Bingbong
3hr ago
I feel like the incentives of sexwork towards not getting pregnant/obviously fucked up with bad STDs (Yes, there is a bottom tier where people are less discerning) makes it less of an issue than the good people of Grindr who are going absolutely uncompensated and engaging in wild frivolous acts with randoms.
Bingbong
3hr ago
You want to visit an escort service? Fine. You want to cheat on your spouse and potentially ruin your family? Fuck you.
I mean to a certain degree the fencing-off of these activities to pay-for-play gives incentives for everybody involved to keep it as transactional as possible and stop it snowballing into family-ruining consequences. I'm not particularly interested in using such services (though more since I just don't find paying for sex sexy than out of any particular moral condemnation) but I'm in a culture where it's a pretty open secret that a lot of middle-aged men have girlfriends or take boys trips a ton, and it kinda keeps things ticking over? It'd probably be better if they guys kept things in their pants (though then you've got to argue what obligations the wives have with regards to sexual availability) and Lou Pai stripper impregnations do happen but a certain level of circumspect whoring just seems to be pretty Lindy throughout human history. A lot of cultures don't really consider it 'cheating' in the same way that they'd handle somebody having an affair with a co-worker or neighbor.
Bingbong
2d ago
AFAIK Down Syndrome pregnancies have higher risks of complications that can impact the mother than typical pregnancies so it's not like it's purely a matter of 'assuming the infant is instantaneously adopted then it has no welfare impacts on the birthing mother'. There's still substantive risks and costs.
Bingbong
2d ago
The minority who sees abortion as murder would disagree, I think, as they are also very anti-MAID as a general rule.
I feel like this is all a sliding scale, though. Downs is the perfect point for debate since it's common enough, visible enough and you can easily say that people with it are capable of living happy lives (albeit at massive cost to the state and those around them). If it's some severe abnormality where the organs are on the outside of the body and the chances of making it 24 hours outside of the window is 0% and the risks of the mother carrying the baby to term are immense that's a completely different conversation. I've got 2 kids and I'd abort a potential future severely disabled fetus despite generally being pro-life (or seeing it as a very weighty decision that shouldn't be made frivolously)
Bingbong
2d ago
Yeah there were a bunch of people on twitter pushing the 'Abortion for any reason is fine, unless it's disability at which point you are committing a hecking eugenics' which creates this funny moral situation where you can supposedly abort out of mere potential inconvenience but also the like maximally inconvenient child cannot be aborted.
Bingbong
2d ago
People also underplaying just how expensive this is for the state since a lot of the costs are covered by subsidies. From what I can see out of pocket for a Down Syndrome child's care is generally 100k+ a year and that's tip of a far larger iceberg of tax money being deleted.
Bingbong
2d ago
Also a funny take on Twitter when some people came out as pro-choice except for in this case since 'this is eugenics'. The position that a person should be entitled to abort their children for any reason unless the child is maximally inconvenient for them is pretty amusing.
Bingbong
2d ago
Yeah. Miscarriages happen and there's a layer of social propriety around this matter where people aren't going to pry.
Bingbong
2d ago
Down Syndrome's kind of a funny spot in terms of aborting disability since they generally land in a spot of sufficient mental and physical development to be 'happy', though I feel like people are also not comprehending how much public investment goes into keeping a down syndrome person alive. IIRC they generally need several open-heart natal surgeries plus lifetime care.
Bingbong
5d ago
A bit different when there's a noted disparity of age.
If this had hypothetically been a 75 year old Digwa and a 20 year old Nowak I feel like the optics would be slightly better
Bingbong
5d ago
I believe the actual murder weapon had already been taken away by his mother, though I'd imagine he'd probably still have had his other smaller legal knife on him as a Sikh.
Bingbong
5d ago
Yeah it does sound like Digwa/his family were outlier-level belligerent and weapon-hoarding amongst the Sikh community. Afaik the brother had also had some legal troubles due to being armed?
