incognitomaorach
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User ID: 1274
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
I watched this 90 minute documentary called "The Bubble" yesterday, and thought people might find it as interesting (and depressing) as I did:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jp0nqJ1yrrg
Ignore the clickbait/signalling subtitle that Vice have given it- the documentary is much more nuanced and balanced. And the last 40 minutes is just discussion with the director.
It's about a massive retirement community for upper-middle/middle-middle Americans in Florida called "The Villages". The documentary itself is beautifully shot, and does a pretty good job of being balanced and showing the different perspectives of the competing interests.
But what I found much more interesting than the plot of "wealthy capitalists push out rural locals" (although that is interesting) was what it had to say (implicitly) about aging societies in the West and the world we've created over the last 70 years.
The Villages are essentially a permanent vacation town of 150,000 or so old people (I think, wikipedia seems to suggest a smaller number). There are some absolutely bizarre and surreal scenes of 80 year olds getting drunk at parties, doing karaoke, dancing and so on.
I think the first two things that it made me think of were Wall-E and the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. Not that these people are particularly fat (in fact they're all rather active and healthy), but the decadent nature of it all. In the Culture, there is a post-scaracity and immortal society where people have to come up with how to occupy themselves when all meaning is lost. I suppose it's a bit like a college town, but there was something deeply depressing and unnerving that I found watching these people who are supposed to be the elders of our society essentially abdicating any responsibility. There's a narrative that reaches its climax towards the end about the nature of retirement and just deserts, where some of the interviewees admit that they don't really care all that much for their children, or the problems of the world ("that'll be a problem for the 40 year olds").
And whilst I'm sure that it takes two to tango on these matters (children don't look after their parents in the same way), there was a deep sense of meaningless and doom that I found watching these people who essentially shouldn't (in historical terms) be alive, confronted with their own lack of place in society, move away to die.
I could absolutely see this becoming more and more common as the numbers of elderly retirees continues to become unsustainably large. And I think there is probably something to be said about the unrealistic expectations we all have about how life is supposed to work. The idea that you work for 40 years and then stop and do nothing for the last 15-20, spending all your accumulated wealth (which in this case gets sucked out by the service economy and healthcare costs), or in perhaps more welfare minded countries, by the taxpayer, is a historical anomaly. At some point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that people will have to keep working much longer (or maybe that they ought to want to work longer).
If historically there was always only a very small number of people that lived long enough to stop working at all, then their place in society was guaranteed to be one of respect, carrying on wisdom and experience from the past. But now we have a glut of people who are basically useless (there's only so many wise story tellers you can support) who decide that now is the correct place (the only place) in life to have fun and play golf all day. It is almost tragic- that these people built up all this wealth and pension money and so on just for it to be spent on activities they can barely take part in due to their age, and for all that wealth and work of a life time to get spent on margaritas, property tax and health (death) care costs.
There is also an environmental/industrialisation angle (the ideal of ruralised life in Florida and the reality of ersatz parades and lawns).
Give it a watch- the Austrian director does do a good job in my view of not over playing the liberal angle on stuff, and the general themes are very thought provoking.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about what's been going on in Leicester in the UK in recent weeks. TL;DR: Sectarian violence imported from the Indian subcontinent bubbles over into a UK city that has previously been deemed an example of "good" diversity, with the potential for much scarier and wider violence in larger cities if the police/community don't get it under control.
I'll start by saying that one of the central aspects of the South Asian religious squabbles we've seen in recent years has been misinformation and biased reporting agitating and stoking tensions. This time it isn't any different, and that makes it difficult to decipher exact timelines. I'll be going off what I've seen from "reputable reporters" in the UK, but take everything with a slight pinch of salt.
I'll do a brief timeline of events, then some background on Leicester and South Asian community dynamics in the UK, and then some brief thoughts- I wanted this post mostly to be informative to a non-British audience, rather than me spouting polemical.
Quick important context: Leicester is a mid-sized British City (approx. 370k 2021 pop.) in the East Midlands. It has historically had a very large South Asian (or just Asian in the UK) population, which until recently was nearly entirely Indian (i.e. Hindu or Sikh). In the 2011 census this stood at 93k Indians, or 28% (almost certainly larger now). In the last 30 years or so the Muslim (Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Middle Eastern) population has grown- very difficult to get exact numbers but maybe up to 20% of the population (in 1991 probably about 1%). More on this later.
