quiet_NaN
5hr ago
I would argue that Epstein and his guests are different from random truckers in that they purposefully selected for underage. If Epstein had hired 18yo's from escort websites only, this thing would be an absolute non-story, and nobody except a few prudes and feminists would get upset.
Being a sex worker at a truck stop is very likely not a great job. I would expect that the pay is lousy (because your clients do not have a lot of disposable income), it is rather dangerous (because "trucker", unlike "bank executive" does not filter for "intelligent person with an appropriate discounting function who will avoid any homicides they will not get away with") and that the clients are not particularly hot or skilled at sex. If you can make ends meet using OnlyFans or doing escort work, that seems much preferable. So I can totally see that this job selects for 16yo runaways who need to pay for their next meal or their next dose, and have neither the wardrobe nor the age to make it in the more respectable branches of sex work (where underage is likely a hard no, because it attracts the eye of Sauron like little else except murder).
Unlike the US, I have no problem with prostitution per se. I certainly do not think minors should be prostitutes, but also admit that I have no good way to align the incentives of a 16yo drug addict to that end. Still, I think informed consent is as important for sex work as for any sex act.
Some time ago, there was a scandal where some porn company would hire women for what they claimed to be modelling (or something similarly tame), then get into a plane to some other city, and suddenly be confronted with the fact that they would be shooting hardcore porn instead. This put the women in a position where they could either walk out, and find themselves in a city which they knew nothing about without a return ticket home, or they could conform with the expressed opinion of the set crew that shooting porn was not a big deal and believe their lies that their video would only be sold to foreign collectors and not be put on the internet. Eventually, the company got sued and is out of business now, and good riddance. By contrast, no hooker who climbs into a truck is under any illusion that the truck driver is going to do a photo shoot to kick off her modelling career. She might still get raped when the trucker violates the agreed boundaries, but that would then at least be a criminal matter (not that this would buy her anything, realistically).
Now, in theory, it could be that Epstein recruited his victims by driving to local truck stops and telling the sex workers: "I am currently recruiting underage prostitutes for a sex party. Here is a brief detailing transportation, accommodations, sex acts, payment, and safe words. Please read it, think about it for a week and then mail me what sex acts you feel comfortable with and I will get back to you."
However, in my world model, this is exceedingly unlikely. It is seems far more likely that the girls travelling on the Lolita express had at best a vague idea what would be required of them, and then were coerced in pretty much the same way as the victims of that unethical porn company were, except worse, because they were underage and actually trapped on an island.
I base this on my general impression of Epstein's MO wrt consent and also one major thing which I think is appealing in men about young partners, which is sexual inexperience. If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I would argue that before Tesla, an electrical car was for the greenest 10% of the population who were willing to drive an expensive substandard car because they wanted to stop CO2 emissions. Rich people who wanted a nice car typically got a premium brand German gasoline car.
Tesla changed that. Suddenly you could drive a car which would impress the ladies while also being electric. In response, the German car industry (which had largely dismissed electric cars as a fad) worked hard to build electric models. While I would probably by a SE Asian car instead of an American or European one, I really think that Tesla moved the industry forward a lot.
Often, the premium brands are trendsetters, and the things they implement (e.g. ABS, airbags, backwards-facing cameras) eventually trickle down to the cheaper brands. Before Tesla, you could belittle that die-hard green running an extension cord through his garden to charge his car. After Tesla, it was clear that electric cars were a viable (if still expensive) alternative.
The main innovation of SpaceX is that they are able to recycle first stages. The Saturn V was very impressive on capabilities, but it also cost about 1.5G$ per launch in today's money to get 140 tons to LEO. The Falcon 9 costs 67M$ for 23 tons to LEO. Sure, SpaceX is overpromising and underdelivering a lot, but that fact alone is impressive.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I might be typically-minding, but I think that most big tech companies are seen at least slightly negative by rats in general.
