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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31887 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I wrote about the likelihood of the Move To Mastodon resulting in a purity spiral of banning-everyone-who-won't-ban-the-target-of-the-week, and it seems to have already started. There's a reasonable summary from Reason here: Mastodon's Content-Moderation Growing Pains

The TL;DR is that Mike Pesca defended an article about puberty blockers by that notorious right wing rag, the New York Times, on a cool-kids-invite-only journalist mastodon server. This is an unforgivable sin in the mastodon universe, and earned calls to purge him as an "anti-trans ghoul" by other journalists.

Reason glosses over the most interesting part to me, which is the massive pressure imposed on on the journal.host moderators to ban Pesca but not Molloy under threat of their entire instance being purged from the mastodon universe (which was done anyway even after they surrendered). Some of that can be seen here. "A line has been crossed and if there aren't consequences it will be a wedge the TERFs use to gain entry into the broader platform." etc. etc. Money quote from one of their own journalist admins: “Banning someone for posting a link to an NYT article sets a precedent that we really need to work through.”

Another incident just happened to Raspberry Pi:

Raspberry Pi posted on Dec 8, at about 10pm NZT, about a new hire, Toby, who was previously a police officer who had specialised in building outdoor surveilliance equipment using Raspberry Pis...

Seeing this behaviour from a well-loved brand like Raspberry Pi was taken as a betrayal of the predominately leftist attitude of many instances. Due to the very different power dynamics of the Fediverse, it took less than two hours from the initial post and initial harmful replies before the official Raspberry Pi instance started being defederated

Now that Raspberry Pi has hit the #fediblock, recovery becomes considerable more difficult. Not only does Raspberry Pi need to withdraw their statements and issue unequivocal apologies, they must also apologise directly to the admins who defederated them, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to change.

On the Fediverse there is no singular entity such as Twitter, Inc. that financially benefits from the presence of a brand, or benefits from the extra engagement and associated ad sales tha controversy will generate.

Brands seeking to join the Fediverse will need to invest not just in a social media manager, but compentent and long-time administration for the instance that is aware of the political dynamics of the Fediverse, in order to ensure that they are able to stay on the fediverse. (holy shit they reinvented political officers pretty quick, although given that they're all communists is it really "reinventing"?)

(Another instance, Mastodon.scot, appears to have been mass-defederated because they allowed a police officer to join. Or maybe they all insisted on typing in scottish accents and everyone thought it was gibberish, who knows)

I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter and reddit act as central authorities to prevent, abet, or moderate and sustain purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid the infighting seen above so they can focus on torturing a common victim, while keeping the moderate wing sufficiently in fear of the radicals to make them obedient. Nate Silver is now mocking the "hall monitors" moving to Mastodon, showing a lot more brave defiance than when they were on the same platform holding the threat of a direct line to twitter's backchannel over his head.

I'm starting to wonder how much the great awokening of 2020 depended on central authorities endorsing (or simply failing to punish) radicals, sending normies like Nate the message that the Overton window is shifting and he'd better go along with it. Struggle sessions occurred in women's groups and fringe fandoms long before that, but even in those cases the knives never came out until trusted authorities gave the signal that the radicals would not be stopped, and that anyone who tried to defend themselves would face consequences. (Anyone who remembers "racefail" in science fiction would be in a good position to either support or rebut this, because it seems like the Ur woke purity spiral incident that I wasn't there to see).

In exchange for obedience and conversion, normies got some degree of protection as long as they weren't ever the last first to stop clapping at the latest public executions. And the radicals had administrative power they were too unstable to use taken away from them in exchange for being given the right to do anything they wanted to their victims with the authority's blessing. The administrators got a helpful volunteer stasi who would literally do it for free (particularly the entire reddit powermod ecosystem that emerged out of the SRS policing/mass reporting clique).

Musk buying twitter and all the various bits and pieces of private conversations we see echoed in the dissident press makes me think they're thinking along similar lines; that a strong central authority can also choose to check radical purity spirals and direct them into a cycle of self-destructive internal purges in much the same way that the Governor of Massachusetts ended the Salem witch trials.

It's encouraging to think that there may be a way to stop normies from sleepwalking into increasingly radical leftism, treating it as the new normal with no memory or recognition of their previous beliefs. Maybe all it takes is a central authority that aligns people's interests in a non-destructive way and refuses to grant cover to perpetrators.

I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter act as central authorities to prevent or abet purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid infighting as they torture a common victim, while keeping the moderate wing sufficiently in fear of the radicals to make them obedient.

That's a very interesting theory.

Back when I was but a wee lad, I read some amount of Forgotten Realms books. There was this one following the adventures of some Drow priestess, which delved into the details of how their society was run. It was a long time ago, and I don't remember that much, but the TL;DR is that there was a lot of rat-racing, ladder-climbing, and backstabbing, all to get the favor of their goddess so she would grant you superpowers and status.

At the time I found it a bit ridiculous, how could a society like that be stable enough to create a marvelous city-state like the one being described? I remembered that a few months ago when someone or another was getting cancelled, and thought "huh, actually maybe a society of backstabbers is more stable than I thought", but I think you zeroed in on exactly what makes it stable. If it's a backstabber free-for-all, it's probably just a question of time before it collapses, but if there's, say, an evil spider-goddess of chaos, who's favor you can fall into and out of, the system might be more stable than you'd expect at first glance.

Funny how a silly fantasy book for teens ends up having so much insight.

We probably read the same book and if I remember it correctly, the goddess never showed up. If you didn't know it took place in a world which had real deities, it could have just as well have been a society where people can use magic but the goddess herself was completely invented.

Assuming this is the Liriel Baenrae trilogy, I think I only read the first one, and she was a wizard, not a priestess. But in the rest of the dozens of realms books about drow priestesses, mostly by Salvatore, Llolth is fairly active in the form of empowering/depowering priestesses she favors/disfavors. As one element, they all have multi-snake-headed whips, where the number of heads indicates favor.

The thing about most D&D settings is that actual priests run around, casting spells that can’t be replicated by sufficiently advanced magic. This includes Commune.

But yeah, if no one ever mentions that over the book, the rest is compatible.

You are allowed one such question per caster level.

WHAT IS THIS MORTAL, A GAME OF 20 QUESTIONS?!

Max level power gamer: "yes"

Like I said it was ages ago, so I might be misremembering or mixing up a bunch of things. But isn't the whole idea that priests' powers in FR come directly from their gods, so if you lose their favor you're not going to be casting any spells?

Yeah. Priests don't have inherent magic powers in Forgotten Realms. They are channeling the divine powers of their patron. If they get cut off by their god then they lose all their magic.

I always think about that regarding the Ferengi in Star Trek too. They're supposed to have stolen all their tech, but still, how could a civilization who glorifies treachery ever create and maintain a space program at all? Or even a power plant? Two brothers can't even cooperate long enough to hold a poker game.

there is nothing that prevents lawful evil and neutral evil societies from flourishing. it's the chaotic evil or lawful good alignment that leads to circular firing squads.

Why does lawful good lead to firing squads?