So on the 28th August India played Pakistan in a Cricket match. This was what you might call a big deal- there's obviously a massive rivalry which gets carried into Cricket, both countries' national sport. After the match, groups of fans of both countries gathered in the city centre, in what seemed to me a mirror image of the post-match behaviour we saw in London after the Euro 2020 football final- crowd dynamics, young amped up men, hooliganism etc. There were reports of some scuffles, apparently Indian fans chanted "Death to Pakistan", there were anti-Muslim slogans, and a (probably Sikh) man was attacked.
This died down relatively quickly, but within a few days, Hindus began sharing videos on WhatsApp of gangs of men attacking property and people in Hindu areas of the city. Some flags were taken down (as far as I can tell, orange Hindutva/BJP-type flags). Videos of some of the men having knives (all too common in the UK now) also circulated. The implication was this was Muslim men attacking the Hindu community.
These messages then started spreading on the ubiquitous WhatsApp groups that the diaspora communities use. The line seemed to be that Muslim gangs were targeting Hindu households, especially those with religious symbols. This was possibly retaliation for or simply escalation of the behaviour seen on the 28th August. Hindus then started saying they needed to gather and protect those households and areas under attack, and at the weekend groups of Hindu men started to mobilise and appeared on the streets in the areas that had been targeted.
That began a tit-for-tat retaliation/escalation, where Muslim activists (usually social media "influencers", young "community leaders", 99% men) turned up on the streets to film the large gatherings of masked up Hindu "protectors", to then post the videos online for a) clout and b) to get Muslims to mobilise. There are lots of videos of Hindu groups chanting nationalist slogans like "Jai Shree Ram" on the streets, usually with masks, hoods etc. Police are struggling to manage the situation, and are using tried and tested crowd control tactics which are more often used for groups of football fans (the similarity is striking). This doesn't involve much actual intervention however to avoid violence and try and keep the group calm.
Muslim groups are then filmed protesting the Hindu crowd's actions (and police inaction), which moves on to causing trouble by removing flags outside Hindu temples. Flag burning videos also circulate (veracity uncertain). All this serves to just inflame Hindus in the UK (WhatsApp again...), but also in India. The right-wing strongly pro-BJP media in India latches on to these tit-for-tat exchanges where it is framed as Hindus being attacked by Muslims- to the extent that the Indian GOVERNMENT has called on the UK to sort it out and stop the "persecution".
This is all inflamed by the Muslim activists/social media influencers coming in and making soap-box speeches, of a radical Islamist, anti-Hindu nature. Again, pretty much everyone involved in this is young-ish men.
This weekend (17th September) the WhatsApp disinformation machine went into overdrive, with claims of Mosques/Temples being attacked/burned (not true as far as I can tell). Mobs are now in the low hundreds rather than the roaming gangs that we saw previously. Police struggled to contain it and made a series of arrests (around 50 in total). Whilst I've been writing this, a man has been jailed for 10 months (which is a very fast turn around) for possession of an offensive weapon. Hopefully this is a sign of the authorities cracking down in order to prevent this spiralling further- we saw similar tactics after the 2011 London riots.
So that's the timeline up to today. The risk is that this is not contained within Leicester, and escalates to places like Birmingham or London, where there are both large numbers of Muslims and large numbers of Hindus. In one sense it has already escalated past Leicester, thanks to the wonders of modern media, and there have definitely been people coming in from nearby Midlands cities (Birmingham/Nottingham) to "protect" their community (mostly Muslims from what I can tell).
Some further demographic context is probably useful at this point. In 2011 there were roughly 800,000 Hindus in England (relevant subpart of UK), 420,000 Sikhs, and 2,700,000 Muslims. Most of the Muslims in the UK are Pakistani/Bangladeshi, with more recent arrivals from MENA.
What makes Leicester unique is that it is the only major city in England which has more Hindus than Muslims. The Hindu population of the UK is concentrated in north-west London (to be fair the Boroughs of Brent and Harrow are 100k strong in their own right, and are both Hindu>Muslim) and in Leicester. Other centres of the Asian population in the UK (East London, Birmingham, Bradford, South Yorkshire, Lancashire) are very much Muslim (i.e. Pakistani or Bengali) rather than Hindu.