Apple and Google are obviously rent-seeking with their digital walled gardens. Apart from that, Google is an ads company, while Apple is making hardware for a slightly cultish consumer base. I prefer Android over iOS because the former is mostly open, but recognize that OS X is less of a walled garden than most Android devices are. Microsoft did a great job of becoming mostly irrelevant for me personally, which is much better than I expected. So far, they have failed to completely ruin github.
Reddit is a cautionary tale about what happens when you let a single company control a bit platform. Facebook was always mostly terrible.
Musk deserves a paragraph of his own. For someone who made his money with fucking PayPal, he really did some good for a time. Both Tesla and SpaceX were exactly the kind of companies society should want. Hell, he was Scott Alexander's go-to example of "high positive impact human" a decade ago. Of course, since he bought twitter, he has had a ton of negative impact on the world as well. Since xAI, I wish that whoever is writing Musk's role would try to write a realistic villain with actual coherent human motivations instead of just a Sieg-Heiling comic book caricature.
Speaking of LLMs, there is a sentiment among rats that many AI companies are actively working on extincting humans. Personally I hope that we will get wiped out by 'Open'AI with its callous disregard for safety rather than by Musk trying to build Grok from his own ego, the former seems slightly more dignified. Anthropic is probably one of the better ones as far as alignment vs capabilities is concerned.
Uber and Amazon are providing a useful service for customers, but it is apparent that their prices are caused by having people work in terrible conditions.
Most companies which I actually consider net-positive are not tech giants. Substack is filling a useful niche. Discord is still slightly useful despite working hard on enshittification.
I agree that monopolies are bad. If a company wants to grow from 0% market share to 5%, its incentives are likely aligned with broader society. If it wants to grow from 30% to 90%, the opposite is the case.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Yeah, Trump won this particular round of chicken. Of course, another way to spin it is that 15% tariffs are not a world-shattering amount, especially to the numbers he originally proposed. But all in all, it seems a bit more than just a token amount to allow him to save face.
If two people are in a positive-sum, mutually beneficial relationship then it is very likely that one of them can leverage the relationship for short term gains. "If you really love me, you will cancel on your buddies and go watch that movie I like with me tonight instead" will probably work fine the first time you pull it if your partner is invested in the relationship. On the short-term, tangible level, that is a clear win.
But just because long-term consequences may be more difficult to quantify, that does not mean that they are not there. Every time you pull a stunt like this, your partner is adjusting their valuation of your relationship a tiny bit downwards. Eventually, your partner might suddenly decide to move out and dump you.
Mutually beneficial trade relationships are not so different. I would argue that for past decades, both the US and the EU have immensely profited from the free trade with each other. Zero tariffs are a rather obvious Schelling point. But now Trump with his zero-sum mindset is in charge, and thinks that either the US is fucking someone over, or it is getting fucked over. In the short and medium term, the EU needs trade with the US, so they can not afford a trade war. In the long term, Trump is a red flag. If I was the EU, I would be working hard to secure other trade deals with other nations, so that when another MAGA president decides in a decade that he will not settle for anything less than 30% unilateral tariffs, we are in the position to tell him to fuck off.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Yes, the conditions in the state of nature are indeed horrifying. I wonder if the past 200,000+ years of human evolution had anything to do with the incentives, motives, and options typically leveraged by its participants? Surely modern peoples are trained to understand those core motivations, and are honest about them, at all times, and not forming their basis of what is and is not good and proper based solely around purely instinctual self-interest. (Now if you'll excuse me, a pig just flew past my window.)
If I understand your sarcasm right, this seems like a fully generalizeable counterargument to most human progress. If you want to argue "back in the ancestral environment we (likely) did not have a conception of sexual consent, so I do not see why we need one now", the same argument could be made against other civilizational projects like trying to limit the murder rate, curing diseases or preventing starvation.
For women, they want someone as old and powerful as possible (more secure, more resources, more even-keeled)
I think that both in the ancestral environment and agrarian societies, age (above 20) was directly negative in a husband, but sometimes positively correlated with beneficial qualities.
