sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The starting point was you saying that people who aren't white nationalists don't "care about white people", and that the reasons for this are sufficiently obvious that even people with drastically different beliefs about the world wouldn't disagree with white nationalism otherwise. You're now talking about how allowing even highly selective non-white immigration could result in intermarriage that results in...the white population ending up with some fraction of a percent of east-asian ancestry? I'm not seeing how this is harmful, and I certainly don't think it is so self-evidently harmful that even people who disagree with you realize it is harmful.
Meanwhile, on a timeframe like that there are far more important factors to focus on. Obviously there are the non-selective forms of immigration, and the large racial minorities that already live in most majority-white countries. There is dysgenic evolutionary pressure costing around 1 IQ point per generation (along with lower conscientiousness, more ADHD, etc.), because modern society is currently set up so that the more successful you are the fewer children you have. And there is the rapidly-arriving promise of technologies like embryo selection or hypothetical future genetic engineering (or simply getting over the eugenics taboo and doing large-scale sperm donation), potentially allowing whichever group is willing to do it to tremendously improve themselves.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
No? That depends on birth rates, intermarriage rates, and the actual rate of immigration from different nations and races. Non-hispanic whites and asians currently have the same birth rate, which presumably means east-asians specifically are even lower. Furthermore, assuming you count people with 98% white and 2% east-asian ancestry as white, intermarriage is going to reduce the proportion of the minority demographic, and unlike with black people I don't know of any research indicating there's a disadvantage to having east-asian ancestry. (There was that one survey of online hapa communities where they seemed to do worse than average whites or asians, but that was obviously because of the selection bias of participating in those communities.) So even if your immigration policy ended up letting in more east-asians than white people, that doesn't mean the country would end up more east-asian over time. And of course there are plenty of hypothetical selective immigration policies where the end result would be the majority of immigrants being white without being an outright ethnostate, in which case the end result will be a higher proportion of white people than if there was no immigration at all.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
There are immigration policies other than "white ethnostate" and "open borders". Mass immigration sufficient for your concern to happen would presumably come from countries that suck to live in, and countries that suck to live in rarely have many high-quality immigrants. Even under the current U.S. immigration system, demographic replacement has little to do with the small numbers of highly-selected immigrants, it's the reproduction rates of the population groups already in the U.S. and the ways for low-quality immigrants to bypass that selective system.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates. It's like conflating "cares about jewish people" and "zionist": many jews believe zionism harms jewish people instead of helping them (and doing it with white nationalism is even less accurate because zionism is currently more mainstream).
It's not just a matter of prioritization but of beliefs about the world. There are plenty of normal people who genuinely think that racial diversity benefits everyone, including white people. Furthermore, even within the realm of people who both know about HBD and think it potentially justifies government discrimination on the basis of race, most are not white nationalists. For instance white nationalists have termed Emil Kirkegaard an "IQ nationalist", though in the linked post he ends up concluding that explicit IQ nationalism would just amount to much the same thing as skilled worker laws, and the important thing is keeping out the far-below-average immigrants without IQ tests or racial discrimination being nessesary. Even if you go to a more populist community like /pol/, there are both white nationalists who think each race should get its own ethnostates, but also plenty of people who only have an issue with specific races like black people and don't care about racial separation otherwise. If your definition of "white nationalist" includes people who want to ban black immigration but allow mass-migration from Hong Kong, on the basis that they believe that such immigration would benefit everyone in the destination country including white people, it's not going to be very recognizable to conventional white nationalists.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.
It's a completely different subject but I'm reminded of Scott's 2015 post about California's water crisis:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/
34 million acre-feet of water are diverted to agriculture. The most water-expensive crop is alfalfa, which requires 5.3 million acre-feet a year. If you’re asking “Who the heck eats 5.3 million acre-feet of alfalfa?” the answer is “cows”. A bunch of other crops use about 2 million acre-feet each.
All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet. Of those, 2.4 million are for commercial and industrial institutions, 3.8 million are for lawns, and 2.8 million are personal water use by average citizens in their houses.
Which leads to interesting calculations like this:
The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.
But in any case the question of whether alfalfa is worth the resource usage has little to do with zeke5123's objection.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Sorry, I was going off half-remembered information about how "grass-fed" labeling is meaningless in some countries. A more relevant point is that grass-fed labeling includes food sources like hay, which still have to be harvested, which brings us back to the inherent thermodynamic inefficiency of feeding another animal so you can later eat its meat.
