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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13hr ago
Yeah, but what do you want from me? You asked for topwits and got a topwit.
My bad, it would have been more useful to ask for your understanding of the bottommost topwit or thereabouts.
I'm not sure that she still does escorting? In any case, socializing is basically your job as a public figure and helps feed the fame flywheel.
Sure, but it does not help the "good poasting" flywheel, and I assumed that any assessment of her wits is based on her textual output rather than her life as a Gesamtkunstwerk.
What is so well researched or interesting about her takes? Asking her Twitter followers about something is, I suppose, research, but I don't know it's particularly good.
The data analysis and visualisation, ideas for things to ask, and thoroughness in constructing the questions. I have not seen things like that fetish tabooness/preference by gender/popularity chart anywhere else outside of 4chan, and 4chan is many orders of magnitude more sloppy about it.
I think this is certainly true. I am not sure that conflating "agency" with intelligence is correct.
I would think of agency as at least strongly correlated with some component of intelligence (frontal lobe stuff?), and I say that as someone with very subpar levels of agency.
I think the real just world fantasy is to believe that nobody who is a midwit can attain fame and success.
Both can be just-world fantasies.
Ironically it seems to me that you are the one posting a weak knee jerk criticism here since I'm none of those things and didn't say anything about whether I find her attractive or not.
Fair point on the latter, but I thought it was fair to put you in the "assorted trad" box given your general right-wing alignment (you get that stamp based on memory, but it's not hard to find posts that give it away in your history) and the somewhat gratuitous use of "prostitute" (Escorts are between not covered by the definition and non-central examples in modern usage, so insisting on the world seems to be meant to convey condemnation).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15hr ago
Well, then you need to argue that imagined/expected/fantasised-about sexual attention does not usually constitute a significant term in male perception of female value.
By coincidence, just today I got myself re-earwormed by this tango classic, which is about the male protagonist lamenting how he repeatedly gets baited by imagined sexual attention. Surely its popularity suggests that the sentiment resonates.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15hr ago
I mean, there's a lot of smart people out there. I don't pretend to have the final say on who is smart and who isn't, but I'd say, for example, Scott Alexander in his prime was a topwit.
Sure, but he was... top 0.1%? Top 0.01%? Certainly somewhere pretty high up, in terms of wit, even if we assume that most of the witty people never make their wits available to the public.
Aella is sculpting a public persona as her full time occupation. Her output is basically the best that she can do given full effort and attention. I like this forum a lot, but how many people here treat poasting as their full time job? I'd say zero. So I don't think that you can do a naive comparison given the discrepancy in effort involved.
A fair point, but one hand we have plenty of very active posters and on the other hand all the escorting and socialising and what-not surely must take up some of her time as well. Besides, being able to actually translate more time investment into better output is a skill in itself.
Why?
Because most posters here produce significantly less interesting, more brainrotten and worse-researched takes? And even then, I'd be comfortable with assuming that all Mottizens are top 10% for some reasonable measure of "wits" and most are at least top 5%. I just suspect that most of us are so bubbled up that we vastly overestimate the median person.
Debatable, since on a pseudonymous forum you can't actually tell who is successful and who is full of shit.
I don't know, it seems that enough people here drop hints at their occupation that it's likely enough most are in considerably lower-agency life tracks where they essentially operate as employees in standard-ish careers, and the path to get there and advance further forward looks like "get better standardised credentials and perform better on the next performance review".
I do have to admit that I'm quite biased against Aella's detractors, simply because the correlation between aesthetic objections to her lifestyle and politics and barely-solicited public criticism of the quality of her output or intellectual qualities is so high. If my impression is that she is one of the more interesting bloggers, but then every time some topic adjacent to her is discussed a cavalcade of card-carrying MRAs and postrationalist born-again Christians and other assorted trads comes out of the woodwork to assert that she is stupid and boring (and also very unattractive to them), then it just seems like a better explanation that the detractor "doth protest too much" and also is falling prey to a variant of the just-world fallacy (believing that the world can't be so unfair that the immoral and distasteful would also be competent and talented).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16hr ago
How is this consistent with the existence of celebrity simps and stalkers, who receive ~zero sexual attention from the target they value the most?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16hr ago
· Edited 16hr ago
Aella, despite being, as far as I can tell, a midwit
Who do you consider examples of non-midwits (topwits?)? It seems to me that unless the standard you are applying is more correlated with your aesthetic/moral approval of the person than their wits as usually defined, you should then be writing off most of this forum as midwits as well.