Evolutionarily speaking, if you are a 14 and looking to marry, you perhaps have 15, 20 years of fertility ahead of you. Sure, there is some heavy discounting because chances are that you will die in childbirth or some unrelated cause before you reach age 30. Any children you have will be a net drain on resources until they are perhaps 14 (when they will either be in the position to sell themselves into sexual/domestic/reproductive bondage or work to produce their own calories). If your expected age at the birth of your last child is 25, that means you would want your husband to provide for your family until you are about 40 (or possibly 50 if you are really lucky wrt fertility).
That is a tall order in the best of circumstances! If the husband you marry is 20, he would have to be able-bodied at age 46. If he is 35, he would have to be able-bodied at age 61.
Now, I will grant you that in the ancestral environment, humans might not have had a conception of fatherhood, or long-term monogamous mating patterns, so let us consider agrarian societies instead, where both of these were generally a thing. (Absent paternal involvement, the trade-offs for age in mating are that on the one hand, paternal age is indicative of a higher genetic fitness, but also will increase the mutational load.)
In an agrarian society, almost everyone is a peasant. Most girls will not marry some noble land-owner. Working marginal fields is back-breaking labor, my guess is that most men give out before 40. What happens then is very dependent on the customs of the society. In the best case, your husband dies quickly and you inherit his land and can marry some landless 20yo who will be happy to breed you for the rest of your fertility window. In most cases, this is not how societies organize. The realistic best outcome is that your husband had a younger, landless, unmarried brother who will just take both the land and you over for him, but more realistically, he will inherit the land and marry a fresh 14yo. He might keep you around and feed you and your kids while times are good, but if he has to chose between his wife and his kids and you and his nephews, things will look grim for you. Realistically, the land might never have belonged to your husband in the first place, but just been leased out from a local noble, who will simply proceed to lease the land to some other guy once your husband fails.
Obviously, if you can become the nth wife of some guy rich enough that he does not have to work the field, that would be preferable from an evo PoV, but realistically that is not an option most girls have.
In conclusion, from evo, you would want to go for a rich man if you can, but settle for a young, strong man if you can't.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
"black is beautiful" does not have the same signaling value.
If they go "black not blue", that might have a similar impact, but will likely end with both sides hating them.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Agreed. This is not a spur of the moment thing. Some marketing firm decided that "White woman has great genes/jeans" was an acceptable pun to run a big ad campaign on.
This is about as innocent as anything Cartman has ever said, which is not at all innocent.
They were deliberately courting controversy. I am not sure that they will come out ahead, though.
If they were the 40th largest jeans vendor in the US, they would probably come out ahead. Sure, they would alienate 20% of their customer base, but they might also entice 1% to buy their jeans specifically because they made the wokes cry.
However, American Eagle is the fifth biggest jeans brand in the US (according to some shitty online list I found). 20% who will not buy their products anymore might hurt them quite a bit. For what it's worth, NYSE:AEO did not make any big moves.
Personally, I would not have run the ads in their shoes. Woke is not so dead that I would jump on its corpse, and the outraged 20% will probably have longer memories than the celebrating 30% (of whom only a small fraction might actually buy their jeans).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
but those laws aren't set up that way to protect children (they aren't the right tool for that).
I disagree, I think that age of consent laws are mostly doing their job well enough.
The thing which horrifies me about ancient marriages was the power imbalance. In Rome, the wife was not even a separate legal entity, she was just a part of the household (which was the legal entity), represented by the husband. From my understanding, it was not so much that the husband had an explicit right to beat or rape his wife, and more that what went on within a household was simply not a matter for Roman law. Outright murder or maiming of the wife might get the husband into trouble with the father of his wife, but anything short of that would probably be tolerated. In that setting, the power imbalance is already over-determined. If a 32yo veteran marries a 13yo instead of a 20yo, this would also on its own determine the power imbalance, but given the context we are already way into diminishing returns wrt power imbalance.