And clearing jungle for pasture is a net improvement for animal welfare, because jungles are obscene murder temples of pure agony, while well-tended pastures are grass and flowers and a few voles (if you don't care about insects).
I was responding based on his assumptions that areas like cropland are bad for animals, rather than being good because they involve creating areas where fewer animals are born into lives of suffering. Yes, with the right set of moral assumptions you can view every animal born into the wild as a bad thing, which would be a point in favor of anything that involves using lots of land in a way that leads to a low density of animal life. But once you're considering things at that level of indirect effects, you should also consider that using resources and land to raise cattle trades off against using it in other ways. Strip-mines and suburbs don't have a high density of animals either, even tree farms aren't that high, it's difficult to predict the effects on land use if people redirected money from meat to something like housing.
In the sufficiently long term the biggest effect might be on social attitudes, as humans gain more and more power over the environment a society in which ethical vegetarianism is the norm also seems more likely to care about wild animal suffering and act accordingly. (Like those ideas regarding genetically-engineering wild animals to reduce their suffering.) If nothing else wild animals with brains capable of suffering are already becoming a smaller percentage of Earth's population, so the average welfare of animals (including humans in the average) is increasingly driven by whether humanity continues to scale up the population of animals we raise for slaughter alongside our own population. For instance look at Earth's distribution of mammal and bird biomass - obviously neither mammals or biomass are the metrics we care about, but it gives a sense of the trend.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
None of that addresses that raising meat for slaughter involves growing more crops, not less. For instance, the U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. Even before trying to account for other sources of animal feed, or that people eat more wheat than beef, or that some of that wheat is itself feeding animals, hay alone is using more land that wheat production.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. So setting aside all other forms of animal feed, more land goes to producing hay alone than to wheat.
However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery.
Which is why I'm pointing out that raising cattle at scale involves harvesting even more land. Estimating the effects on animals from cropland is difficult, but it's not a comparison that favors beef to begin with.
Industrial farming of animals requires feeding them, and thanks to thermodynamics this is dramatically less efficient than growing food for humans directly. (Theoretically you can raise some grass-fed cattle on grassland that already exists without clearing new land but this does not scale and still kills the cattle themselves. Note that labeling beef as "grass-fed" does not mean they get their food exclusively from pasture, it includes feeding them hay which itself has to be harvested.) You don't need to throw up your hands and act like there's no way to know if there's more animal death/suffering required for beef or bread, various rough estimates like this are enough to show the intuitively obvious answer is correct.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Right, I saw that part of the sentence but skipped past that part of the argument, I should have explicitly said why I was talking about the military of Ukraine. I think it is deeply silly to attribute Ukrainian military performance to the politics of the U.S. army because of U.S. intelligence passing them some information. Also, even if we were talking about the U.S. military, soldiers are more right-wing than the general public and belief in "non-binary gender identity" is far from consensus in the U.S. even outside the right.
To the extent talking about "the they/them army beating Russia!" is a real argument at all, it is a response to those who have said it weakens the U.S. army when it adopts policies such as lowering standards to let in more women and pandering to divisive left-wing political groups who are not particularly patriotic/nationalistic or likely to join the military. Those criticisms have essentially no relevance to the U.S. keeping a spy drone over international waters and passing some of its data to Ukraine. Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian army is not particularly left-wing, owes much of its success to the Ukrainian people being more patriotic/nationalistic than Russia expected, and by the way a surprisingly successful force in pushing that sense of anti-Russian patriotism was a militia of literal neo-Nazis who were subsequently successfully integrated into the mainstream army and political system. (Meanwhile the U.S. military brags about campaigns to root out supposed "right-wing extremism".)
