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If you've been on twitter in or around the tpot space the last few days, you may have seen Aella blowing up and deciding to go private. I won't recount the whole story, but it is in screenshots in the link earlier.
Suffice to say, apparently she searched her name and saw a ton of vitriolic attacks and discussions around her online presence. She claims that the worst part is the "overwhelming hate with nobody defending me. People are ashamed publicly to support me, they don't want to be called a simp or cringe."
Long story short she basically said that she is heartbroken, is "so sad the world is shaped this way," and decided to quit twitter and go locked for the foreseeable future.
For some quick background, aella is a prostitute. She is extremely successful, and has built up a huge presence on twitter as well as a cult following in rational spheres. She does data science work as well, and claims to be autistic. She is polyamorous and openly promotes and campaigns for that lifestyle, as well as doing drugs. Some of her stunts include things like tattooing her name on the body of men who have sex with her, having orgies while sharing details of who got to get in, etc.
A few darker claims are that she pushed her two younger sisters into sex work (one of them, by her own admission on twitter, was doing camgirl jobs before she turned 18.) She has also said some... problematic things that are edging around support for pedophilia, although she's canny enough not to come right out and say it.
Now as I'm sure many people here agree with, I don't exactly agree with aella's views or lifestyle. That being said I am still torn, the world is a cruel place. At the same time, aella has probably caused harm to a lot of others with her lifestyle and especially her approach to promoting it online.
This equivocation points to an actual underlying tension/confusion I have around liberal expression. On the one hang I think polyamory, sex work, and some of the.... encouragement aella has around minors watching point &c is quite bad, and should not be allowed to happen in the public square. I think a certain amount of shaming is absolutely good and necessary.
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society? Can we somehow shame people without turning into monsters ourselves, in order to protect our children and especially young girls from (imo) degenerate and overall unhealthy lifestyles?
The Motte is in fact the first rat-adjacent space in which I have noticed how much seething hatred she seems to inspire in certain quarters. It seems... hard to determine why it's so extreme, but at the same time totally unsurprising that it is there? After all, she has consciously and openly built her social status by entering a community of nerds starved for female attention and selectively dangling hers before them, making a show of being simultaneously promiscuous and picky to come across as the stereotypical "slut who will sleep with everyone but you" to almost everyone simultaneously, with echoes of the circle crusher trope as well. On top of that, her audience includes a large number on the alt-right~trad larper spectrum (see this very forum), whose role compels them to reach for the KJV vocabulary when facing people in her line of work, as well as redpillers who seem to take particular offense at the "rational camgirling" of her oeuvre that is essentially gender-flipped redpill advice (under the men extract sex = women extract resources homomorphism), and few people enjoy having the UNO reverse card pulled on them.
For the record, though, I've actually always enjoyed her posts, and would be sad if there are no more. I always kind of assumed she knew what she was doing and was just okay with the rock-bottom agreeableness lifestyle, so did anything actually change (The ranks of the white knight guard thinned too much? The haters became more numerous or determined than before?) or should I read this as her having somehow managed to remain in denial about the reaction until now?
The endless "Though experiment: what if a scenario where pedo stuff is not actually harmful, or is at least the least harmful option?" assuredly plays a large part.
I don't think I noticed that, somehow. What sort of "pedo stuff" are we talking about, on the spectrum from toddler rape to the American "that bikini pic? She was 17 years and 364 days old, you monster"?
Possibly relevant link: AI Child Porn Will Probably Save Real Children
This is your brain on utilitarianism.
Sometimes it just doesn't matter what the cost/benefit tradeoff is, it's still wrong.
This is your brain on deontology. Sometimes it is better if fewer people suffer with less intensity.
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