As one of these bleeding-heart liberals, I have this idea that power imbalances in sexual relationships which do not stem from a sufficiently informed consent are bad.
If a 30yo is grooming 13yo's, he will probably succeed with a decent fraction of them, if he is average-looking, average-income and has an average skill at manipulation. "No, he is not some creep who wants to fuck 13yo's, he just recognized that mentally I am already 18 and our souls fell in love with each other. It is so romantic!"
With child marriages, at least there is a sharp limit on how many girls a bad actor can victimize (though the magnitude of victimization per victim is of course much higher). With Westerner morals around dating, our average adult man could probably seduce, fuck and dump several 13yo per year if that was his hobby. Now learning the hard way that men will sometimes talk about being soulmates to manipulate you into doing sex acts you would not do otherwise and then display no inclination towards an exclusive romantic relationship is not the end of the world (unless you kill yourself over that), but it is clearly making the world a worse place.
If we had headbands of WIS+6, INT+6 that would probably suffice to cancel out the power imbalance due to the 13-vs-30 age gap, but without that tech having an AoC seems like a good idea.
Or if that is not convincing for you, consider the AoC not in the context of a 13yo, but a 5yo. Adults are great at manipulating kids into doing stuff they have no inclination to do, from eating spinach and getting poked with needles to sitting still in school and doing homework. Child molesters could easily manipulate kids into all kinds of behaviors which will be demonstrably harmful for their normal development. With AoC, we can simply say "well, the kid may have consented, but their consent was invalid, so off to prison you go".
They're primarily for keeping young women out of the sexual marketplace and providing women-as-class a weapon to exploit men more powerful than them (to which they are inherently attracted).
I am sure that there are some adult women who wish that they had lost their virginity at age 14 to a 40yo driving a Porsche instead of a 15yo driving a scooter, but I am also convinced that they are a small minority.
If we generously say that half of the men who groom underage girls (if it was legalized) are interested in a exclusive long term relationship, and half of them are interested in sex without having to work as much on a relationship framework as they would when dating an adult woman, then most girls will end up dating the latter type.
I do not think that the motivation of fathers and feminists to be against minors dating adults is that they fear that they will ruin the sexual marketplace for women. Few fathers will say "I don't want my 13yo to date adult men because she does not know the proper price range of sexual favors and will happily give them blowjobs after getting invited to the cinema". More likely it is something like "I do not want some creep to use his power to manipulate my daughter into doing sex acts she is not comfortable doing and then break her heart. I will grudgingly tolerate her dating a boy a few years older, as at least the boy will not have a ten year head start on how to manipulate woman into sex."
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I REALLY think you have to downgrade your belief that Trump actively prefers young teens.
I don't think he actively prefers them.
Suppose some elite socialite organized a hunt for migratory birds on their private island. From my knowledge, Trump is not much of a hunter and has never displayed any intent to break federal wildlife statues.
However, if he were to learn that the creme de la creme, including British royalty, is along for the hunting trip, he might still come along and shoot at some birds. He will probably not kill the most, but in my model he would certainly enjoy rubbing shoulders and doing something naughty with the rest of the elite.
Likewise, if it is an open secret that the rich and powerful enjoy banging underage girls on Epstein's Island, I do not think that Trump will go "too bad that is not my cup of tea, they will have to have their secret club without me". Instead, he is likely deviate from his usual preferences a bit to be part of the secret club. After all, few men are so much into MILFs that they would not enjoy a blowjob from a busty 16yo.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Honestly I think that the whole thing is to protect Andrew - probably UK has threatened to make a big stink. And some nice blackmail materials on all levels of USG and titans of industry.
What is surprising to me is that Trump would be willing to alienate a large part of his base for that.
