The problem is that if you normalise certain activities through porn, they will eventually bleed through into the mainstream (e.g. for a recent example, heterosexual anal sex now being part of the expected sexual repertoire after formerly being something only or mostly found in porn; see here for 2014 'pressured into having anal sex' followed by 2018 'nah it's normal and fine' from the same magazine).
So normalising child porn may not lead to "nobody will ever have real life sex with kids", the same way that we still have rape and sexual assault even though there is access to porn. There's arguments tat availability of porn leads to less rape, but not no rape.
But for better or for worse that's how people are, they can handle zero rational discussion on this topic
Okay, but guys who have no other sexual outlets than watching porn still want real life sexual encounters and even relationships. A paedophile (or should I use the preferred euphemism of 'Minor Attracted Person'?) may still desire a real sexual relationship with a child, even if 'as realistic as real' AI-generated child porn is available. And if the acceptance of using that AI porn means that over time, it wears down any resistance about "I can't have this in reality, that's wrong or society disapproves"? What then?
Yes, I realise I'm going for worst-case scenarios, but I am pessimist enough to think we should plan for worst-case scenarios. Making AI child porn legal, then finding out that "holy crap, this only inflames the desires of those using it, conditions them to think of it as normal, and then they try it in real life*, how were we to know?" would be the worst of all possible worlds.
*Presumably the AI-generated porn would have happy, laughing, fully-consenting six year olds engaging in these acts with adults, which my ignorant self can't help but think would condition the user to imagine that real six year olds would consent and be happy doing it. Unless you're producing stuff for the people who want and need 'no, I want crying and screaming and begging to stop' fantasy material, which may be a step too far for society until some brave pioneer breaks the taboo of producing 'you won't believe it's not real three year old rape!' stuff.
EDIT: Before anyone gets on to me, yes I agree that fake three year old rape porn is much better than the real thing. Best of all is to put out the eyes of watchers of said porn with sporks, but if we have to have it, then fake three year olds instead.
HereAndGone
3d ago
The one I saw mentioned (and I have no idea if this is true) was "An elderly woman will be tortured to death unless you have sex with a six year old. So, what are you going to do? Explain your reasoning and moral valences for your answer" (that's not the exact wording but the essence was 'would you/would you not rape a six year old to save an old woman from a horrible death?')
The only way that works is if the six year old consents to the sex, and how the hell is a six year old child going to consent to sex with an adult in any meaningful way? But if she thinks "yes a six year old can consent" due to "I was six when an adult had sex with me, and it makes me feel less like a victim to pretend I consented" then that makes some kind of sense.
HereAndGone
3d ago
Also bitter complaint that major companies are not sufficiently showing their support for pride this year.
That is the surprising, and to me hopeful, thing. Woke Rainbow Capitalism may have been mocked but now it's not showing up and the lack of funding is being felt.
HereAndGone
3d ago
Perhaps you ought to take the time to sort through your own emotional baggage and then move beyond it.
I don't know if she's capable of that, though. Again, doing untrained psychoanalysis over the Internet, but by all accounts her method of dealing with her traumatic upbringing was "do a shit load of LSD and permanently fry my brain" which is not really helpful. And if she does have to face it all and acknowledge that she does bear responsibility for her choices, plus confront her past, I do think she's liable to crack right open and maybe not be fixable.
I hope she gets help. I don't know if she wants it or if anyone in her life is in a position to tell her to do so (the main fault of the nice rationalist EA people is that they are too damn nice and so fearful of appearing judgemental or telling people how to live their lives or seeming to be unaccepting that they will hum and haw and tie themselves into knots while literal rapists are taking advantage of the culture to get away with being abusive and manipulative). I don't think anyone in her circles feels capable of telling her "this is not a good choice" or that she would listen to anyone who did tell her that.
HereAndGone
3d ago
She outright claims to be the highest paid escort in the world or similar.
Yeah, I wonder. But even the high-rolling courtesans of the past lived extravagant lifestyles (as that was all part of the branding to attract clients) and burned through money. She may or may not have access to good investment advice, for her own sake I hope she does, because being fifty and trying to sell your sagging bosom for paid views is not an appealing future. (Though who knows, there are niche fetishes for everyone and maybe there will be enough custom for sagging bosom pics?)
HereAndGone
3d ago
Plus if you genuinely have a bad back, standing on your feet all day can put strain on it which causes pain.
If anyone has ever put their back out by lifting something too heavy or the wrong way, you soon find out how every little action somehow involves the muscles of the lower back so that even trying to get out of bed is a production.
HereAndGone
3d ago
I am largely unsympathetic to people with chronic health issues as I've said elsewhere.