As I said earlier, Leicester is rapidly becoming a city with large Hindu AND Muslim components, rather than a Hindu centre. Leicester also has a large black British population (~7%). Leicester has been one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the UK for a while now, and was also upheld as an example of "good community relations". However, these community relations were between white Brits/Eastern Europeans/Indians/blacks until fairly recently. The massive increase in the Muslim population of the city has changed this balance, and introduced a usually unseen (in the UK) dynamic of minority v minority, rather than the usual ethnic conflict (majority v minority).
The Muslim population in the UK is growing rapidly, partially due to immigration, but predominantly due to birth rates. Indians (often East African Asians in the UK) have usually been a) wealthier and b) more assimilated than the larger Muslim population. They also have birth rates which are closer to the national average.
I'm not going to go into depth on the rise of Hindu nationalism, but suffice to say that it has made it over into the UK via WhatsApp, and is one of the larger factors behind the escalation. It is easy to see a picture here of the only "Hindu" city in the UK quickly becoming more and more Muslim, with presumably an inevitable overtaking in the near future, and rising anti-Muslim sentiment amongst Indians (including the diaspora) and how that may result in what we're seeing happen on the streets.
This post has got too long so I will stop here, but there are some really interesting and complex dynamics at work on top of this core story. The key ones are in my view:
-Importation of South Asian sectarianism into Britain
-Relative population growth rates and migration
-Rise in Hindu nationalism/RSS/Hindutva
But there are also a ton of other stories going on- some unique to this, some that have been bubbling away for a while in the UK:
-WhatsApp and instant communication and their role in spreading misinformation/radicalisation
-Media bias (lack of reporting due to the Queen's funeral)
-Stoking of tension by online influencers for "clout"
-Knife crime/gang violence imported from London, often via internet culture and music
-Mob mentality/masculinity, and the similarities with football hooliganism
-Islamic extremism, or at the very least anti-integration/orthodoxy
-Inability of the police to manage crowds (yet again)
-Wariness around ethnic minority/sectarian issues from the authorities.
Hope this was of some interest- as I said, be careful of sources if you want to read more into this- twitter is a good place to look to see real reactions from those involved and how both sides are adamant that the other side is 100% at fault and it is clearly an anti-X attitude.
incognitomaorach
8mo ago
As someone who has very little familiarity with US legal culture, can you explain how on earth they arrive at sums like $11m, let alone the $366m in the FedEx case? What is the justification for such huge sums of money?
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Yep, my mind immediately jumped to the Trans comparison as well on this one. I think that the medical powers that be have shown over the last few years that they're just not really fit for purpose in terms of properly spelling out the issues at play. I think it's probably a matter of "doing what is best for society", as deemed by elites.
It's worth saying on the T point- there was a video doing the rounds of a 21 year old F2M man speaking to camera about how they were too far gone (too androgenised) to consider detransitioning. Besides the mastectomy (which is actually sort of reversible, same as breast cancer patients), the T had led to insane male pattern baldness (Norwood 5 or so) for a 21 year old. And I suppose the tragedy of the situation was that you think Testosterone->some kind of Adonis, in the eyes of what would have been a teenage girl who felt out of place, but the reality was a small, bald little man-child who wouldn't register as a 4/10 on the attractiveness scale.
Obviously T for Cismen will be different (different starting points), and baldness isn't that big a deal if you're improving muscularity etc. but it was just an example of how this constant fuckery with our bodies usually doesn't match up to expectations, and as someone more used to seeing detransitioning/side effects/unfortunate results of M2F individuals, this was quite sad.
All pretty off topic on Euthanasia I guess, beyond the general principle of "we should try much harder to stop people doing irreversible things to themselves, and we should try harder the more years of life they have left to live (or not) with the consequences".
incognitomaorach
5mo ago
I don’t think that Christianity is some God-ordained perfect religion — that would be superstitious — but I think it’s approximately the optimal religion, and all other close contenders would look a lot like it.
If you buy that liberalism, humanism and even atheism etc. are all profoundly Christian ideas (Tom Holland's thesis in 'Dominion') then a religion which lays the groundwork for its own collapse is probably not close to an optimal religion. Secularisation, universality, equal value and such are all core concepts of Christianity, and so one may say it was inevitable that such a belief system would eventually be superseded by the current form of itself. Some may argue that these are reformation/Protestant trends, but look at the Pope!
One can imagine an Ontological argument (if a religion is optimal, it exists...) here. Would an optimal religion leave room open (nay, encourage!) doubt and lead to its own demise, or would it be in fact that which had the strongest grip on its population and cultural success over time?