My understanding of Trump is that he has a fragile ego and really needs to be popular. I think his refusal to believe that he might have lost to Sleepy Joe stems from that, ultimately. A more cynical power player might determine that two dozen influential people on the top beholden to him are worth more than ten million supporters, but Trump does not strike me as that kind of guy.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This is kinda what I figured. I think that the women being underage was kind of the point, every taboo is also a fetish, and "what we are doing would land a normal guy in jail but we are powerful men who are above plebeian moral and legal considerations" probably aroused them, but at the end of the day most of Epstein's guests were guys with pretty normal preferences (and evolutionarily speaking, "society permitting, have sex with any women who look healthy and fertile, no matter if they are 15 or 35" is probably the dominant strategy for men). Thankfully, raping toddlers, murdering them and drinking blood from their skulls is something very few people are into -- and even if some of Epstein's guests were into that, they likely had more sense than to share that desire with him.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
In today's "old man yelling at clouds" news, it appears that leftist memes (e.g. on imgur) have taken to calling Trump a pedophile due to his connection with Epstein.
As someone who does not give a damn about Trump, but who cares about the language we use to describe reality, I want to object.
A pedophile, in my book, is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent kids. Often, the term might imply exclusive pedophilia, e.g. someone who is only attracted to pre-pubescent kids. This seems like the worst sexual attraction card to be dealt, while being straight, gay, bisexual, into MILFs, or into BDSM, or most other kinks means you have a decent chance of getting laid, the lack of adults who could pass as pre-pubescent means that there are no sex partners who could consent. If used as an insult, the unfortunate implication is that people are morally responsible for their sexual inclinations.
Naturally, there is an overlap with people who end up molesting children, which is rightfully considered a serious crime. It bears saying that a significant fraction of child molesters are not exclusive pedophiles but just men (mostly) with broader sexualities who use the opportunity of the power discrepancy between kids and adults.
In general, I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws. Using the age is obviously a crude approximation, I can think of situations where a 15yo having sex with an 18yo would not be problematic from a power discrepancy point of view, and also of situations where two 18yo having sex would be problematic from a power discrepancy view without being criminal. But still, one has to draw the line somewhere, and age is at least something which can reasonably be verified, while "would a judge like the power dynamics in that relationship?" is much more diffuse.
If we tie consent to age, then it makes sense to dis-emphasize physical development. After all, a woman consents with her brain, not her boobs. It might certainly make a difference if the defendant claims he was mistaken about her age or that she was the one who initiated sex (not that either defense would help much, likely).
To get back to Trump, I think it is pretty clear that he is not an exclusive pedophile. That guy paid for sex with Stormy Daniels, hosted beauty pageants and boasted about grabbing post-pubescent participants "by the pussy". Based on the women he married, "small and flat-chested" does not really seem to be his type.
He is also a sex pest. I can not imagine him going "Dear Jeffrey, this is very flattering, but I do not think it is appropriate. Look at that poor girl. She is a minor who possibly did not have a clear idea that she would be expected to do sex work here and is effectively trapped alone on an island with some very powerful people. Besides her being below the age of consent, this whole setting is intrinsically coercive. If you want me to fuck someone, please get an experienced sex worker of legal age for my next visit." Instead, he probably went "great, I will take the one with the bigger tits" and committed a particularly vile act of statutory rape.
From a culture war point of view, I can see why the left is pushing the pedo angle. It basically comes from qanon, where "oh, did I mention they also rape kids" was used as a boo light to drive home the fact that these were Bad people. MAGA pattern-matched Epstein to this, which was fair enough. Now that it looks like Trump might have been a visitor to Epstein's Island, the likely factually accurate claim "Trump is a sex pest who has no conception of consent and will happily commit statutory rape" is not going to do much damage. The American people have known that he is a sex pest with no conception of consent since 2016, and in their heart of hearts they also know that someone who is generally loose on consent will also not be a stickler for the rules as far as age of consent is concerned. By contrast, going "that pedophile world-controlling elite you were always talking about? Trump is their chairman!", or more shortly "Trump is pedophile" is obviously superior as an attack in the CW.