I would not define a Good society as a competition in being virtuous. Pretty much by definition.

Righteousness and ideological rigidity. It's much easier to do atrocities when you believe you are the good guys.

It's been done to death because it's so damn applicable to so many scenarios. Truly one of my favorite quotes, from anyone about anything.

Also, cupidity is a great word.

Why you think that lawful evil would not result in this? We have plenty of examples of exactly this problem happening.

Lawful evil is pragmatic

Why you think so?

German Third Reich was very lawful evil. Technically they ended with vertical firing squad rather than circular firing squads, but problems in the end were very similar.

(maybe there could be treated as pragmatic with "Jews are evil" axiom, still society they created was far from flourishing due to their own actions)

And yet in that very time USA were also lawfully evil and they built the greatest superpower the world has ever seen in the aftermath.

If you insist on dumb binary ethical categorizations (which are dump) then USA at that time was closer to lawfully good than lawfully evil.

(not claiming that it was ideal but on evil to not evil range populated by governments in human history it was quite far on "not evil" side)

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Pragmatism can be applied to different goals. For example, it would be quite pragmatic to backstab all your rivals and send the region into a downward spiral if you decided that what you want is to rule the ashes in a perfectly orderly manner.

But would it be lawful? Generally no.

It would be lawful if it's my rules.

You're confusing lawful neutral with lawful evil, I believe.

I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter act as central authorities to prevent purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid infighting as they attack a common enemy.

Maybe, but it seems to me like this is an entirely predictable result. The people moving to Mastodon are (anecdotally, based on my observation) mostly the people who were most zealous in their political opinions. Which is to say, they are the ones who were by far the most likely to start purity spiraling and attacking people they don't like. Essentially, Mastodon got an influx in some of the most censorious Twitter users, so of course they're going to be censorious when they get to their new platform.

Maybe, but it seems to me like this is an entirely predictable result.

If you've been online for a while you've probably seen this story before.

I remember the split of Atheism+ - basically atheism + an even more strident version of the progressive politics that most liberal atheists already shared - from the general New Atheist/Skeptic camps after Elevatorgate and how its forums spiraled so fast into policing every single element of speech and turning into a circular firing squad.

If anything the more shocking thing is how this mindset - which was mocked as fringe at the time- slowly became so pervasive on the Left, even amongst the alleged grownup orgs and people.

But the key is that their censoriousness worked on twitter despite them having less direct power, which is why people like Silver didn't criticize them until they were safely gone. Something about twitter (and reddit) allowed radicals to organize to hurt people without spiraling into self-destructive turbo-insanity the way they are on mastodon.

Silver started picking fights with his followers last year already, at least over the Covid issue, where he became a supporter of ending the restrictions quite a bit before it was a liberal consensus in the United States.

I didn't know that, thanks. That must have legitimately taken a lot of courage, and explains why he has so many dedicated mastodon-and-mask-in-bio reply trolls to every tweet he makes now. That struck me as an odd hatebase for him to have picked up.

The presence of various outgroups and a mechanism to punish them provided them with a lightning rod for their free-floating anger and an incentive to band together. Now that they are among themselves, they have to turn on each other if they want a good fight.

The average attendee at an anarchist radical book reading club, assuming it really is a club that meets up live, may not even represent the most wacky section of anarchist radicalism, since at least they're still out and about, meeting other people and exposing themselves to potentially problematic opinions in such a space. In my experience, biggest hyperradicalism usually comes from shut-ins who essentially live their entire lives online and have a major effect on online discourses that way.

The general power of extremely online shut-ins who do nothing but post and engage in online dramas all day to affect social discourses - not just in woke way, but also in, for instance, the views of the extremely online far right seeping to related spaces - is generally an understudied topic. It may be that one of the most effective ways to give an ordinary nobody power is to bully them hard enough to ensure they won't ever go anywhere where they may meet anybody and will only process their resentment via social media.

That's... precisely backwards. They would never get anywhere near power, where it not for active protection from Ezra Klein types telling everyone it's just a couple of crazy kids on tumblr/college campuses.

Welllll, one of my arguments is that liberals have often managed and used these types, or redirected their rage towards powerless victims.

I can't remember who said in 2020 ( probably David Hines) that liberals consider their children joining a leftist gang to loot and burn a helot neighborhood a charming traditional rite of passage--something to enjoy and get out of their system before they grow up and become university administrators, just like they did in the 60s. They do prevent the radicals from taking power, but only out of paternal instinct and self-interest.

Raspberry Pi posted on Dec 8, at about 10pm NZT, about a new hire, Toby, who was previously a police officer who had specialised in building outdoor surveilliance equipment using Raspberry Pis...

Seeing this behaviour from a well-loved brand like Raspberry Pi was taken as a betrayal of the predominately leftist attitude of many instances.

Ended up looking at this drama to see if there was a coherent reason for the outrage and mass defederation, and this is what I find:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/meet-raspberry-pis-maker-in-residence-toby-roberts/

“I used to be a police officer tackling serious organised crime and terror threats across the east of the UK,” Toby tells us. “I was a Technical Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide video, audio, and other covert gear. You really don’t want your sensitive police equipment discovered, so I’d disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item. The variety of tools and equipment I used then really shaped what I do today.”

I'm not the biggest proponent of a "surveillance state" myself, but unless someone is a complete hardliner on the issue I think there can be some justification to the use of these things if the threat warrants it. Counter-terrorism efforts for example can and do make legitimate use of surveillance technology, and there's no real reason to suspect sinister intent or malpractice here. Really it seems clear to me, reading the comments, that most of the distrust and controversy has to do with him being a cop, and because Mastodon seems to be primarily leftist there's a very strong (and IMO ridiculous) "ACAB" sentiment.

I could agree that Raspberry Pi handled the whole drama badly. That being said, it's hard to criticise them much for it when I find the initial fundament for criticism to be so weak in the first place.

I'm definitely chuckling at the idea of this guy building open source spy gadgets to catch terrorists in some East Anglia police station when he should have been handling a important missing sheep case.

(Or maybe the region's changed since I was a kid and it's a hotbed of murderous extremists now. I always knew that kebab shop was bad news)

I admit this is all very entertaining to watch. The journalists/whatever that made pyrrhic hay about being principled platform refugees were on Twitter in the first place entirely because that's where the eyeballs are. Twitter's entire competitive draw is its massive engagement potential. I can't imagine that the Mastodon migration is all that sustainable if all you're going to end up with are balkanized circle-jerk sessions. Similar to the selection problems that befell Gab, Parler, Voat, etc. it doesn't seem like you can build a successful platform unless it is predicated on being broadly accessible to everyone.

Ooh, I’m glad you made this writeup. There’s quite a dose of schadenfreude in seeing a different group faced with seven zillion witches.

If I understand the structure of Mastodon—I’m envisioning a certain Bugs Bunny clip—then this is not working as intended. It’s unhinged and hilarious, yet not terribly surprising.

What’s most interesting is the determination of activists to import Twitter culture. Their course of action is supposed to be defederation. The offender only loses access to instances which can’t tolerate something, not to his home turf. This obviously runs counter to the sense of “justice served” inherent to cancellation.