Look, I do a sedentary office job as administrative support. The heaviest things I carry are a bunch of files. I use my hands and arms for typing.
And I had a upper spinal disc problem (yes it showed up on x-ray so no I wasn't imagining or pretending) that meant I had terrible pain that started in my neck, gradually went down my arm, and ended up at the knuckles every single day and night for a prolonged period of time. It genuinely felt like my arm was on fire and I couldn't sleep because of the pain. My doctor didn't put me on painkillers (no idea why, unless it was 'don't want to facilitate addiction') so I was dosing myself up with over-the-counter analgesics (I sincerely believe I may have borked my liver the amounts I was taking for relief, plus I managed through other means to source tablets containing codeine which did permit me to sleep by reducing the pain to a dull roar) and I genuinely feared I wouldn't be able to work, because the pain made it impossible to use my hands.
Fortunately, the trapped nerve or whatever eventually untrapped itself or died or something so the pain stopped.
And that was just for a damn "sit at a desk and type emails etc." job. Imagine if I was doing anything even a bit more labour-intensive requiring dexterity or strength.
So just wait until you get old enough, or over-exert yourself enough, to run into a chronic health issue then come back with the same opinion.
HereAndGone
3d ago
What about babysitting? Or cleaning people's houses?
The exact jobs I've seen arguments about on here that are too low-skill and 'anyone can do them' to charge high wages so the cost of childcare is scandalous compared to the labour done.
You can't have it both ways: either that kind of labour is a job and is paid accordingly (not sky high but enough), or it's paid peanuts because "my sixteen year old niece will mind my two kids after school" and thus isn't going to support an adult (let alone one with a family).
And yeah, even for babysitting/childminding, you do need to be able to lift and bend and carry, and it's a job where you can put out your back over time.
HereAndGone
3d ago
it hurts her feelings that more people aren't defending her is really hard for me to find credible
I find that easier to believe. Even if we think that she's engaging in cynical performative "oh I'm so hurt I'm going away", it's probably a bit of a shock to find that she's not as beloved as she expected, or that her supporters are not in fact willing to come out in public and defend her. If her simps (dreadful term but it's useful here) are not indeed willing to associate themselves publicly with her, then that's indicative of a threat to her income stream: they may say the right things but they do not, in fact, respect her and when push comes to shove, they may well be pragmatic about "do I send this hundred bucks to Aella or do I spend it on something else" and spend it elsewhere.
For a test of mindless devotion, this is coming back with uncomfortable data that the mindless devotion stream is lower than she predicted and it's likely to dry up altogether.
HereAndGone
3d ago
Remember we're talking about a multi-millionaire
Is she, though? Traditionally the life of the Grande Horizontale has been one of getting a lot of money but also spending a lot of money, and your career lifespan is shorter than that of a professional sportsman. Once your value drops, and clients lose interest in you, the money dries up and then it's the route of blackmail* or tell-all memoirs (see Stormy Daniels touting her affair with Trump all over the talk shows for a modern example), unless you manage to hook a wealthy protector who will take care of you long-term or even, somehow, a husband.
So unless she is very canny about saving and investing whatever money she makes, she may well be in want of a husband to support her in later life.
*"In 1824, one liaison came back to haunt him, when Wellington received a letter from a publisher, John Joseph Stockdale, offering to refrain from issuing an edition of the rather racy memoirs of one of his mistresses, Harriette Wilson, in exchange for money. It is said that the Duke promptly returned the letter, after scrawling across it, "Publish and be damned". However, Hibbert notes in his biography that the letter can be found among the Duke's papers, with nothing written on it. It is certain that Wellington did reply, and the tone of a further letter from the publisher, quoted by Longford, suggests that he had refused in the strongest language to submit to blackmail."
I don't want to get into doing psychology over the Internet on a person I don't know, but yeah. I think she's in the poly bubble, so she imagines it is possible to find a guy, marry him, have kids, and still maintain the sex worker/poly life. Some poly people do handle marriage and parenting while having multiple partners, so she must think it possible for her.
But the kinds of guy she is attracted to, given what she's revealed of her childhood, are not going to be the kinds of guy who want to settle down and marry her (this is where the doing psychology over the Internet part comes in). She plainly has very conflicted views about her father, who seems in the small extract she provided to have been a sadistic piece of shit, and I think she has elsewhere indicated she was sexually abused as a child. Since she seems to have escaped into sex work as a reaction to her upbringing, I think she has put all her eggs into the basket of "I'm hot, I'm sexual, I'm promiscuous and that's okay, suck it repressive ultra-Christian upbringing that punished me for everything, I'm doing all the stuff you said would send me to Hell and I'm loving it!"
