium regarding antisemitism.
With the exception of some of the Muslims (and not even all of them, since many at elite universities are largely secularized DEI libs who do not or barely follow any tenets of Islam) these protestors are not racially or religiously hostile to Jews in and of themselves. At most they consider Jews to be ‘white people’, whom they may dislike, but that is hardly the basis for a coalition with white rightists.If this is how young progressives protest against what they perceive as ‘white ethnonationalism’ on the far side of the world, it does not take a great intellect to imagine how they feel about white ethnonationalism in the United States, which is the central policy position on the dissident right.
It is cathartic for far rightists to see Jewish people finally getting their supposed ‘comeuppance’ for supporting progressive policies in the diaspora while defending an ethnic homeland in Israel (allegations of hypocrisy were not unfounded, although many did ‘pick a side’ and advocate liberalism in both, like Soros, or in neither, like many Jewish conservatives).
In practice, though, the most strategic thing for the dissident right to do would be to shut up. Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.
The coming together of leftist and rightist antisemitism is not particularly likely. Blue haired DEI activists who think Israel is a white nationalist fascist police state oppressing innocent people of color (much like Amerikkka amirite) are unlikely to agree that the progressive ideology, media, art and culture they love, which in fact is the impetus behind their antizionism itself (!) is in fact degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews they are protesting against. The protestors like everything the rightists dislike about Jews except their zionism, while the antisemitic far right sympathize on some level with ethnonationalism but dislike everything else.
However, I disagree that antisemitism will not rise. It is clearly rising, as is visible in everything from comments on mainstream YouTube and TikTok content, in Zoomers memes and in real life among younger people, both white and non-white in the West. That does not mean that things will necessarily get very bad for Jews, at least in the Anglosphere (it was still much worse a century ago), but it is undeniable.
2rafa
22d ago
They do what they say on the tin, meaning rule over an unproductive peasant economy that is one of the poorest nations in the world? No, it is clear modernity is still better than the Taliban if the goal of organized human society is some kind of technological or industrial advancement.
And the Taliban haven’t even been able to stop ISIS terror attacks, which continue regularly under their authority. The first duty of any state is to order; the Taliban cannot even accomplish this. You may wish to be ruled over by illiterate, destructive tribesmen descended from Buddhists converted by Arab conquerors in the distant past. That opinion may not be widely shared in the West, though.
2rafa
26d ago
either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court.
Why would she win? If she violates the law and is convicted there is no higher court to appeal to, there is no British constitution. She could ‘flee’ to England, which would lead to an interesting legal situation (any British police force can make arrests anywhere in the UK, so Police Scotland could in theory arrest her in, say, London and drive her back to Edinburgh, but they would be reluctant to do so for political reasons). But the only real way for her to win if charged would be for the UK Parliament to pass a law explicitly reversing the Scottish Parliament’s bill. In an election year that is unlikely, and it will be even more so after Labour win in October.
2rafa
26d ago
I’d offer a limited defense of this country.
The UK’s growth trend since 2007 is largely because the UK was one of the fastest growing major economies in the previous decade, and because of various second-order effects of the US dollar being highly depressed from the late 90s until 2008/2009 and then surging in value until now. For a brief moment the UK’s nominal gdp/capita was even slightly higher than the US in 2007, again because of an FX quirk after the dotcom bust and mid-2000s oil bubble sent the dollar cratering. The fiscal problem is, as others have said, obvious and has long been obvious. Brits expect continental European social democracy at American tax rates. It isn’t possible and has never been possible. Therefore the UK will continue to run high deficits and struggle with poor public services. It is what it is, but it isn’t collapse-tier really. Every major party has acknowledged it in private, there just aren’t any palatable solutions.
The immigration problem is significant but France and Sweden’s problems with immigration and Islamism are still much worse. As a percentage of non-European immigrants, the UK has fewer migrants from the Islamic world than almost anywhere else in Northern Europe, including France, Germany, Benelux and the Nordics. Again, a collapse is more likely elsewhere (probably France). The UK is closer to the US on the “pace of being destroyed by mass immigration” scale than worse-off countries elsewhere in Western Europe, and more likely to end up Brazilified than Lebanonified.
Warships being scrapped: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-to-scrap-two-royal-navy-frigates-say-reports/
32 year old warships being scrapped. The biggest problem for the British military is America’s snail-level pace at building F-35s which means that it will be 15+ years after the two aircraft carriers came in before they have enough planes to operate them as intentioned.
I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns
The core problem with the British civil service is that it’s run by figures like Cummings who believe issues are a result of stupidity or inefficiency instead of deep-rooted political realities (like the tax situation I describe above, and views on planning among the electorate) that can’t be changed by putting a few smart autists in power in Whitehall.
Porn is inherently low status. Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc.
It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.
This is what really makes selling porn online so difficult to make profitable. Terms like “post nut clarity” (which, yes, has a real-world meaning but is most commonly used in relation to porn) speak to the shame of the whole enterprise. Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited. If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
Men don’t want to pay for porn because it makes them feel like losers. I don’t see why that’s not the obvious answer. When men had to pay to access it, more swallowed their pride. Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
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