I think the stable equilibrium, here, is aggressively unresponsive instances focused on easily-legislated moderation. Journal.based accepts all links to mainstream publications, doesn’t moderate for content, and doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Then journal.host can filter on top of that or just flounce and federate with someone who will.

It’s not clear that Mastodon will actually converge on such a solution. If the userbase is homogenous, perhaps because of selection pressures on those who leave Twitter, there may never be demand for apolitical instances. Is there any point in moderating an instance that’s not meant for end-users? Do hosts see some benefit from additional layers of federation? Wait, how’s Urbit doing lately?

There’s another stable state where the platform collapses. A sufficiently fragmented fediverse offers all the risk of social media with little of the benefits. This will happen if activists consistently implode any server large enough for a brand to put in effort.

Which brings us to Raspberry pi, facing the more traditional problem of amateur PR. It’s amplified, not created, by the shiny new format. I think the appropriate response is to find new, more general instances (after booting the current PR guy!) rather than beg back into one of the Soviet republics. If no such instance exists, though, what reason does the company have to hang around in the fediverse?

Maybe all it takes is a central authority that aligns people's interests in a non-destructive way and refuses to grant cover to perpetrators.

There’s a certain irony in saying this about mobs, well, petitioning their sovereigns to align interests and uncover perpetrators. You can even see their attempts to claim “non-destructive” goals of making the world safe for democracy LGBT. Everyone likes to claim the moral high ground.

Brands don't need to be on Mastodon. And the majority of people that "moved" to Mastodon still post on Twitter. The whole thing will cost Raspberry Pi sales of exactly 0.

Recently read a Guardian article (leftwing British newspaper) about the problems with Mastodon: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/08/masochism-drove-me-to-mastodon-at-first-i-felt-high-but-the-comedown-was-brutal.

It's generally a pretty good litmus for a certain kind of liberal opinion. (The more metropolitan varieties.) In fact, the Guardian was where I first heard about Mastodon.

Since Guardian readers are exactly the demographic to have the most problems with Twitter, this is pretty telling. I think they'll move back to Twitter, assuming Musk doesn't drop the ball too badly.

I've occasionally wondered if American speech issues appear so hypercharged compared to local ones precisely because in European countries there are formal legal authorities ready to make yes-or-no decisions on free speech issues. Ie. I may not like that something like this ever became a court issue, but it also meant that a lot of activists were content to see how this process would play out in the courts (with their processing times, checks and balances etc.) instead of deciding that their only recourse would be stoking up social media / regular media fires and utilize public pressure that way.

Yes, if one has already the capability to use courts to harm the other, weaponization of common carriers isn't required.

And one side has this capability in Europe. True statements about people dead for over a millenium are deemed illegal.

In exchange for obedience and conversion, normies got some degree of protection as long as they weren't ever the last to stop clapping at the latest public executions.

Did you intend to write first to stop clapping, not last? For the purity spiralers, isn't it a good thing to keep clapping all the way through even after everyone else has stopped clapping, to show that you're that enthusiastic and dedicated to the cause? Or is this like a "doth protest too much" thing where you don't want to be in that extreme either, since that might mean you're trying to cover for your hidden internal lower enthusiasm?

Derp, thanks for the catch. The sentence was too much for my 90 IQ brain.

Wait a second, I thought the selling point of the whole fediverse thing was that it was all decentralised, no one entity in charge, anyone can start up their own instance, etc.

So it turns out that there is a Thought Police patrolling after all?

Many new users have flocked to a couple large flagship servers running Mastodon because having content curated for them by ideologically similar moderators is more important to them than principles of decentralization or being burdened with having to choose what content they wish to see. The rest of the fediverse is completely unaffected by all this since they've been defederated by mastodon.social long ago in the gamer wars of 2014.

Since the beginning Mastodon is all about censorship. That the tools they are using are really difficult to use for that is just them playing on hard mode. Fortunately for them, they've got enough power to do the censorship anyway. For instance, to ban Gab's instance they had to hardcode the ban into the client. They then got Apple and Google app stores to ban any client which didn't have this ban hardcoded.

Since the beginning Mastodon is all about censorship. That the tools they are using are really difficult to use for that is just them playing on hard mode.

I'm aware that the creators are hardcore leftists, but I'm curious about this claim that it was always about censorship. If they were consciously thinking about this as you imply, why make something federated in the first place?

Iirc the system was stolen by that one German guy from a gnu actually-free-speech project. So they're in a "squatting in master's house while trying to tear it down with his tools" situation.

On part of the promise surely works: You can still run your own instance and federate with those instances that want federate with you and build your own social net. However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that decentralization is not sufficient for freedom. Imagine a school cafeteria where you have freedom of association -- but the ruling clique can also say that loser nerds are not welcome to sit in their table.

However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.

This is starting to sound to me like folks that try to run their own mail servers. In theory, it's a federated protocol. In practice, newcomers and small fish are very difficult to operate because automated spam filtering pretty universally rejects them, and a mail server blocked by Gmail or Microsoft isn't terribly useful.

There have been some proposed ways to improve email federation, but the big players have a lot of inertia and no real reason to change anything.

It's interesting because spam filtering isn't particularly politicized to my knowledge, but the outcomes are similar.

However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.

And we've seen this play out since the dawn of the Internet. The vast majority of online spaces were rich in cliques, flamewars, relentless trolling, and corrupt moderation that never shied from using the banhammer for personal gain. It's why such a high number of online communities follow a predictable path of eventually becoming echo chambers and later imploding. Perhaps it would even be fair to say that the vast majority of people who take on the mission of establishing and running a community have little or no knowledge of basic coordination mechanisms, some dating as far back as ancient Greece.

Themotte and some rat-adjacent spaces are the only ones I know that have avoided imploding while maintaining the ability to generate novel, interesting discussion. I can see no other reason than the fact that these places have not only enshrined rules that encourage civilized argument, what Karl Popper labeled "the rational unity of mankind", but also ensured that moderation is done in the spirit of those rules.

As evidenced by the broader culture war, the majority of people are fine with tribal warfare, whether it's online or offline.

Also mastodon-related: hosting your own social media site comes with a host of legal risks. from twitter thread

If satori and the gab guys are brave enough to do it, these dudes have no excuse when all their content is hyper regime-aligned lol

The issue isn't 'regime alignment', it's "what if someone spams CP or copyrighted content or other illegal content on your instance, and what if you didn't make the proper legal incantations to shield yourself from liability"? Gab has lawyers and money to pay lawyers with, joe baker, host of loafstodon.net, has not (as the article shows, very few mastodon instances have).

The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released. [previous discussion here]

For a summary of the background: Loudoun County School District had a possibly-gender-something student sexually assault a much-younger female student who the assailant had a previous relationship with at Stone Bridge High School (SBHS) on May 28th, 2021. While eventually arrested, state law limits pre-trial detention to 21-days for this class of juvenile, and the assailant was transfered to Broad Run High School (BRHS) for the next school year. The father of this first victim was expelled from the school on the day of the assault, and later arrested by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) during a school board (LCSB) meeting where he confronted or was confronted by someone (not a part of the school board?). On October 6th, the assailant further abducted and sexually assaulted another female student at BRHS.