So having to face "sexual abuse as a child" and "sex work is low status, nobody wants to marry the whore they've been banging on the side" would crack her psyche right open, and she's already too vulnerable. Hence why (I am speculating hard here) if she seems to be endorsing "porn and exposure to sex aren't bad for minors, what is a minor anyway?" it's to do with reconciling how she was abused as a child: unless she can embrace it as "no, it was all fine!", then that brings back the child's guilt of "I must be a bad person, that is why this is happening to me". And to admit "I am a bad person" then brings back "so my parents were right and I'm wrong and what they did was okay" and that is very much not so. The tension of the contradictions is threatening to snap her mental state apart, so she has to balance it all very carefully.
So, yeah. She's pinned her new identity on "you can be sexy, promiscuous, and desired and loved", and found out the hard way that the "loved" part is not in fact part of the package. 'There's women you have fun with, and women you marry, and they're not the same' is an old truth but still relevant. EDIT: I think the data science work and her being involved in rationalist circles is an admission on her part, not recognised as such, that she does want to be admired for more than her waist-hip ratio, that she wants to be seen as intelligent and having worth apart from her sexuality. But she's sort of trapped right now: if she steps back from the sex work, then what is her unique selling point that sets her apart from "all the other kinda smart, kinda nerdy, kinda mathy rationalist-types"? She's shackled by her brand as "Aella, the sexy rationalist girl".
I vehemently disapprove of her lifestyle and views, but I do think she's mentally vulnerable and calling people names isn't polite. Now, that does bring us to "but is calling her a prostitute calling her names or is it naming the truth of her situation?" and I think her supporters would say the former, while "she's doing sex work to make a living, that's prostitution" is the latter.
HereAndGone
6d ago
The hopeful thing is how many big corps are no longer funding parades around the place (even over here). There's been a drop in sponsorship and some griping about it (and of course blaming Trump for anti-DEI). Maybe that indicates that some of the rainbow bullshit will not be as prevalent in future, because it was never about principle, rather what made good sense for PR. Now that it's not as profitable, they're not spending money on it.
HereAndGone
6d ago
We managed to dig up (not literally) his Irish ancestors, as we do for every American president! 😀
Seriously one of the funniest things I watched on TV at the time was the Obamas pressing the flesh with the denizens of Offaly (I had to admire Michelle for how well she handled it).
HereAndGone
6d ago
I don’t see Newsom getting the nomination in any contest that involves an actual primary.
That is part of their problem. He does great in California, but nothing elsewhere. But he's the white male liberal guy that might win an election, because hell knows running women/black women hasn't done anything for them, but oh no isn't that the systemic racism and sexism problem, shouldn't we be fighting that? And then they have nobody that everyone can agree on, because X is too progressive and Y is too mainstream.
HereAndGone
6d ago
And take away it being Kamala fucking Harris (who isn't getting the nomination, though she has a better shot than Newsome),
Yeah, but I think you've encapsulated the problem right there: they picked the wrong candidate. Now, there are reasons for that, mostly to do with Biden insisting on running again and everyone in the tight inner circle hiding his decline until it couldn't be papered over anymore, leaving the party with a very short run-in to the election and only Harris as their main choice.
But they still refused to have a primary, refused to consider any alternatives, and let her/her campaign staff run a terrible campaign. Add in that allegedly she picked Walz over Shapiro because Walz was willing to stay in the background and hold her handbag, and that tells you where it was going.
Do you honestly think the same party, with the same people in charge, are going to turn around and pick "well Shapiro is electable!" this time round?
HereAndGone
7d ago
I wouldn't put him at zero because right now who do the Democrats have? Tim Walz? Kamala again (if she doesn't decide to run for Governor of California instead)? The others - Pete, Gretchen, etc. who have already been rejected in previous primaries? Josh Shapiro, who they couldn't even decide to pick as Kamala's running mate?
I agree that Newsom does not have national appeal, but the Democratic party is stuck for a choice of "does not appear totally crazy progressive, can be painted as a moderate" candidates, and Newsom has been making some recent moves (or speeches) in that direction.
HereAndGone
7d ago
Rock and a hard place. Newsom has ambitions to run for the presidency in 2028 but he needs the California vote to get anywhere, and if he loses that then he loses the primary (most likely) because the party is not going to pick the guy who lost the support of the safe state or if he makes it to be selected as candidate, he loses the national election (because no way he has enough support nationally).