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
No, the military and government and people of Ukraine did that. It was the fact that none of those 3 crumpled that stopped Ukraine being overrun in weeks like Russia expected, not that the U.S. had sent them some Javelins/small-arms/intelligence. The more substantial supply of equipment came later, and has made it more difficult for Russia to grind down Ukraine with the sheer size difference, but even then it is nonsense to pretend that donating some spare equipment (without even dramatically ramping up production) means Ukrainian performance can be attributed to the U.S. military. If you want to see how "afterthought" support from the U.S. military does when it is backing a people without a sense of patriotism for their country and a military that isn't already competent, look at post-withdrawal Afghanistan.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
I do not know of any polls about how many Ukrainians believe people born with a "non-binary gender identity" exist, or that people should avoid "misgendering" them, but I doubt it is a significant number. I do not even know if anyone has invented "non-binary pronouns" in Ukrainian, I assume a few Ukrainians on Tumblr have done so but I do not know of them successfully convincing major Ukrainian institutions that their adoption is a civil rights issue. Searching finds an article about a soldier who identifies as "non-binary" and says that "some even used my she pronoun", with no mention of "non-binary pronouns" as a concept. Ukrainians are of course not using singular they as a pronoun to indicate "non-binary" people, since less than 30% speak even "some English".
By comparison, in a 2023 poll 44% of Ukrainians supported common-law same-sex marriage and 30% believed same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children. I do not think it is useful to base your understanding of major world events on bizarre gotchas against conservatives from /r/politicalhumor.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
This case comes to mind:
Compact Magazine: A Black DEI Director Canceled by DEI
This month, I was fired from my position as faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, Calif.—a position I had held for two years. This wasn’t an unexpected development. From the beginning, my colleagues and supervisors had made clear their opposition to the approach I brought to the job. Although I was able to advance some positive initiatives, I did so in the face of constant obstruction.
What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.
My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice. On the contrary, I was informed during the interview process that the office I would be working in had been alienating some faculty with a “too-woke” approach that involved “calling people out.” (After I was hired, this sentiment was echoed by many faculty, staff, and administrators I spoke to.) I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role. I was wrong.
Of course, most of the time people who disagree with core SJW tenets don't get hired for DEI positions in the first place. This case is unusual not in that they demanded ideological homogeneity, but in that they didn't demand it as part of the original hiring process. Plenty of academic institutions now require diversity statements from prospective hires for any position, let alone positions related to DEI, statements evaluated in a way that would probably exclude someone like her if she was open about her beliefs.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
It can justify a lot of things, but there does need to be some justification that those involved find convincing. Operation Northwoods, for example, was a proposal from the DoD to start a war and thus attain a specific geopolitical goal, rather than justify one that has already occurred. It also drew justification from the greater importance of the Cold War. To justify faking WMDs after Saddam was already overthrown you have to think about it in terms of long-term PR concerns, there isn't any immediate goal. That's enough of a difference to explain why one would be proposed but not the other. (Of course, even if it had been proposed, we wouldn't necessarily know if Bush rejected the idea. I'm inclined to think that it wasn't even a proposal though.)
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
My own impression is that this is a case of rationalist first-principles thinking gone awry and applied to a domain where it can do real damage. Journalism doesn't have the greatest reputation these days and for good reason, but his approach contrasts starkly with its aspiration to heavily prioritize accuracy and verify information before releasing it.
It seems like the opposite to me. Running with the baseless callout post to show how seriously you take wrongdoing in your community is extremely normal behavior. Normal people tend to assume accusations are true, without appreciating how easily they can be dominated by a small percentage of delusional or malicious people. Normal people tend to take a "if there's smoke there's fire" attitude rather than nitpicking individual claims to see if the accuser is credible. Normal people are more interested in punishing or warning about wrongdoers than the impact of false accusations, and don't think about the second-order consequences of incentivizing false accusations by taking even weak accusations seriously. Indeed, I wonder if one reason the claims weren't questioned enough is because those doing so wanted to act normally and being skeptical would have pattern-matched onto negative stereotypes about EAs: defending an EA organization accused of abusive behavior would be cult-like, while nitpicking the truth of individual claims by an alleged victim would be cold and emotionless. Now, normal people can be skeptical, especially after a response like the one Nonlinear has now posted, and obviously they aren't as bad as SJW-inclined communities with ideological antibodies against failing to "Believe Victims". But the behavior you're attributing to rationalism seems very typical. Sadly this includes large sections of mainstream journalism, regardless of what the SPJ ethical guidelines say they should be doing.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
This explanation also seems unlikely because of the predictable and dire consequences, as I cover above, for the CIA's operational reach, of the intelligence failure and the subsequent extreme reluctance by future administrations to commit ground forces to regime change operations.