Get used to the acronyms; the report uses them everywhere.

The report is... a read. With apologies for transcription errors:

Later that evening, a school board member asked the superintendent "do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms, regularly? I would hope not but I'd like clarification." The superintendent responded, "to my knowledge we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms." The SBHS principle, who attended the Teams meeting with the superintendent the afternoon the SBHS sexual assault took place, testified the superintendent's statement "is not true." Another witness testified the superintendent's statement was a "bald-faced lie." We agree.

There's two separate failures, here, that I think are worth discussion and highlighting. One is the more overt culture war, and the grand jury report does make very clear that the culture war drove a lot of bad practice. It's a little hard to tell since the report uses roles rather than names for everything, but it seems like even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either, as an half-hour before the email previously made available, it turns out that:

At 3:30PM the chief operating officer emailed the superintendent, the now-deputy superintendent, chief of staff, directory of communications, and assistant superintendent, [stating in part]:

The incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040.

With extreme charity, perhaps this refers to the father’s near arrest, and not the rape itself, but that doesn’t absolve much.

At the same time, there's another disturbing component that I think a lot of 'mainstream' conservative critiques are likely to overlook:

The special education teaching assistant later said she saw two pairs of feet under the stall, but she did nothing about it. She testified this was not an uncommon occurrence, because "somebody could have their period. They might need a tampon. Or somebody had a boyfriend they had a fight with." The assailant later acknowledge that "They usually don't do anything" regarding two pairs of feet in a stall. After the teaching assistant left, the assailant again forced penetration against the female student...

That is, a teaching assistant -- in Virginia, a mandatory reporter -- walked past a bathroom stall where a violent rape was in-progress and, once the teaching assistant left, continued. Further, that this was not an unusual mistake, but enough of a practice that it was recognized by the offender. It's quite possible that Superintendent Ziegler was making a bald-faced lie not in the sense that this particular sexual assault occurred in a bathroom, but that there is little effort or interest in preventing dubiously consensual sexual behavior in bathrooms between students at all.

And this continued more broadly. On the day of the assault, the report details how the school was more intent on expelling an angry father and seeking a no-trespass order against him (e-mail at 3:09), even suggesting that the father "should have been arrested", than tracking down the at-large rapist (who was only grabbed at the end of the school day). Even once arrested, the local police showed little interest in bringing the case.

And even once that was done, there was a complex game of blame- and paperwork-passing that seemed optimized to lose track of things, and not just for this specific case.

However, juvenile intake did not call the superintendent's office, email the superintendent's office, or send a copy of the notification through the mail. Instead, the process in place at the time was to send it via inter-office envelope that was picked up at the courthouse. Further, the envelope was addressed to "David Spage," who is an LCPS employee but has not worked in the superintendent's office since 2014...

During the calendar year 2021, there were 39 school notifications sent [in this method], but it is unknown how many of those the superintendent's office ever saw.

((SBHS seemed to think the student had transferred to SBHS from another high school, THS, over similar allegations. The grand jury report says that this probably is confused and didn't happen? Which is another level of wtf, maybe.))

This continued even as other warning signs kept scaling up.

In the ensuing weeks after the assailant was released from custody, the court services unit learned information from the assailant's family that cause them to "keep a tight eye on this kid."

This included, separately, the assailant's grandmother and mother both requesting additional assistance from schools and the probation officer, with the grandmother calling the assailant a "sociopath."

In early September, the assailant had separate incidents at the new school, first following female students around school long enough to result in an art class shuffling the assailant's seating around, and then a more serious incident in an English classroom where the assailant tried to take a female student's Chromebook, and asked the female student about online nudes (and another boy if the boy's grandmother had online nudes?). This was escalated, yet:

The most senior individuals in LCPS knew about this incident, and knew is was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. Multiple people in the LCSO were aware of this incident around the time it occurred and kenw it was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. The deputy commonwealth's attorney prosecuting the May 28, 2021 case knew of the incident, and the probation officer, who had been communicating with the student and his family nearly daily for over a month, knew of the incident.

Not a single person with knowledge of the student's history or of this current action stepped in to do anything. Instead, discipline was left to the BRHS principal, who did nothing more than issue him a verbal reprimand.

On October 6th, this escalated to a second sexual assault, this time with the assailant abducting a female student without a fig leaf of a pre-existing relationship.

In "late October", the school commissioned an independent review of the incidents at hand. However:

Many board members were surprised to learn the report was subject to the attorney-client privilege.... Several board members testified they were given only half an hour to read the independent review and ask questions about it. Despite having asked for the review in the first place, they were handed out numbered copies of it and required to return it upon leaving the room. On January 14, 2022, LCSB [County School Board] issued a public statement stating the report would not be released, listing the attorney-client privilege as the third, and least-important, reason for keeping it private. The statement [link] also noted several changes and updates to LCPS [County Public Schools] policies and procedures.

It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :

The director of school administration disagreed with this assessment [that they could not proceed until police completed their investigation] and had conversations with the chief of staff about it in July and August 2021. The director, even those his office was not supposed to be doing Title IX, also created a Google document of possible Title IX violations reported from schools because he was "worried at the time that we were not reporting some things that could become Title IX."...

On September 17th, 2021, the director of school administration testified he emailed the superintendent, chief of staff, deputy superintendent, and chief of schools, about the situation. He testified the email laid out his extensive training, experts he had met with, and the fact the SBHS assault should have "immediately" and "automatically" triggered an investigation. It is unknown how the superintendent or these officials responded - LCPS refused to provide us this email -- but it was not until a month later, and after the BRHS sexual assault, that a Title IX investigation into the SBHS sexual assault was opend. The individual who ultimately conducted that investigation testified it was the first Title IX investigation she had ever done.

And, once the grand jury investigation had begun, the legal office's emphasis on obfuscation was not limited to its 'independent' review:

On April 22, the same attorney filed another motion to quash testimonial subpoenas on behalf of three teachers at SBHS using, again, the same arguments. The court again rejected these arguments.

In this instance, however, one of the teachers was explicitly not represented by the attorney, even though he claimed to the court in a filing that he did represent her and was advocating on her behalf. The teacher said she felt pressured by the attorney into representing her, that the attorney told her not to provide the special grand jury with anything, and that the attorney tried to "shut [her] up" because "this won't look well for the schools."...

On the date of their testimony, the two school board members did not show up. The court gave them two hours to arrive at the courthouse otherwise the court would issue a capias warrant for their arrest. The board members subsequently arrived at the courthouse in a timely manner. One of the board members testified "it was based on my counsel's advice not to show up. Otherwise, I would have been here."...

Division counsel's mere silent presence in a crowded room was enough for LCSB's lawyer to claim the attorney-client privilege and instruct the witnesses not to answer the question... LCSB's counsel also inappropriately used hand signals and other methods to communicate with witnesses while they were testifying...