(My impression is that she should be a little bit above the median of the Motte in terms of smarts and verbal skills, and way above in terms of agency (mostly evidenced by the successful ascent to and maintenance of local e-celeb status). Not in any sense my "type" either, so I think I have a low risk of bias due to simping.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18hr ago
All things being equal I would prefer the not slut. But all things are not equal.
It seemed to me that this was essentially what remained of @2rafa's point, after one cleaned up the slightly muddled argument, anyway. Relatedly-
In modern American society my gut says I would advise young women to go be a slut. It opens a lot of doors for you and not being a slut is socially awkward now. Though I think it may be very psychologically damaging.
If you define "psychological damage" sufficiently broadly, is this not just the two sides of the deal offered by any form of social interaction? The modal rat-adjacent slightly right-wing homeschooled CHAD would like to keep the purity of his autistic trains of thought, birthed from the dust of the internet and nursed in its dark corners like the medieval idea of a, well, rat; but his life success will increase if he goes to college, has his rough corners filed off by the feminised DEIcracy and learns to talk the talk of successful people. The monk-like mathematician would like to stay in his ivory tower counting ordinal angels on the head of a pin, but three increasingly depressing postdocs with overwhelming teaching load later he gives up, starts spending his nights on HN and before long he is grifting funding from schmucky finance bros with papers about smart contracts instead.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
I wonder if to some extent this can be chalked up to differences in climate, but I am surprised how nice and clean everything looks. I spent a bit of time around Shanghai and Suzhou two years ago, and though of course especially the former had its glitzy parts, I took in no shortage of sights that were far more decrepit and dilapidated than anything you are showing here. There were rotting trash-covered shopping malls/hawker centres right next to the canonical route from the airport to the center, dystopian arrays of housing blocks made of unfinished water-damaged concrete, and peeling paint and rust all over.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
This is way too detailed for a "testable predictions" post, and I'm glad to see the responses you get are not really having it. Are you trying to exploit that "What's more likely: (a) Linda is a bank teller, (b) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement" cognitive glitch, where the excess of detail paints a more vivid picture and thus gives your hypothesis more weight in the reader's mind than it should get on intrinsic merit? (Less nicely: are you not just using the "public predictions" framing to peddle your wish fulfillment fic where AI believers are BTFO? Not that the other side is not guilty of the same thing, with "AI 2027" or what it was called)
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2d ago
I have a slightly different answer from what seems to have been offered so far. Companies, as a legal form, are a carrot-and-stick deal offered to the individual by society in order to channel his ambition into pro-social or at least less harmful ends.
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The carrot are tax advantages, paperwork benefits, legal perks such as being able to claim unique use of a recognisable artificial trademark, and some degree of shielding of the individual behind the enterprise from repercussions (such as debts far in excess of what the enterprise could be expected to make up for, or legal responsibility for side effects and damages caused by it), as long as he plays by the rules.
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The stick is, often, outright lawfare against individuals who pursue their ambitions without signing up to the form (in Germany for example you can not even, as a private person, make and sell software to the public without registering a company).
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The means by which the goal (of channeling individual ambition to pro-social ends) is pursued are legal requirements to make the activities of the company legible in particular ways (bookkeeping, charters, records) and adhere to all sorts of restrictions on shape, purpose and behaviour. If there is an obligation to "maximise shareholder value", on the flip side this means that a company can not actually have the terminal value to "maximise paperclips", and there may be legal ways to mobilise society against if it appears to do the latter over the former. Also, the things that a company can command its employees to do are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with a legal contract, which are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with legally unregulated compulsion such as individual or communal violence.
The alternative to companies, the thing that there would be more of if someone erased the concept of companies from reality with a memetic Death Note, does not look like people no longer getting together to achieve things, or less consumption. It looks like more instances of things like the Mafia, cults and Genghis Khan's hordes. If you only erased companies narrowly writ, you might also (at least) get medieval guilds, which are really an older, rougher attempt at the same thing.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
Do command and conquer games model a civilian economy...? I thought they were a classical RTS, where you just have military production buildings and maybe resource extraction and upgrade research. Even if that were the case, "it's like this in a game" is not an argument that something is not the case in real life. You have to actually articulate what you believe is different. I gave concrete examples of ways in which I believe an indiscriminate bombing campaign would lower military productivity; do you have an argument against that that is not just waving your hands about adaptation and heroism? If not having public transport and shops actually had no adverse impact on military production, why does Ukraine not shut down its public transport and shops and have the people run them produce more drones instead?