I think the idea that this is a puzzle, like so much political discourse, is based on a failure to listen to what people say about their beliefs and motives and then believe them. If you're going to keep a secret, you need strong agreement among the people who know about it. People who work for the CIA generally want to help the U.S. and beat the bad guys, not deceive the American people in order to preserve the CIAs "operational reach". People may have hidden motives, but groups rarely do, since new members will be people who believed the public messaging. If they do something to interfere in U.S. domestic politics it'll be because they genuinely believe it is aligned with their mission, like if there's widespread agreement that left-wing radicals are Soviet subversives. Or if they were the next organization to suffer enough SJW institutional capture to decide that the next Republican presidential candidate is a "white-supremacist" who needs to be kept away from power at all costs. Or if they bought into some media narrative and, for instance, think Incel is a terrorist organization. But they aren't going to do that sort of thing for the sake of the CIA itself, their loyalty is to what their worldview says is in the interest of America and/or their sense of morality.
You can often get CIA members to keep a secret against a clear enemy, you can maybe even get the NSA to keep a secret like "using PRISM to scan all internet metadata in the U.S. in order to catch terrorists", though of course that one ultimately leaked. But once you're doing something that members don't view as a natural extension of the CIA's public mission, people aren't going to try doing it and they will probably have whistleblowers if they do. The same is true for the politicians who could have potentially tried (and probably failed) to order the CIA to commit such a deception. Bush claimed Saddam had WMDs (beyond old unusable remnants) because he was biased enough to believe it was true based off the weak and ambiguous evidence, not because he deliberately lied, so why would he suddenly start orchestrating a giant lie after he turned out to be wrong?
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
If he made the references out of indifference towards those who find those references taboo, then that is even less reason to believe "The point of the jokes was to make leftists think he was a Nazi!". Same thing if he made those references without knowing that some people would consider them proof of Nazism. My point was that, even if he deliberately transgressed the taboo because it was a taboo as a means to mock those who find it objectionable, that does not mean he 'wants to be viewed as a Nazi'. As tends to be the case with people engaging in deliberate transgression, he does not actually support the existence of the taboo he is transgressing. Like most 4channers, he would probably prefer the internet of 15 or so years ago when people made Nazi references and jokes all the time and nobody of relevance tried to harm them over it.
Incidentally this inspired me to look at the KYM page for Downfall memes. The meme dates back to 2006 and the first controversy mentioned was 2010:
On December 8th, 2010, Jefferies investment bank executive Grant Williams was fired after sharing a Downfall parody video in a company newsletter e-mail. The video in question, which is thought to have been uploaded on December 6th, 2010, satirizes JPMorgan's financial bet against silver in 2010 and the subsequent online grassroots campaign that was launched to buy silver and thus counter the firm's efforts.
In July 2013, a Hong Kong judge ordered the international investment bank to pay its former executive $1.86 million USD for damages covering lost salary and bonuses between June 2011 until July 2013, ruling that the termination of Williams for sharing a video was "hypersensitive" and "irrational." The story was reported on by Bloomberg[21], The Atlantic[22] and The Huffington Post.[23]
The interesting thing is that if you look at the linked Huffington Post article from 2013, the most left-leaning source linked, there is absolutely no mention of the idea that sharing Hitler memes (as part of your job in the official newsletter for an investment bank!) is offensive or creates a hostile work environment for minorities or is dogwhisting by making light of Nazism or anything like that. In fact even the company's argument quoted in the Bloomberg article is just that it “insulted in a quite humiliating way a competitor and business partner”.
Mocking someone's beliefs or taboos does not mean you like the thing you are mocking, even though if it vanished that would remove the assumed context for your work. Making Postal 2 doesn't mean you want people to believe that violent videogames cause violence, rather the fact that they already believe that is part of the premise and context. Chris Ofili can make The Holy Virgin Mary and sell it for £2.9 million regardless of what his own views might be on taboos involving pornography, dung, or christianity.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”.