We received the May 28, 2021 email from the LCPS chief operating officer regarding policy 8040 and the SBHS incident in early September, even though it should have been produced months earlier in response to the April 7 subpoena to the superintendent. Instead, this email was produced pursuant to a document subpoena to a different LCPS administrator, who had their own lawyer, and not the preferred lawyer of LCPS division counsel...

Several school board members then testified to the exact same story: the chief operating officer said the incident at SBHS had to do with policy 8040 because the father of the victim who showed up at the school that day was shouting about policy 8040.

There is absolutely no evidence the father said anything about policy 8040 that day, or that he even knew what policy 8040 was on that day. No school board member could provide any evidence that what they claimed happened had in fact happened -- even though they all parroted the same story. Interestingly, multiple school board members also corrected special counsel to the special grand jury when asked about the individual wearing a skirt in the female bathroom that day; these board members were quick to claim he was instead wearing a kilt.

It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).

Unfortunately, the Grand Jury report falters when it comes to a conclusion. Despite everything above:

Unlike federal law, no Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover htis fact pattern. For those reasons, we were unable to consider an indictment against the LCPS division counsel.

It gives, in the place of criminal charges, a list of administrative recommendations. Some range from the obvious to the tautological :

The LCPS directory of safety and security needs to be more involved in situations that threaten the safety and security of students, faculty, and staff.

While others are, bluntly, so broad and vague as to be unactionable:

Strengthen avenues of support and advocacy for faculty and staff confronted with challenging scenarios that could pose a danger and/or impede learning.

To the nearly unrelated:

The superintendent's recommendation for the non-renewal of a teacher's contract should be the subject of a separate agenda item and not placed on the LCSB consent agenda.

((Presumably a teacher mentioned fearing termination for testifying? Maybe?))

It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.

It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.

Sorry to take it in this direction, but I am still fairly convinced this was the motivation and rationale behind the majority of covid policy. It was the reason for the initial reaction, the subsequent overreaction, for mask mandates, for lockdowns, for rushed testing and for vaccine mandates. Saving lives was at best secondary to covering asses. Society is run by middle aged adolescents, their greatest concern is the same as any teenager - if they admit they fucked up they might get in trouble.

The consequences for a person running society to be known to have fucked up is generally much worse than getting grounded for a week.

That's certainly true, but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes. To understand that running society comes with a lot of prestige and respect and power, but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society. Or to put it another way, if you wouldn't prefer your downfall to society's you shouldn't be running society.

But I call them middle aged adolescents because the impression I get from speaking to them and seeing/reading them in interviews is that none of that even enters their thought processes. It doesn't have time to because like an irresponsible teen the calculus terminates at 'but what if I get in trouble!?' regardless of whether the consequences are some light mocking from strangers or an international incident. I used to think this was only something kids raised by narcissists did. I still sometimes think that.

Has any society ever been good at selecting for leaders who will fall on their sword if need be?

Japan, literally.

but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes.

That seems like the opposite of reality.

but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society.

This kind of thing (more severe consequences of mistakes) incentivizes ass covering. If you want to incentivize 'admitting mistakes', then again, you'd need to do the opposite.

I don't want to incentivise anything. I am simply stating a fact - if you are running society, fucking up has more severe consequences than if you aren't running society. And separately, regardless of how much you personally suffer from the consequences of your mistakes, they will pale in comparison to the suffering of the society you fucked up.

While I do agree there are people out there who get scared by harsh consequences but are too power hungry/narcissistic to take that as a sign they shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of society, they are the aforementioned middle aged adolescents.

I'm not totally sure what the difference is, but I have some ideas. Aside from narcissist parents, it could also be to do with the level of comfort - as the saying goes, hard times breed hard people and soft times breed soft people. Which is why, if you want to see leaders of the calibre I mentioned, you look at times of war and hardship - times where fucking up might result in being conquered or getting everyone you know killed. Or for modern examples you look in places where violence is still just a part of life - gangs, cartels, crime families.

If you are thinking 'the king who fell on his sword for his country is rarer than Tyr the vanquishing warlord' you are right, but kings are supposed to be outside of the chain of responsibility - and they often led rather comfy lives. Generals though, and other military officers, did it so often they have memes about it. Falling on their sword for example, which dates back to the classical era but is most often associated these days with Bushido culture. And dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori - which prior to world war 1 was used entirely unironically.

I guess I have to get back to my main point, although I have no idea what to say, it's all so bizarre. The consequences of an action are what they are. A pr campaign isn't going to change them even if it changes the perception of them. And what do you think will happen when people find out that you... massaged the presentation of the consequences? We don't have to wonder, that exact deceitful strategy was employed repeatedly during covid. And all it did was destroy trust and lead to a situation where nobody knew what the consequences were, couldn't ask anyone and succumbed to fear. Beside that, if you are in a position to shape the presentation of consequences to the leaders of society, they aren't the leaders of society - you are.

It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.

Black pill- the people studying this do not see it as a problem. The goal is to legally comply with the text and preserve any bureaucracy from accountability. It is not to protect either the institution or the students- schools don’t care about large financial liabilities, they’ll just raise taxes to cover it, and no one in this bureaucracy is at any point incentivized to care about the kids.

In the sense that the school administration and board didn't see it as a problem in that way, yes, and indeed the grand jury report spells it out, if perhaps in circumspect terms:

... throughout this investigation we have learned LCPS as an organization tends to avoid managing difficult situations by not addressing them fully.

In the sense that the grand jury recommendations are couched in terms of policies that would preserve the school bureaucracy from accountability, kinda. There's actually a pretty serious indictment of the school system's near-complete abdication of responsibility -- literally, that LCPS "bears the brunt of the blame" -- as well as individual actors. And yet, those bad actors are named only by role, not by name; the efforts toward encouraging the bureaucracy to be better couched entirely within the assumption that the school administration would remain consumed by and for administrators above students. Nor could the administration be above individual people; quite a lot of the obfuscation from the LCPS legal counsel seems focused on covering the individual reputations of bad actors even at the expense of the school's reputation.

We don't know the members of the grand jury, but they were appointed by a local Republican for whatever that matters. And yet they don't seem to be willing to burn down the administration or to encourage putting safety above Goodharting, even as they say the only reason they did not deliver an indictment was a lack of sufficiently close statute. If they too are captured, there's a fun question first of how, but also of what capture means when it can be so broad as to include them.

To be honest, there’s lots and lots of republicans that do boring work like this(and yes, no matter how juicy the situation originating the investigation, this is a lot of boring work) who are extremely literal-textualist in outlook and so will do things like not recommend charges for gross negligence because there isn’t a sufficiently close statute.

It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).

Is this at all surprising? Totally unrelated to any trans issues--I would not be surprised at this behavior for any scandal at a public school, or indeed any institution. This is perhaps a slightly extreme example, but really only because the initial crime is so bad. (I'd like to think it might be less bad at a non-public school, but that's probably just my bias showing.)

It does seem like the only consequences of this will be empowering awful Title IX regulations and the hiring of another dozen administrators to impose them. Talk about victory even in defeat.