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Missing point
Obviously I missed the other large dynamic- reaction from right-wing/anti-immigration groups. Historically the anti-migrant right in the UK has had issues with the Muslim population predominantly, although Hindus also experience plenty of general racism. Usual stuff about migrant control, importing violence etc. already being seen and likely to grow if this drags on.
Since the rightward turn in India, there is also a dynamic around alliances between anti-Muslim European politics and anti-Muslim Hindu politics. This doesn't seem that much of a leap, as historically Muslims=Labour (left) voters, Hindus=~Conservative (right), but more evenly split.
This probably originates in and reflects the poverty/education/wealth disparity between the two groups. Wealthier, middle Class, often East African Indians (those with origins in Gujarati merchant families are a major group in British politics), as opposed to the Pakistani community which largely originates from some backwards rural districts in Pakistan, or refugees more recently. It is an interesting dynamic.
incognitomaorach
4mo ago
Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise
There's clearly either a revealed preference here or some kind of skill issue. India is around 41% urbanised. Take away the rural classes and a "few hundred million" people represents like 30-50% of the urban population, which would be even higher in non-slum areas. If those people and a smattering of billionaires can't or won't clean up their cities then I'm not sure what would get them to. There doesn't appear to be that spirit of municipal capitalism that was prominent in, say, the late 19th century in England. Mumbai must have greater resource than 1870s Birmingham, and look at Chamberlain! And if not grand paternalistic mayors, then at least naked self interest to carve out a space for those few hundred million you mention.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
I suppose that's the inevitable response if you start from the individualist perspective. What I meant is the tragedy in comparison to leaving the money to your children, giving them a better life, rather than frittering it away. It's easy for me to say this, nowhere near retirement, and god knows I'd probably do something similar myself if I was in that position. But it's clearly a bit weird that you work all your life, and then towards the end you say "I've done enough now, for my progeny, so I'll just spend the money on eeking out an extra year or two and alcohol and other hedonist expenditure." And I know it's asking a lot and perhaps holding people up to too high standards, especially given they've put a good shift in already, but to me that feels like something which is tragic, over and above staring into the face of your own mortality in an existential way.
A massive chunk of it goes on the Villages corporation itself (I realised I forgot to mention that, but it's basically a semi-private township). And a larger chunk goes on Healthcare- but then that's an argument about accurate allocation of resources I suppose and value for money.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Maybe you're right- I suppose the point where it begins to collapse is when demographics start to look like South Korea. The US will be fine for a long time (not as bad demographics issues, plus the petrodollar). But in for example, the UK, we're already nearly at breaking point with our social care system, and with inflation driven declining standards of living/property bubble, I don't see us having as good a time of it.
Then again, we don't have anything like the Villages, so perhaps there is a much shorter distance to fall.
I suppose just mass and everyday consumption- it's difficult to explain without watching but they will eat out every single day, spend all day every day in dance classes, or golfing, and so on. Don't get me wrong, it looks like a great time (vacation!), but there is something about the specifically ersatz nature of the places they live, the entertainment they enjoy, and the constant nature of it being off-putting for me.
Also, it is pretty unnatural right, a community of just thousands of old people living together, a whole town/city full of them nearly. Society isn't really meant to function like that- people of all ages are usually mixed up (with obviously some peaks and troughs). It feels like a regression of a person, rather than a maturity, where at retirement you decide to basically go back to college.
Maybe that's completely unjustified from myself, and they all look happy, much happier than dying in a traditional nursing home. But it's less of me giving a moral judgement, even though it still gives me an uncanny valley kind of effect. If you're an ethical realist then don't take me as making a normative claim on this! It's definitely more of a visceral unease.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I know a variety of Jane Street London Office employees and for all of them they either have a great work-life balance, or genuinely love the job, put in more effort/take seniority promotions, and therefore get paid more for more hours, but they enjoy it so it doesn't matter. Hours are usually like 8-5/6ish (depends on whether you're tied to the trading hours or doing behind the scenes work). One person I know moved into their crypto team, so because the market is 24/7 they work Saturdays, but get Mondays off instead. NYC might be different though!