You readily, even enthusiastically concede that Russia is being incompetent. Do you think that this incompetence does not extend to their choice of targets and risk assessment, so individual decisions like e.g. throwing a dud Oreshnik at Yuzhmash instead of aiming it at the Khmelnytskyi NPP or downtown Dnipro was a competent decision? In fact, can you state your theory of why they have been bombing conventional power plants but leaving nuclear ones alone? It seems to me that you would have to go through extreme argumentative contortions to fit it with this "whatever targets Russia hasn't hit would make no difference or they are incapable of hitting them" narrative.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Hm. After reviewing the situation, I have to withdraw my implication that the Baltics have gotten particularly more bold since the start of the conflict; I was assuming that the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on St Petersburg used their airspace for transit with their explicit approval, but apparently they themselves still dispute it (and the "EW misdirecting drones there from Russia" story seems no less plausible). There's a steady drumbeat of rather more belligerent rhetoric than the European average and attempts to up the tensions around Kaliningrad from them, but I guess this has been constant since the beginning of the conflict. Sorry.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
You are conflating different levels of city functioning here. You need a far greater level of destruction to get a city in "fortress mode" that is being defended by a military garrison which is being supplied from the outside, than you need to degrade a city in functioning civilian economy mode to the point where its ability to operate military production facilities is significantly degraded. Severodonetsk, Avdiivka etc. were examples of the former: I doubt that, while they were under siege, a significant number of drones, military uniforms or even food ration packs were assembled in either of them. Instead, those workshops are in cities like Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Vinnitsa, where I gather civilians still can go to the supermarket to buy groceries, go to a 9-5 job in a factory (producing drones, or producing something that will be used by someone else producing drones), and stop by a restaurant for dinner after. However, would the frontline cities you listed held out for so long if the backline cities had stopped supplying them, or even if the volume of supplies had to be cut by half? This seems doubtful to me.
How much bombing does it take to significantly degrade, say, Dnepropetrovsk's civilian economy relative to its current state? I doubt it is actually all that much. We hear reports of facilities in the city being hit all the time, but usually it is repeat hits on hardened Soviet-era factories like Yuzhmash, which evidently don't have a lot of long-lasting effects (and anyhow Yuzhmash's output at this point may not be as important as that of some random drone workshop in a basement somewhere). What if everything being directed at them were instead sent to randomly chosen coordinates in the city's residential areas? Surely this would result in normal civilian life in the city becoming much more dangerous, regular businesses shutting down, and people leaving, making life harder for those who stay behind, and accordingly reducing productivity. Even having to go from "get it from the corner electronics shop" to "put in an order with the military" if your drone assembly shop is missing some widget would entail significant loss of time.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
On the other hand, WWII "terror bombing" is generally accepted to have been useful. I don't get the impression that Iran actually has been anything near "terror bombed"; Gaza for sure and Lebanon maybe, but I'm not convinced those could be compared to a hypothetical similar bombing of Ukraine because the baseline living standard in Ukraine is much higher and both surrender to Russia and emigration to Europe would be a significant carrot that is simply not available to Middle Easterners, whose neighbours can't be assed to help them and whose conquerors want to exterminate them.
Even then, I didn't mean to suggest that the optimal strategy involves terror bombing followed by a complete occupation; instead, what they could realistically hope for is terror bombing enabling occupation of some more adjacent parts (Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Sumy and the rest of Donbass are probably an upper bound on what they could achieve with a conventional terror bombing campaign against the whole country + final push without significant conscription) and the rest being so weakened and ruined that it will not be a net threat to them even if they can not extract any negotiated conditions. (EU and NATO could then repair and rearm what is left of Ukraine, but if that much population and resources are gone then doing so might wind up costing so much that it would actually weaken the bloc.)