It's by design. They control the entire pipeline from front to back. They set the bar for what credentials are required. They hand out those credentials. They control what gets taught to acquire those credentials. They interview the candidates for the positions. There are no counterfactuals where dissidents are allowed anywhere near attempting to mitigate the problem.

So how to break that ? Change legislation ?

There is no breaking it. You need parallel institutions from the ground up. Parallel school, parallel training, parallel gatekeeping, which is the most important part. You can't just start a new school, and connect it to the pipeline of ideological enemies being churned out of the institutions you fled from. You need to actively keep them the fuck out.

Unfortunately, keeping them out is likely to be "discriminatory", so you are just fucked. If you even try you'll get sued into oblivion. We simply are not permitted to have institutions which serve our needs.

But you can't use legislative change to starve these institutions so they wither?

We tried. Youngkin specifically rolled back a lot of these policies. People are no longer allowed to use whatever bathroom they please and schools are no longer allowed to secretly transition people's children. This is something he is allowed to do with executive power.

The schools just said "We don't care, we do what we want." It's probably going to be tied up in court until they can get a (D) in the office who will make it all go away. Northern VA is chocked full of branch covidians who still drive alone in their cars wearing masks, and believe Republican's are literally murdering people, on purpose, with their pro family, pro liberty policies. Recently my district was gerrymandered to take a 95% Republican county, and attach just enough of Fairfax County to it so that it will reliably seat a far left Democrat. I've been effectively completely denied representation. There is zero overlap between the interest of the county I live in, and the county that got to choose my representative. I'm fucked.

Northern VA is chocked full of branch covidians

You know better. If you don't want people calling you a Rethuglican or a Magtard, you don't get to do this.

If the shoe fits...

Listen, if I were advocating for Republicans to rise up violently, Rethuglican wouldn't be a bad fit. If I were advocating that Trump was still a genius, and this was all part of his 43d chess, Magtard wouldn't be a bad fit. And if you commute 90 minutes to work, alone, in your car, with a mask on, branch covidian fits.

Am I on some fucking short list of people you feel compelled fucking annoy whenever they use slightly creative language? Do you know what the no-no words are ahead of time, or do you just see myself enjoying writing too much and decide to be a killjoy?

I didn't call a user here a branch covidian, I didn't make sweeping generalization. I described a specific set of behaviors and beliefs, and used an appropriate descriptor for it. If you don't drive 90 minutes to work alone wearing a mask, be not offended, be not inflamed.

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Arizona's voucher system. Any public school aged kid in the state can instead get a yearly check for $7,000 that they can take to a private school or use for homeschooling. You can't reform the public school system but you can let people opt out entirely.

Now, bear with me here, my public school experience was overall good. But if you're talking about preventing the abuse of children, I think you're going to run into the problem of Child Abduction Is Not Funny. As much ideological weirdness happens in schools, and as infuriating as these incidents are, they're infuriating because it's public officials that are supposed to be accountable being unaccountable. Like being killed by a seatbelt or airbag or police officer.

But, most child abuse happens at home. It's mostly the parents and close family doing it, and at school there's people who will notice bruises, and so long as the parent isn't too Intersectional, they will investigate. I'm just not a fan of widespread homeschooling; the more of it there is, the harder it becomes to audit, and I don't trust un-audited homeschooling

The natural state of children is to be with other children doing children stuff. It's unfortunate that school is the main place where other children are.

Uh, isn’t the vast majority of child abuse in the home stepdads or stepbrothers, a group that is very underrepresented in homeschooling?

It's a coup complete problem.

even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either

Even if true, that's not a fig leaf. "Oh, you didn't mean 'rapes under our new trans-friendly policy'? You meant all those other rapes that happen in our schools? Sorry for misunderstanding you!"

Even accounting for the right-wing bias in the reporting, it sounds like the grand jury was mad as hell about the whole affair. Good. The kid at the centre of it all sounds, from other things I've read previously, to have been totally fucked-up by his dysphoric family life, and instead of doing anything to help him, the school board was all "Oh you are gender-fluid and trans and a girl? Of course you are! Feel free to use the girls' bathrooms at your own discretion! Rainbow flags aloft!" because, and this is just my own opinion, they were a bunch of spineless idiots in thrall to the local trans activist parents' group.

EDIT: Okay, to be fair to the school board, they were being kept in the dark by the administration. So it's the superintendent and the principals that should be strung up by their thumbs. There was an immense amount of "sweep it under the carpet" going on, and things were made worse by A not informing B that C had told them they were going to be working with D between the courts, the schools, the sheriff's office and pretty much everyone involved.

What I really hated afterwards were all the good progressives, online and in the media, solidly (1) engaging in victim-blaming which, in any other context, they would tear someone apart for doing and (2) suddenly they were all very, very sure that this wasn't a trans kid or gender-fluid, this was a male boy who was completely male and not really trans or any other identity he claimed, even again where they would be "if you say you're trans, you're trans!".

Yeah. Enough shame and blame to go around for every single person, including that bitch of a prosecutor who tried to hang the father of the raped girl with all her might.

I think that the trans angle is a possible read, and almost certainly a component of the story... but I think there's a lot of fingerprints that don't touch on it, and I think it's important not to miss them. There's definitely stuff like all the people insisting that the assailant was wearing a kilt, despite all everything going on, but there's also issues that had ignored other bad conduct when that bad conduct was the only real interaction they had.

In extreme cases, this involved parts of the system missed dozens of other incidents, and had for years, including in ways that never would have seen the assailant either in this case or in others, and might not have even gotten information about gender beyond the name on a piece of paper: the reporting system that had been broken for the better part of a decade falls into this group. I think the special ed teacher's assistant literally walking past a rape in progress does as well. There's plausible explanations for the complete lack of Title IX infrastructure, but more likely it's just not something anyone who should have been making the decision wanted to think for five minutes about. Same, if not more so, for the complete abdication of any role by the director of 'safety and security', the long-standing lack of cooperation between the school district and police, and the efforts to obscure the 'external' review.

There's still ways to argue these latter problems derive from culture war causes -- maybe even true ones! -- but they point to a far broader problem that I think a lot of social conservatives are ignoring in favor of the flavour of the month.

I see by recent news that they've firedthe Superintendent of the schools. Good start, but a lot more heads need to roll, and it looks like maybe some in the sheriff's department too.

That kid was woefully disturbed and should not have been in schools at all. I know it's very hard to know what to do with a juvenile, you don't want to condemn a 14/15 year old, and they are entitled to an education, but that boy was a danger to girls and needed to be getting appropriate treatment, not "well we held him for a bit in detention, now he's going to live with his granny for two weeks until he can start school again".

Aella recently made an online survey about escorting and posted a chart on Twitter. It shows monthly earnings binned by BMI and clearly depicts that escorts with lower BMI making more on average than escorts with higher BMI. I would not have thought anybody would be surprised by that. The comments under the post proved me wrong.

Christ almighty, I had no idea that there are so many statistically literate whores around just waiting to tell you your survey is bad. I also wasn't aware that escorts advertise their services so openly on social media.