If you do manage to get a Jane Street job, of the 5 staff I know who started in the last 4 years, none have left (and the pay is...impressive), so I'd definitely consider it.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Yes, one of the issues skirted around in the documentary is the nature of the boomers who live there. This was the hippy generation (of course, not all of them) who essentially built the world that they now inhabit (atomisation, make work etc etc). I suppose they don't have to live with the consequences.
incognitomaorach
4mo ago
Well England's population density was around 160/km² in 1870, 22m in total. Maharashtra has a population density of 365/km². Mumbai now must be 3 or 4x denser than the West Midlands of the time if the state as a whole is that dense. I don't think density is the key at all (look at the Ganges valley, UP and Bihar combined is ~USA worth of people!).
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I could probably dox 3-5 regular posters with overlap on here/reddit/twitter, given say a week or two's work. If you have read 70-90% of someone's comments over the years, you can build up quite a reasonable profile on someone. For example, if you have:
-Age range
-Industry (narrowed to a few places of work)
-Location
-Interests
-Social background (schools etc)
-Ethnicity/Religion
-Sex/gender/sexuality
And at least 2 of their social media accounts, how much harder could it be to dox someone from that, without even having to use data-breaches. If you were a PI I imagine you'd begin by trawling sites like Linkedin (probably the most useful due to the breadth of information and easy access) and quite quickly finding some obvious candidates. I've always assumed I'd be relatively easy to dox and I tend on the lurker side of reddit/blogposts/twitter.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
I think you've misunderstood - I'm fully aware that most elderly people don't live like this. I'm not from the US, the whole thing was really bizarre and surreal.
This was just a specific response to this particular reaction by a specific group of elderly people, in what felt like a dying society. And I thought it raised some interesting points in a really candid way.
I also don't think it's particularly useful to call it a "shitty" documentary- I get that Vice is hardly prestige cinema but it's merely a platform for what I think is a very well shot and visually interesting film about a little known part of America.
incognitomaorach
10mo ago
At first blush, this is an absurdity. Then I remember that race relations in the UK are different than in the US, with UK blacks ahead in life expectancy and nearly equal in earnings. I suspect this is largely a selection effect: a much greater share of blacks in the UK are elite immigrants from Africa compared to the US - though perhaps not Somalis.
No, you were correct in your first understanding. It is a relatively small section of London, but in say, Notting Hill, you have large estates mostly divvied up semi ethnically e.g. Somali, Carribbean, Moroccan, cheek by jowl with £15m townhouses.
The road David Beckham lives on for example, is less than a 10 minute walk to multiple estates, and less than 20 minutes walk to Grenfell tower itself. This is (as far as I'm aware) a uniquely (West?) London thing, where the houses by Ladbroke Grove station will be £10-20m and yet 1 road next door will be a very poor housing estate. I used to think it was great, as an example of semi-integration (Ghettoisation leading to say bad shops, bad services). Nowadays, I'm ambivalent, but I appreciate its uniqueness.
incognitomaorach
10mo ago
This is definitely real, and very, very lucky. The primary method of guessing (he's been playing this 0.1 second thing for a while now) is via meta/vibes based stuff, including colour, car tells, photo artifacts etc. The country is easily West African from the 0.1 second snippet, top level players can probably know that it is likely to be Ghana (only some countries are included, Ghana being one of them) based on Meta like this: https://i.redd.it/2ofuurlj61g61.png. (Out of date now, but you get the idea). And then you have a relatively small subset of main roads to choose from. He just got very lucky this time. Even if because of his advanced skills he has a 1 in 1000 chance of guessing the correct road, he must play at least that many games a month.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Just differing circles- I don't know anybody who works at a FAANG on the technical side (a couple in marketing/sales). Everybody I know who works at JS did maths at my university, they hire (graduates at least) from an extremely small talent pool in the UK. I'll try and figure out a way that I can help without doxxing myself!
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Just to answer 3) now- this is one of the other main points on the documentary (I didn't want to get into the inequality angle on this post). In fact it was exactly that part that made me think of the idea of "off-worlding" or escaping. Those who can afford to just nope out.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Sure, but I'm not sure the full scale of the problem has been faced up to (not as bad in the US as here in Europe, perhaps), nor the unpalatibility of it with people told all their lives "work hard, then retire".
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
She's actually almost certainly had a nose operation to narrow her nose, which was previously one of her more African-American features.