Then there is the pour encourager les autres element: at this point there is a distinct sense that the Baltics are actively flirting with the idea of baiting the Russians into attacking them, because they figure that fighting against Russia does not actually look so bad away from the frontline and if they can secure NATO or EU support early on the frontline doesn't have to be on their territory (and Estonia's feelings about Narva getting the Vovchansk treatment probably amount to "don't threaten me with a good time" anyway). Building a reputation for indiscriminate/vindictive bombing would probably dampen that enthusiasm.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Well, just to be clear, the primary example I was thinking of were various minorities that beat the curve in terms of criminal proclivities. Surely there is no shortage of Blue NGOs that would be happy to make an example out of the occasional randomly selected police for giving traffic ticket to a black person. Is disincentivising that a mission you want to see accomplished too?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
That's easy to say in a case like this, but would abolishing qualified immunity in the US not just result in unlimited lawfare against any government officials enforcing anything with a political dimension, which would presumably lead to said government officials becoming reluctant to do so? Expect impunity for [whatever group pisses you off the most] first, and subsequent further incineration of the commons.
Really, my sense often is that the US would stand to benefit from having its entire legal system burnt down and rebuilt from scratch. So many of your problems, including healthcare costs and inability to build infrastructure, ultimately can be traced back to the possibility of being dragged to court and having to spend the GDP of a minor country on lawyers (because if you don't and the other side does then you lose and are on the hook anyway).
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5d ago
I feel like you are borderline nutpicking the "pro-Russian" side here, but then the nuts may be disproportionately visible because for the more realistic people on it there is nothing to be excited about. Therefore, let me just put down a prediction of "once again, nothing much will happen" for the upcoming quarter here. Maybe the Russians will finally grind their way through the rest of the ruins of Konstantinovka or Kupyansk (though the 90% confidence interval for that is more like 1 year from now), and maybe the Ukrainians will start yet another "successful" counteroffensive that will gain some 200-400km² to then be slowly rolled back over the course of the next 1-2 years at a great cost in life and treasure to Russia, Ukraine and the European taxpayer.
It is more likely that there will be some additional unpublicised backdoor decisions that will influence the longer-term trajectory of the war, such as the addition of further "gentlemen's agreements" about what sort of facilities may not be targeted by long-range bombings. From a purely military standpoint, I expect these to be detrimental to Russia (because from a purely military standpoint, I think the winning play for Russia more and more obviously amounts to escalation, now that NATO and Europe is further strained by Iran - blow up NPPs and make sure that any city in Ukraine that still can support a civilian drone workshop becomes uninhabitable for civilians, send your own leadership to the bunkers, and absorb the retaliation in kind with your superior bulk), but I do not have anything resembling a complete picture of how thin a thread the Russian economy and internal control system is hanging by, and if any greater mobilisation or damage to their own civilian infrastructure would actually result in them collapsing (in which case they maybe have no better option than to sit and wait out their gradual decline and hope for some deus ex machina).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I don't know, these reports seemed suspicious to me. How would the Russians have gotten their hands on a sufficient number of those terminals that it would have made a difference to their operations? Throughout the war, we kept hearing that Ukraine had been holding off the numerically superior Russians thanks to their ingenuous quick iteration on top of the superior Western startup technology that is Starlink, and then suddenly, in one package, the story changes to "but actually, the Russians had Starlink too, but now they don't have it anymore, and so Ukraine will win for sure"; meanwhile, in reality, after a small jitter in favour of Ukraine that this story was timed to coincide with, we are already back to the same neverending stalemate we had before. The one OSINT-visible thing Ukrainians were doing that was definitively dependent on Starlink (drone boats operating in open water with real time remote control) was seemingly never replicated by Russia, even though other than Starlink no particularly unusual tech goes into it.
In the end, the more likely explanation to me is that the "Russia in shambles because Starlink was cut off" story was a successful plant from Elon's PR department, which was picked up by the usual pro-Ukraine social media channels to build hype for the random swing of momentum in their favour at the time.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
The thing with pretense is that humans are generally terrible liars, who can't credibly pretend to anything without gradually coming to actually believe it to some degree. The people pretending to care about fairness can be casually motivated by the most brazen self-interest, but the result of all the pretending tends to be that if you then take a sufficiently powerful psychological steamroller (argumentation, rhetoric, propaganda, ritual, fancy buildings with statues of blindfolded matrons) to persuade them that forfeiting their self-interest would be fair, they by and large give up.
This is why justice and organised society works at all. Without this mechanism you just get something that looks like Somalia, and even in Somalia I gather that the tribal courts actually talk people into a lot of self-destructive ingroup altruism.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up". The curve was more generous than I would have liked, sure, and there were a lot of loopholes and "accommodations" and second chances; a lot of those also turned out to primarily benefit those who lacked consistency and conscientiousness, as at a "more hardcore" university you would not have gotten the allowance to strike out your lowest homework grade or have a TA dispatched to invigilate your stinky two weeks unshowered self in a separate room taking the exam two hours later than everyone else because you overslept.