The number of escorts, both slim and not so slim, calling her out with little to no argument is mind blowing. The arguments they do give basically amount to sample size too low, BMI isn't real or "your survey is bad, and you should feel bad". Some of them also appear to lack reading comprehension. They point out that a sample size of 30 doesn't tell you anything meaningful. The post, however, clearly states that the sample size is about 30 per bin (which Aella points out is kind of low), making it about 150 total. Some give the argument that they themselves have high BMI but earn way more than that, and therefore the survey result must be wrong. Averages are seemingly a foreign concept to some.

A lot of them don't give much of an argument at all but question her intentions. Why would anyone be posting such dangerous information targeting the doubly marginalized group that is fat escorts? Their point seems to be that such information serves no purpose for anyone and should be kept hidden, which is ridiculous, since any woman considering escorting must have an interest in how much she can expect to earn based on her body type.

Others claim Aella is trying her hardest to stir the pot for attention. That could have been a valid point, if what she posted had been the least bit controversial. If you went out and asked 100 random people, I can't imagine that more than a few would say they believe fat escorts on average make the same as normal weight escorts. I also can't imagine any of these offended women would have any sort of problem with a chart showing that taller men make more on average than shorter men.

A few are asking what Aella's credentials are or whether the survey has been reviewed by an ethics committee, as if you need any of that to do a random google forms survey on the internet. They appear to believe that ethics committees are to protect people who might find the result offensive and not the participants of the study.

I also can't help but find a bit of irony in prostitutes trying to discredit someone based on their credentials.

Anyways, the data from the survey is available on Aella's website. I had a quick look at the correlations. It seems to be mostly what you would expect, but one thing that I don't get is that condom use shows no correlation with contracting STDs, which makes me quite suspicious of the data. It isn't correlated with education level either, but somewhat correlated with doing the job out of desperation (0.19). I would assume it would be the other way around. What is even crazier is that condom use is slightly negatively correlated (-0.11) with having a romantic partner. That seems absolutely insane to me, but maybe they use protection when they are with their partners?

The ultimate soft spot for women is sexual rejection. It doesn't matter if she wants to sleep with him or not, the idea of him not wanting to sleep with her will generally send a women off the rails. I am not really talking about a guy not being in the mood once in a while in a relationship but rather a guy being in general uninterested in sex with her seems to provoke women to no end. This char effectively called many women undesirable and got the expected response,

Female intrasexual competition is vicious to a degree that makes the Sunni-Shia feud look like a junior league soccer match.

It is just fought purely on an informational/signalling/status level, and not physical violence.

And it has intensified in the social media era where instead of vying to merely be the prettiest Belle at the ball one has to compare herself to every female in a 10 mile radius.

And Aella is nearly an apex predator in this environment.

This chart effectively called many women undesirable and got the expected response

Well, if it's mostly 'escorts' who are getting riled up about it, yeah that's expected because it is forcing them to re-evaluate their price in the market. They can dream all they want that they're "lush" or "curvaceous" but if they're fat, they are not going to get top dollar (unless it's the chubby chaser market).

The fact that they're getting mad at Aella, of all people, only makes it even funnier.

This is absolutely correct. Men are probably biologically programmed but definitely socially conditioned to constantly being sexually ignored by women. So the emotional response women have towards rejection themselves can be a bit alien

I'm not surprised by the trend but I am a little surprised by the magnitude. A BMI of 26 isn't really that high. A woman with larger breasts and hips can be at that level without even really looking overweight and yet those escorts are making a quarter of what the skinny girls make. I think one factor is that the BMIs are calculated from self reported weight/height and these are likely to be underestimating weight and overestimating height which means most of those 26+ respondents are actually 30+

A BMI of 26 isn't really that high. A woman with larger breasts and hips can be at that level without even really looking overweight and yet those escorts are making a quarter of what the skinny girls make.

It's also possible those women are making decent money, and the ones that have a BMI > 26 without having large breasts/hips are making ~1/16th (or whatever the numbers need to be to make the math work).

It looks to me that 26+ bar has smallest confidence interval, so i doubt your explanation.

Christ almighty, I had no idea that there are so many statistically literate whores around just waiting to tell you your survey is bad.

To drive the point home, these women affect being really anal about methodology – despite being, like you note, often unable to parse the trivial study design. I wouldn't scoff at that merely because of their occupation, escorts aren't street workers and may well be above average in intelligence (though Aella is of course still an outlier) – it's more of a conflict of interest, Upton Sinclair moment, and as is common, it's misguided territorial instinct – they won't get more clients nor higher incomes by making the conclusion of the study or Aella personally lower-status on Twitter.

Crucially, they have strong guild/cabal ethics with their talk about «community» and how she's «new», and a weird idea of the purpose of ethical research guidelines. Or... maybe their idea is the correct one in the current climate?

I've collected their responses (not up to date) because it was just such a perfect example of motivated reasoning and middlebrow dismissal, it reminded me of mainstream skepticism directed at politically incorrect findings we discuss here more frequently, namely HBD. See also: artists and AI, audiophiles and double blind testing, {your own example}.

I don't include links because my goal isn't to bash their looks (by the way, it's not like she got dogpiled by conventionally overweight hookers).

dunno if you have the research qualifications for something with such heavy implications; SW solidarity is something I'd be researching too, but that's just my opinion and I could be wrong.

guessing you are pretty new; also it's <19 not >19 if you wanna get fatphobia correct

You should re-do this with a bigger sample size and more accurate earnings. I would separate full-time and part-time maybe. Fssw and kink etc.

You’re not very connected to the community bc you disregard valid criticisms and emotional reactions (yes emotions matter, ppl aren’t robots) from a wide array of its members

You think you’re right bc you make a lot of money but most of us know better than to equate those things

I don’t think she should be doing it at all unless she herself has a genuine and broad community connection which she doesn’t.

The world doesn’t need another privileged white swer sharing their uninformed opinion on the industry for attention.

Soooo many things wrong with this. A sample size of 30?!?! Mo. income is estimated (by the researcher, not the respondent)? Only using online escorts when many SWs work exclusively in person creates additional bias. Additionally,BMI is outdated & <19 is unhealthy for most people

I have always been a big girl, and if I was making that small amount of money, I would not be a veteran, and still be working in this industry. I am also a older provider well over 40. I actually make more money when I am bigger then when I am smaller. You data is skewed.

If we are speaking of averages, then it would be a very excellent idea to enlarge your focus group. What joke.

This is flawed. Income in this industry is highly dependent on the providers location and touring (if they are available to). Then how much they are willing to place into their marketing (pics, websites, etc).

Calling this “data science” with a sample size of 30. Lol.

She said herself the sample size was “still kinda low”. Her own words. Also implies she is still collecting data and released her unfinished “study” anyway, Mr blank profile.

Also does not check out in my experience. I know big gals making way more than I do. She has even admitted to not being able to get good data because she’s not connected in the industry.

Wildly inaccurate.

Anyone who knows anything about statistics will know how laughable this is. Stop this embarrassment of our community.

"If your sample isn't representative of your population, then you can't make valid statistical inferences or generalize. " where is your sample size? Where is your scientific methods and statistical evidence. You're not proving anything you're making wild inferences in a...