(crap site, but the pictures don't lie https://radaronline.com/photos/prince-harry-meghan-markle-nose-job-plastic-surgery-photos/)
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
The Kirpan is an interesting one- I'm sure there is probably a story there about the British Empire's unique relationship with the Sikhs, and consequently modern attitudes toward them. For those who don't know, Sikhs were given privileged positions in the Raj and used as allies and military enforcers, as they had common ground against their previous Mughal and Hindu overlords. Factors such as monotheism may also come into it. I distinctly remember in school being taught a lot about Sikhism in religious studies, comparatively much more than Hinduism or Islam or Buddhism.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Sure, I broadly agree. I hope my post didn't give the impression that this was somehow the entire Muslim and Hindu male population fighting it out- the vast majority have been completely reasonable if not actively helpful in trying to calm it down.
I think you're right about the masculine flag stuff as well, but worth noting that for the Muslim sections it is still very much a flag of faith. In fact I'll be very interested to see the census 2021 results and whether the Muslim population in Leicester is majority Pakistani or more mixed as it was in 2011 (Arabs/Afghan etc etc).
On the other hand, the old firm comparisons are slightly unhelpful - we're talking about the people of 2 nuclear armed states who've commited de facto genocide against each other, plus their allies who belong to a faith of billions, not interdoctrinal differences between a few million. Slightly exaggerated but I do genuinely think the dividing lines are much deeper than the Catholic/Prot gap (not to say the latter wasn't deeply felt).
And while you are correct that there is always the possibility of orientalist hypocrisy in these matters, one can't help but point out that these are non-indigenous, if not non-British (1st gen, unassimilated etc) people squabbling rather than those with roots of thousands of years.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Yes that's a good point about Kashmir, I'd forgotten about that.
It's also worth pointing out that community relations between Indians and Muslims in some parts of the population are perfectly fine. Especially second-gen, upper/middle class, there are basically no issues beyond "I can't marry you as our parents wouldn't approve."
So some of you may have seen the latest round of pizzagate type posts on twitter revolving around Etsy digital images. It started with someone bringing back the Wayfair cabinets story from 2020, here's a "fact checking" post from the time as a reminder https://twitter.com/mediawise/status/1281711438462177281. Essentially the idea was that Wayfair were selling cabinets with the names of children on missing person lists for very large amounts of money, so really they must have been selling kids. Ergo, in plain sight paedophile ring.
Anyway, the latest round focuses on Etsy. There are a variety of 'digital images' of foods/children that are selling for $1000-$90,000 such as here: https://twitter.com/littleapostate/status/1734207558905106462 or https://twitter.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1734368320441192593/photo/1. It doesn't help that a lot of them are pizza related, so obviously catnip to Pizzagate believers- presumably this isn't coincidental.
So what is going on here? Assuming prima facie that these aren't children being sold via online distributor stores this leaves four main options:
1- The listings were real, you can follow links through to some of them (or see them on webarchive). But that doesn't preclude the possibility that they were made by the people whipping up hysteria or engagement baiting, or just trolling the internet nut jobs. All very possible options
The other options are much more interesting.
Scams
On the face of it, there are a few very funny scamming possibilities:
It could be a scam targeted at pizzagate truthers. They try and buy the $3000 digital pizza. png to see whether they get a child delivered, and in fact get a pizza picture. Scammer makes free money.
It could be a scam targeted at paedophiles! This would be funnier, as above but believe it and want to try and get a child delivered.
It could be some kind of weird automation thing, are there algorithms that buy things on Etsy?
It could just be trying to prey on people whom make a mistake or kids. But you could presumably just get a refund, so seems unlikely.
Only the first option really makes sense of these imo, if even one brainrotted internet person decided to fork out thousands to expose the Etsy paedophile ring you'd be laughing to the bank. Again though, I don't know how refunds work, so maybe they could just embarrassingly claim it back.
Money laundering
Fairly self explanatory- maybe the customer base is just other accounts set up by the same organisation, where the flows/receipts from Etsy can contribute to the image of a legitimate commercial enterprise. It might help evade certain checks, but surely the FBI or whoever would see something like this a mile off if it was genuinely an attempt to launder funds. Is there a possibility it's to do with capital controls from a foreign country?
Other illicit sales
There is also the possibility that they're selling another product, like drugs or weapons or so on. But this doesn't make a lot of sense either- why wouldn't they make the sales using the dark net or offline?
I lean strongest towards it being some kind of trolling/scamming effort by non-Pizzagaters, but the possibility that it is a false flag to whip up engagement is also possible.
More options
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