Still, a lot of epistemic commons are burned in the process, and I really don't like that.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Neither will Israel starve Gaza into releasing the hostages nor will Hamas rape Israel into recognizing a free Palestine. Nor were either Nazi Germany or the UK ever going to bomb each other into submission.
Both phrasings imply that there is some level of suffering at which point the other side will give in, that the cruelty is instrumental to achieve another terminal goal. While this might even be technically true (i.e. once the last Gazan starves, nobody will stop the IDF from retrieving the bones of the hostages) I think that the implication "and we already have made progress into making the other side give in" is simply false.
In reality there is no clever terminal goal for which starving Gazans or murdering Jewish civilians is an instrumental stepping stone, so we can conclude that the cruelty is itself a terminal goal.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
There is no exception to the requirement to let humanitarian aid through if your enemy uses it to gain a financial advantage.
Also, I doubt that the average Gazan has a lot of savings which they could pay Hamas by now, and Hamas certainly has other ways to extract any resources from the Gazan population. For example, they might require a donation to be exempt from human shield duty. Also, flooding Gaza with food (to the degree that NGOs are able to provide it) would likely collapse the food prices in Gaza and cut out that stream of resources for Hamas.
Realistically, most of the funding of Hamas probably comes from Iran anyhow.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Hamas, as the governing body (such as it is), is the one obligated to provide for their own people's food. This whole thing is predicated on the idea that feeding Gaza is the job of literally anyone else on the planet except the actual people who are responsible for doing so.
I would say that it is not Israel's responsibility to feed the civilian population in Hamas-controlled territories. However, they are obliged to let in humanitarian aid. From my understanding, Israel's refusal to let the trucks in is why Gaza is starving, not because the international community is unwilling to buy food for Gaza.
If Hamas were to burn food as it enters Gaza, then you would be correct to say that Hamas is starving Gaza (but my model of them says they would not actually do that).
Likewise, while you can blame the Soviets for much starvation, you can not blame them for the starvation during the siege of Leningrad. That blood is on the hands of the Nazis who decided not to let any food in.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Amazingly enough, what is permissible conduct in wartime has varied greatly based on tech levels. "So after we won, we killed all the males and forced the women into marriages with us" was SOP a few thousand years ago, yet today it would be considered a war crime. For millennia, the sacking of cities involved the looting, murder and rape of civilians for the crime of living in a city which had not surrendered.
Before railroads were a thing, food logistics were often a big operational factor. The only way to move a large army to the land without them starving was to "forage", which meant sending out looting parties to nearby civilian settlements to steal their grain supplies and likely condemn them to starvation. Sieges fall into the same time.
But civilization marches on. Wartime rape is considered a war crime. Food logistics are not a big issue in most contexts. International humanitarian law recognizes that starvation is no longer a valid weapon of war.
Most damningly, just about nobody believes that starvation is effective against Hamas. If for every kid which starved to death, a Hamas militant also starved to death, I would grudgingly grant you that this might be a better way to defeat them than bombs. Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want. "Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool. Assuming they have food stashes, you would have to starve most of Gaza to death before the shortages will really affect them.
Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids. While you might claim that the actual goal is to hit the Hamas guy, it is very predictable that all your bullets will hit the kids and be stopped long before they reach the baddie.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Jeffrey Epstein
I am of the opinion that as far as securing the US support for Israel, Epstein is not even in the top ten, and possibly not in the top 100.
Most politicians have a thing were they accept campaign donations from special interest groups in exchange of political consideration. Some US Jews are very rich. At the risk of sounding like an antisemitic conspiracy nut, I think political donations are the main way that the US position towards Israel is influenced. (For the record, there is also Christian Zionism to consider, as well as the fact that Israel sometimes just is a good ally to the US.)
Nor is it only Jews who can lobby. United Fruits certainly influenced US policy, for example.