Bingbong
12d ago
Death of the monoculture and an increased fracturing in media consumption might mean the dynamic works a bit differently, but I also broadly agree.
Bingbong
13d ago
Yeah. You can argue that there's some religious element but the entire idea of the Sikhs being able to carry knives is essentially a pro wrestling kayfabe where they're able to fulfil their religious requirement of 'self defense' but should also immediately get nuked with the full force of the law if they actually ever unsheathe one.
Bingbong
14d ago
Open relationships are kind of an inverse bell curve thing for men, IMO.
If you're bottom percentile you'll go for them out of desperation. If you're top percentile and can trivially attract casual sex from other women, then it has an appeal again even if not everybody will go for it. If you're anywhere in the middle of sexual attractiveness it's inherently skewed where the woman in the relationship will have about 10000x the ease of attracting casual sex partners and it's thus skewed.
Though on the other hand you could just make the argument that somebody on the far right side of the curve is also incentivized to just pick a girl who's monogamous and tolerates his philandering.
Bingbong
14d ago
UK media seems to be diverging pretty hard. The Henry Nowak story being huge on the Right and getting buried on the left, for instance.
Bingbong
14d ago
Yeah I don't think the shower frequency is going to be the immediate disqualifying factor for the 140 IQ, open relationship comfortable tech 9-fig+ guy she's probably hoping for.
Bingbong
14d ago
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 usual deflection she offers when someone points this out is "social science is even worse" which, even if true, says more about the quality of social science research than about Aella's twitter poll to Claude code pipeline.
Having somebody with sufficient clout/exposure to get earnest responses to the questions she's asking from a population of higher-functioning horny enthusiasts is a nice novelty. She's also autistic enough not to just automatically discard things that go against her preconceived notions of what the responses should be, which makes her better than social science academy members who are frequently fishing to prove their own notions since reporting otherwise is to get cancelled.
Bingbong
15d ago
Sun Umbrellas are just a thing in Chinese diaspora culture. See it all the time in Malaysia.
Bingbong
15d ago
IMO the way that KPIs work for local government officials means that to a certain degree there is a model of development that everybody broadly sticks to, since it's the cheapest/easiest way of delivering on those KPIs and you don't get fired for buying IBM. I've always found it interesting when you go around cities that were earlier towards development like Shanghai/Shenzhen/Guangzhou it feels like there's a lot more room for unevenness and idiosyncratic stuff that only really exists there. Whilst going to newer metropolises like Chongqing or Changsha and there's way more of a paint by numbers system displayed.
And like it's a perfectly fine liveable paint by numbers system so I can't complain about it.
Bingbong
15d ago
The current state of drug enforcement kinda snowballed out of the conception of drugs that allowed for weed/didn't punish it super viciously. Then it was erosion from there.
I'd rather the full prohibition of most Asian states since it's a lot harder to erode a 'No and we'll fucking kill you' than 'No but we're trying not to ruin anybody's lives'
Bingbong
16d ago
Also most Chinese have a direct sense that tangible change is happening and can look back at their parents/grandparents generations and see meaningful living condition improvements.
Bingbong
16d ago
I mean some of the point is that the wealthiest areas in the world randomly tolerate meandering JRPG encounters with homeless people since nothing effective can be done in the current system of legal malaise around it. Which is a huge owngoal for no adequate reason.
Bingbong
16d ago
I spend a decent amount of time in China and whilst there's definitely cases of people hustling absurdly hard. I think there's definitely a mindset with most Chinese that things are getting better and that on some level you can work hard and actually get ahead somewhat in the system. Whilst I think a lot of lower-class Westerners no longer have that optimism.
Yeah but look at how awful the quality of work in social studies (especially anything sex-related) is.
Aella having an audience of people who are autistic enough to answer broadly-truthfully and being autistic enough to just present the info she gets instead of trying to massage it into a structure that suits whatever the agreed-upon orthodoxy of academic circles is is a level of truthiness I don't believe the current state of academic inquiry on this subject actually matches.
More options
Context Copy link