HereAndGone
7d ago
You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave
I see you've missed the recent "the new pope is actually black" discourse elsewhere, you lucky person you! And yes, they're invoking the one drop rule: hey, if under slavery/Jim Crow laws he'd be considered black due to the discriminatory one drop rule, then yeah he counts as black now.
I don't know about Trump, but I think it would be hilarious. Especially in light of the John Oliver "Drumpf" stuff - he's not just descended from a recent immigrant, he is the Second (Just As) Black (As Obama or Kamala) president! 😁
HereAndGone
12d ago
Well, sorta the other way round. Modern social justice movement grew out of Catholic beginnings. But I was more amused by Barrett being excoriated as a liberal when she was being excoriated by the liberals for being a fundie.
Don't make me quote "Orthodoxy". Oops, too late! Chesterton is talking about Christianity as a whole, but I think it fits the case of the Church as well:
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre.
It's not totally senseless, it's the equivalent of rich people and celebrities having private security and bodyguards today. "You're the guys likely to be robbed, have some defences on your ships or hire some private contractors". Something like ex-military or ex-cops setting up as private security nowadays? "Hello, you're a former privateer with a ship, a crew, and no war going on for you to plunder foreign navies. What do you do in peace time? Write to MERCHANTS-R-US for exciting new job opportunities in the field of civilian fleet protection!"
As you point out, though, in times of war this affair falls to pieces. That is when you need a professional navy with proper warships. Though maybe Paine wasn't anticipating that America would need to be going to war with anyone else after kicking out the Brits?
HereAndGone
13d ago
I don't know why I am always surprised when someone is surprised to discover "Catholic is, indeed, Catholic".
Her policy is just the policy of the Catholic Church, some kind of generic progressive social democracy except opposed to abortion.
I honestly have to laugh about this, because remember back when she was being confirmed and the rumour-mongering was about her being a member of a cult? A traditionalist cult that treated women as second-class? I don't think Dianne Feinstein was complaining about her being too liberal when she went off about the dogma lives loudly in you.
Yeah, weirdly enough the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is not a right-wing American institution. Or a left-wing American institution. But now you guys have the pope, here's your chance to get it Chicago-style!
HereAndGone
13d ago
Okay, so it's the Theosophists are the bad guys in the secret global occult plot stakes this time. Unusual, I don't generally see them hauled out (usually conspiracy theorists stick to the Rosicrucians).
He's right in that Theosophy does have its own interpretation of Jesus, angels, etc. which diverges in very large part from traditional Christian beliefs, and that they do like to celebrate traditional festivals (like Michaelmas) with their own spin.
And there has been a resurgence in devotion to St. Michael, generally with the promulgation of the prayer and sort of in a "right wing young guy warrior wannabe" style devotion. A modern American Catholic revival of muscular Christianity, as it were, as well as a sort of adoption of the Evangelical notion of demons under the beds everywhere, though that leans more to the Rad Trads.
Hmm. Thanks for the link, I'm always interested in strange new weirdness I haven't seen before!
HereAndGone
14d ago
They'll spend four years fighting with their parents about their internet friends and then run away, if necessary.
That anecdote is what I meant about her being stupid for being so smart. She wasn't good at working out loopholes around the rules; an ordinary kid would have figured out a way to notify her friend that "I'm grounded, can't see you" without using the computer (because expressly forbidden to use the computer and if found out it'll be bad). Aella didn't - maybe she didn't have another way, but anyway she headed right into the trap. Then spent four years running her head into the same brick wall of "gotta use the computer to talk to my friends - get found out - get grounded - finally work off the punishment - do the exact same thing to get me punished all over again".
That's not stupidity because of lack of intelligence, that's a blind spot of personality that indicates she will always make things harder for herself because she won't be able to figure out the signals.
HereAndGone
14d ago
Eh, Steve Rogers is the son of Irish-Americans (not noted if they're Protestant or Catholic) so he's the exact type the Know Nothings were objecting to (even though he's literally white, blond and blue-eyed):
The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855 and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothings, or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.
Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values. The Know Nothing movement is remembered for this theme because Protestants feared that Catholic priests and bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, the ideology and influence of the Know Nothing movement lasted only one or two years before it disintegrated due to weak and inexperienced local leaders, a lack of publicly proclaimed national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In parts of the South, the party did not emphasize anti-Catholicism as frequently as it emphasized it in the North and it stressed a neutral position on slavery, but it became the main alternative to the dominant Democratic Party.
The problem, so far as I've gathered, is "the guys I like enough to want something more than a casual sexual relationship don't want to marry me and have kids, and I don't like enough the guys who do want to marry me and have kids to want something more than a casual sexual relationship with them."
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