By contrast, blackmailing politicians with videos of them fucking underage girls is much riskier. If such an operation was traced back to Mossad, it would create an existential threat for Israel. And even then, a politician bound to your will through blackmail will likely resent you and try to undermine your cause, while a politician who sees you as a big donor will proactively try to keep you happy.
When Epstein was active, few people cared really about Palestinians. "No political donation could convince me to send bombs to Israel, but faced with the threat of the blackmail material being revealed, I am willing to kill a few Palestinian kids" was very much not the stance.
And even if Mossad had wanted to blackmail senators, having a single "Pedophile (sic!) Island" seems a strange way to go about it. Once you reveal the first bit of footage and the first senator 'fesses up, the cat is out of the bag and Epstein is implicated. What you would want to do instead is to target the politicians independently, so you can reveal any slice of evidence without compromising your whole operation.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
By 1945, about any land suitable for human settlement had a local population, including Madagascar. British Palestine still had a rather low population density (1922: 30/km^2, contrast with Germany 1925 @ 133/km^2). Seasteading just was not an option.
The area around Jerusalem was an obvious Schelling point. Picking another place would have meant splitting the project of a Jewish state into two, because some were likely determined to settle in their ancestral homelands or die trying.
The other alternative would have been North America, but I do not think that a truly sovereign state would have been in the cards there. Even if they had convinced the USG to sell them land, they would still have depended on having good relations with them because the US could have invaded them at leisure at any time.
I think the actual best option, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been to carve out a New Israel US state somewhere around Nevada (1920 population density: 0.27/km^2) or New Mexico. I think the only point where a Jewish state would really require sovereignty by design would be to allow Jewish immigrants from all over the world in, which in the US would be a federal matter. Something along the lines of "Jewish migration is unrestricted, but the migrants will not become full US citizens and are restricted to their state (with birthright citizenship still in effect)", would alleviate most of the concerns the rest of the US might have with allowing immigrants in while also being sufficient to allow refugees shelter.
In short, some similar deal to what the Mormons have in the form of Utah.
Sure, New Israel would have had to keep on the good side of the US for survival. But this is not very different from present day Israel. Only that it is much more popular for the US to leave a desert state like New Israel or Utah to its own devices and rather unpopular to send Israel tons of military aid.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Yeah, that's the bet all western jews are making. They think Israel is going to fall someday
While I am sure that there are some Jews who carefully select their country of residence based on minimizing the chances of being genocided, I am positive that for many, other factors (employments, economics, existing relationships) play a more crucial role.
My subjective mental model of the median US Jew is not "these fools in Israel will get themselves murdered again" but "having a state which is guaranteed to accept Jewish immigrants in a world where countries sometimes expel their Jewish citizens is a nice fallback solution, and we should support Israel for that reason even if we do not have a compelling reason to move there."
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Sounds like the streamers and their watchers really deserve each other.
Personally, I have never really gotten watching other people play video games. I can certainly believe that people, despite having literally an internet full of all sorts of porn at their fingertips, nevertheless prefer hot women streaming video games. I can also see a race-to-the-bottom dynamic happening where the best point to make money ends up being just shy of violating the content policy of your platform.
I think that the starting point of sex work is debatable. It is well known that people on TV are on average hotter than the general population. In the broadest sense, this could already be called sex work -- of you got a job reading the news because you are a nine rather than a five, then part of your job is just looking hot, and there is a continuous path from that into softcore and eventually hardcore porn. If you are streaming while wearing makeup and elaborate sexy clothes, then you are already accepting that part of your appeal is that guys will be aroused by your videos.
Presumably, a large part of your income will not be from the people who watch one or two videos of you gaming, but from the small minority which develops an unhealthy parasocial relationship with you. By not having a paywalled explicit channel, you are likely leaving most of the monetarization opportunities on the table. So getting an explicit account where you sell videos of your feet or tits likely has a big payoff.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
If the management is ok with cashiers wearing cameras, they are very likely also willing to use visible video cameras for the same purpose.