I don't see how anyone can closely look at real-world charities and believe this. The charity world is full of organizations that transparently don't think about effectiveness at all. The Make-a-Wish foundation doesn't run the numbers and decide it's better to grant a wish for X dying first-world children than to save Y first-world children or Z third-world children from dying, they don't consider the question in the first place. Yes if you dilute "effectiveness" to "think they're doing good" they do think that, but they don't actually try to calculate effectiveness or even think about charity in those terms. And that's by many metrics one of the "good" charities! The bad ones are like the infamous Susan Komen Foundation or (to pick a minor charity I once researched) the anti-depression charity iFred. iFred spends the majority of donations on paying its own salaries and then spends the rest on "raising awareness of depression" by doing stuff like planting flowers and producing curriculum that nobody reads and that wouldn't do any good if they did. Before EA the best charity evaluation available was stuff like Charity Navigator that focuses on minimizing overhead instead of on effectiveness. That approach condemns iFred for spending too much money on overhead instead of flower-planting, but doesn't judge whether the flower-planting is effective, let alone considering questions like the relative effectiveness of malaria treatment vs. bednets vs. vaccines.
Even within the realm of political activism like you're focusing on, such activism is often justified as trying to help people rather than just pursuing the narrow political goal as effectively as possible, opening up comparisons to entirely different causes. As EA discovered, spending money trying to keep criminals out of prison is less efficient at helping people than health aid to third-worlders even if you assume there is zero cost to having criminals running free and that being in prison is as bad as being dead. You can criticize the political bias that led them to spend money on such things, but at least they realized it was stupid and stopped. Meanwhile BLM is a massive well-funded movement despite the fact that only a couple dozen unarmed black people are shot by police per year (and those cases are mostly still stuff like the criminal fighting for the officer's gun or trying to run him over in a car). Most liberals and a significant fraction of conservatives think that number is in the thousands, presumably including most BLM activists. It would be a massive waste even if it hadn't also reduced proactive policing and caused thousands of additional murders and traffic fatalities per year. That sure sounds like a situation that could benefit from public discourse having more interest in running the numbers! Similarly, controversial causes like the NGOs trying to import as many refugees as possible aren't just based on false ideological assumptions, but are less effective on their own terms than just helping people in their own countries where it's cheaper. The state of both the charity and activist world is really bad, so there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for those that actually try and any comparison should involve looking at specifics rather than vaguely assuming people must be acting reasonably.
Yes it is.
That's 1000 for $9.99, 999 pills for 1 cent each and then 1 extra. Now, if you buy a smaller quantity it is more expensive, since you're paying them to make and ship around a smaller bottle, and there's probably also a bit of a premium for name-brand Tylenol if you don't know about generics (some of which is you paying them to advertise the existence of Tylenol to you), but here's a smaller quantity of brand-name Tylenol for something like $0.15 each.
https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Acetaminophen-Extra-Strength-Count/dp/B000052WQ7/
Not exactly an onerous burden.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
A lot depends on how much of a filter immigration is, immigrants who go through a highly selective system are obviously going to be better than refugees or illegal immigrants who don't. Due to geographical proximity Europe has more unfiltered Muslim immigrants, and correspondingly has more problems with them. That said, I suspect that even for unfiltered immigrants a lot of the difference would disappear if you controlled for race.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
If you control for race do muslim immigrants and their descendants assimilate and secularize less than christian immigrants? Or is it just that they are disproportionately arab and african? Intelligence correlates with economic success, low criminality, and atheism. I'm not saying that the actual content of islam must not be relevant, I genuinely don't know, but it's not something you can compare by just assuming other variables are equal.
You could blame them for commenting on immigration policy without taking HBD into account, but that is pretty expected for anyone close to the mainstream. The fact Sam Harris has discussed HBD at all makes him a rarity for a commenter of his prominence, even if he either didn't consider it in this case or thought it wasn't sufficient to make the policy a good idea.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:
ones successful in the most similar to European fashion
I think that's part of why it gained use among white supremacists in the first place, because it complicates the mainstream african colonization narrative. For instance they like to talk about how the vast majority of black people in South Africa are Bantu but there were few Bantu in the region prior to Dutch colonization, mostly the region was inhabited by Khoisan. So they can argue that the Bantu pushing decolonization in South Africa are themselves colonizers barely more native than the Dutch.
More generally, since the majority of sub-Saharan Africans are Bantu I'd guess it's a way to refer to the main African population without having to say "sub-Saharan" and without including smaller groups like the Igbo (often claimed to be the most intelligent African ethnicity).
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
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