You can maybe make the "feminisation" claim about school (K-12, for Americans), but even there the story seems complicated: at first glance not being smacked with a ruler if you fail to sit upright with your back straight or have crooked handwriting anymore surely makes less of a difference for the conscientious and obedient girls. I'm more on board with the "boys used to be able to engage in fistfights during recess without having the cops called, which helped them sit still later" explanation.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
That is sort of true, I think, but as long as the grounding provided by elections persists, this seems like a natural damper on any spinning out of control. Wild defections tend to be bad for the handful of things that the mercenary voters do care about, except perhaps the hype/vibes dimension; and even there, the jury is still out on whether Trump (as a candidate whose hype value was entirely built on promising to press defect) was just an outlier in this regard. (Biden surely was the least "own the cons" candidate of the last three fielded by the Dems, and he alone managed to eke out a win against Trump.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
Does this "people on both sides" framing that we see time and time again actually predict politics accurately? The internet, and really any sort of mass media, likes centering people on "sides" whose political position really does amount to this sort of mutually recursive tribalism (do whatever is most Right/Left, which is whatever pisses off the Left/Right the most, which is whatever is least Left/Right, which is whatever pisses off the Right/Left the most...); but those people's votes and political allegiances are largely locked in and the only way in which they have agency at all is producing and responding to hype (in states of low hype they might become so apathetic that they themselves fail to turn out to vote; in states of high hype they produce an infectious mood that might assume some of the reality distortion field nature). Meanwhile, somehow the system keeps equilibrating in such a fashion that neither "side" has a majority and so elections are decided by a marginal set of people who stubbornly refuse to hate Republicans for being Republican, or Democrats for being Democrat, and in fact are so mercenary that it is hard to ascribe to them any principles at all other than "gas should be cheap, my investments should perform well and my candidate should be hype rather than a loser".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
Regarding vaporwave, I think you are missing that it is not supposed to be nostalgia for the general 90s/00s but nostalgia for the computing of the era. This was when computing was still primarily by and for 50 year old suits working in drop-ceiling cubicles at IBM or some insurance company, plus their occasional tone-deaf attempts at reaching out to wider markets. Ads for Bryce, Lotus 1-2-3 and "I'm a PC", not Budweiser. Visions of the future for stodgy professional adults already half buried with the past. Smooth jazz and elevator music is a lot closer to the soundscape of those types of lives than, I don't know, Kylie Minogue.
Movies... my experience of that era was in Germany, but older movies were definitely a separate category that was widely enjoyed and discussed, in part due to the nature of cable TV. When one of the major channels ran an old James Bond, this was an event (sometimes even announced by an ad campaign in public transport or the like), and half the kids in my class could be expected to have watched it with their parents or at least taped it on VCR to watch later.
I largely missed the MC era (though I once took a carpool ride with two chain-smoking punk students who played their techno mixtape for the whole 5 hours), but people definitely shared burned CDs and later preloaded MP3 players with those they were trying to hit on?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
This preference for following ideas through to their conclusion was often speculated to be what leads in the perception of an abnormally high number of engineers and scientists in ISIS. (I should say I never quite bought it; "Arab society does not have the Western correlation between education and secularism, and Westerners are surprised to see that expectation subverted" seemed truthy and sufficient to explain the observations)
I see you use "pozzed" in a post on page 2 of your profile. I consider unironic use to be an unambiguous right-wing cultural marker. (Doesn't it come from right-wing COVID vaccine opposition, which if anything is significantly more right relative to the distribution of (>=mid)wit rightwingers than it is relative to the US right wing as a whole?)
I have not actually read her CV or anything, but since people referred to her as an escort I thought she primarily sold companionship/romance (not a sex act). She may also have worked as a camgirl (since I remember seeing posts about camgirling), which I would also not group with prostitutes (as long as you can't lose your virginity over a video feed, nothing you can do over one counts as sex, as far as I'm concerned; therefore camgirling is not a sex act). I have no issue with the term "prostitute" for people who take money for performing sex acts, especially if sex acts are the main component of what money is being taken for ("I hang out with you all day and at one point we have sex" feels borderline).
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