If I was a manager, I would not want employees to record continuous footage on private devices. Their interests are not aligned with the store's interests. E.g. it is in the "creator's" interest if a video of fat people buying tons of unhealthy food goes viral. It is not in the interests of the store.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
If you damaged their property or health, and I was on the jury, I would be much inclined to acquit.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Stills at a rate of one per five minutes is much less of a privacy nightmare. I mean, you probably should not wear them for most jobs, but recording full video with sound is much more likely to catch material which will go viral.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think that there is a difference. Glassholes pose a different threat to privacy than governments or big corporations.
If I am in a McDonalds, I am probably recorded by security cameras. But it is also highly probable that McDonalds will not decide upload that footage in some viral video about funny incidents at their restaurants.
Likewise, the NSA can read my text messages. But again, I don't have to worry about featuring in "best of captured texts today", at the most some perv NSA employees will have a laugh with some other pervert spooks about it.
Sure, both government and commercial entities can get hacked, so I would prefer for McDonalds to delete their videos after a week or so (and they share that incentive).
By contrast, if I am recorded by some random pervert with a cell phone, the probability that I will land on the internet is much higher. This is why people react much stronger about cell phones pointed at them than about security cameras.
If someone openly records, my instinct is to tolerate it if they are clearly recording something other than me, and just move out of the picture. By contrast, if some asshole covertly records people without any extenuating context, I very much hope they will make "glassholes got their cameras and jaws broken collection, part 563".
Then people are wrong. I discussed this before.
Let me put it more plainly and provocatively. The problem with calling a 50yo who fucks a 16yo teen in a clearly coercive setting "pedophile" is that you are equating something which is deeply morally objectionable with something which is fine.
In case there is any doubt about which is which, yes, I am claiming that there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile, in the technically sense of the word.
Now obviously, it is a sexual orientation which sucks greatly for anyone with a remotely working moral compass (and will lead to behavior which is very wrong for those without one), and I thank my maker that I am into women with tits instead so I have access to ethically produced porn and ethical opportunities to have sex (even if being bi would be strictly preferable in that regard).
Sure, there is a large overlap between child-fuckers and pedophiles, but my problem is with child-fuckers as child-fuckers. If some asshole decides to sexually abuse a kid, I don't give a rats ass if they were into kids or watching MILF porn at the same time to keep aroused, they should go to prison either way.
Using pedos as a synonym for child abusers is bad. Expanding it to include creepy sex pest-ry targeting underage victims is even worse. I also do not think that the general vibe of "your sexual orientation makes you the likeliest group to be deported to death camps without anyone else saying a word in your defense" is actually very effective at keeping ethical pedos (who are not complicit in sexual abuse) ethical, probably a society which was meh about ethical pedos but very much against child abusers (which mostly describes western legal systems) would offer a better gradient.
I am not much of a linguistic prescriptionist, normally. I use to beg the question correctly, but it is not a hill I am willing to die on. Still, words matter, and I think that on this forum we should strive to use accurate terminology even if 85% of the general population is using it in a more diffuse manner, especially if it involves emotionally charged words which are intentionally repurposed for clear political goals.
As another example (without a strict 1:1 correspondence), consider a (perhaps hypothetical) attempt to redefine "rape" as "any sex act perpetrated by a man which involved a woman who either did not consent or regretted consenting subsequently". (It is not entirely divorced from common usage, people have sex under the influence of voluntarily consumed drugs which would inhibit their legal ability to consent all the time, and end up in situations where they can decide on the next day that they were raped (and then decide to report it or not) or retroactively grant consent. (Perhaps not legally, but practically. Legally, "last night when I was dead drunk, I urged my hot husband to fuck my brains out and he did" might still be rape, but unless she bring that up in divorce proceedings eventually, nobody cares.)) Still, I would definitely argue against anyone here who would try to push such a new definition, because it hopelessly muddies the water by using the same term for different things which are not remotely morally equivalent.
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