She put out this graph without any context or background, it's just not appropriate method. This is what causes an uproar and when it is found to be false results are swept under the rug because its not as interesting. Graphs are misinterpreted all the time why are you so upset

I’m not giving my data to a woman who thinks she knows better than those of us who have been at it for years. She thinks lawyers and doctor who pay 1k an hour won’t hurt workers and her “advice” is gonna put people in unsafe situations. Also tracking BMI is not a useful metric.

You just love being loud and wrong, huh? I’m honestly impressed at the way you manage to make every tweet worse than the last

I'm fat and make 6 figures.

You couldn't be more wrong.

Stop the lies and perpetuating stigma.

You're a stain on this industry.

“BMI (body mass index), which is based on the height and weight of a person, is an inaccurate measure of body fat content and does not take into account muscle mass, bone density, overall body composition, and racial and sex differences, say researchers from the Perelman School”

As a researcher myself, this is straight up terrible research design and thus garbage findings. Maybe sit down and think about research design and ethics before you go around 'doing research' ie confirming your own biases.

I’m no statistician, but the holes in this methodology are truly incredible. Not to mention the use of BMI, which is a hugely stigmatising metric that fat people have asked people to stop using FOREVER. There are better uses of your time than whatever this is.

I had to read the comments because i couldnt believe someone would do something like this about body mass index. Theres so much fatphobia, classism and whorephobia in one graph. Also as a data scientist why are you using n=30 and no standard dev or error matrix? Bro

This is ridiculous. Look at my photos. They’re accurate. My BMI is 28.6, I make 30k on my worst month.

Y i k e s

Stop it.

Girl... just stop

It’s men in the comments thinking it’s accurate smh

Lol where did you pull this fluff from. Highly inaccurate

This is really stupid lol

this is disgusting, useless and inane. but good that you manage to stay busy i guess.

Why are you doing something this offensive to a community that u just became a part of??

Your provingmy point -your new to this. Only fans hasn’t been around long & is already known to be problematic by far. Content is only a aspect of SW & more removed newer aspect. Please be respectful-your behavior almost reads like your intentionally trying to rile your community

Flipping through your TL your online poles, interviews, etc are incredibly problematic. Maybe pay close attention to the backlash your getting from everyone

She’s not an escort -she’s an O F girl -she’s just promoting not accurate tires tropes that the general public like to push & she’s arguing, blocking & getting a offended that actual real escorts are telling her she’s wrong. It’s obvious

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What I don't understand is why they're so enraged by it.

If we live in a society that's fatphobic and unfairly discriminates against fat people, should we be surprised if fatter sex workers get paid less? Or is it that the Johns are unique in their tolerance and fat acceptance, standing above the rest of us in their empathy towards women? Or maybe fatphobia is a rare and marginal viewpoint, except for the occasional bad person like Aella?

It’s mostly jealousy I think based on the source. Aella is thin and has made a ton of money, they view this as her relationally bullying her fat female peers. What I’ve observed online, women really, really hate other women that put women down in regards to their weight/appearance. It’s probably the worst thing you could do, it appears, especially if you yourself are higher status (pretty/thin). Most women sense this intuitively and behave accordingly, but Aella is… a special case. I think she lacks this sorts of social awareness.

What I’ve observed online, women really, really hate other women that put women down in regards to their weight/appearance.

Surely this is contingent on the environment. I think plenty of women diss other women for being fat and ugly (usually behind their back, but sometimes not). Just depends on what gains social cachet in their immediate circle.

Right -- and I'd expect Johns to be more extreme, since they are essentially paying for appearance only (vs a relationship, where you're going to have a whole bunch of other factors influencing your choices).

I think part of the rage is that the woke belief system can't hold up to any scrutiny, so it needs to be extremely aggressive to any questioning of it. That's why in addition to calling people racist and sexist for very small thing, you also get meta-attacks on trying to get to truth, e.g. being devil's advocate, "just asking questions", sea-lioning, or providing nuance/accuracy ("Well Akshuallly,").

What I find weird though is that the survey isn't contradictory of the belief system: the obvious response to it should be "Aella has uncovered evidence that society is still biased against fat women and we've got a lot of work left to do." If someone does a mediocre study showing that white people or men make more money than black people or women, you don't see a woke dogpile of people jumping on it saying that it's wrong because nonwhite women can make just as much money as white men.

Something about Aella's identity or presentation triggers an extreme immune response. Perhaps it's because her (very successful) schtick is "I'm a hot but borderline autistic nerdy sex worker who likes nerdy guys and nerdy things," and that's a relatively difficult market to get into with a disliked clientele and so they want to bring her down a peg. Or perhaps the kvetching about sample size is a (badly executed) attempt to peel off some of her customers.

I guess the pile on isn't even bad for her, as it improves her brand among her target market: she commits social faux pas and loss of reputation among her community because of her intellectual meanderings and thought experiments, which is very on-brand. But I don't get how this is even a social faux pas in the first place.

I wouldn't scoff at that merely because of their occupation, escorts aren't street workers and may well be above average in intelligence

Yeah, it was sort of an attempt at humor. Looking at the data, it appears that more than half have a bachelor degree or higher. I don't know how much that that can be trusted, though, since it appears that of those who hold a PhD, half has obtained it before the age of 21. Quite impressive. Furthermore, 9 has obtained a graduate degree before age 23. I hope she has at least removed the most obvious lizardman answers.

these women affect being really anal about methodology

I'm grinning and wincing simultaneously. I suppose it's one of those shots you just have to take.

And how is Aella a newby? I thought she was an expert, writing guides for others on how to camwhore? Are camwhores looked down upon by sex workers, 'all show and no go'? Has she not slept with hundreds of men? At least there are no formal qualifications for sex work, that could only make the whole area even more toxic. I'm sure that innovation is coming, though.

If anything, the "newbie" accusation is probably grounds to dismiss the rest of their criticism; Aella's been in sex work since before Tumblr banned porn.

I was about to say "bitch that was like last year," but it really has been a long time, especially measured in hooker years.

I guess I should have added "(pre-Covid)" to that.

They imply she is new to the “community”. That probably implies some forums and WhatsApp groups or leftist advocacy groups or whatever

I’m no statistician, but the holes in this methodology are truly incredible. Not to mention the use of BMI, which is a hugely stigmatising metric that fat people have asked people to stop using FOREVER.

This was my favorite comment. It implies that either

  1. BMI does not correctly measure obesity, in which case it wouldn't be stigmatizing toward fat people because it isn't correctly identifying them

  2. BMI stigmatizes fat people, which means it correctly identifies them, but having a high BMI somehow brings some additional stigma that merely being fat doesn't

Christ almighty, I had no idea that there are so many statistically literate whores around just waiting to tell you your survey is bad. I also wasn't aware that escorts advertise their services so openly on social media.

A few are asking what Aella's credentials are or whether the survey has been reviewed by an ethics committee, as if you need any of that to do a random google forms survey on the internet. They appear to believe that ethics committees are to protect people who might find the result offensive and not the participants of the study.

It's as if the burden of proof for something that isn't politically correct is way higher.

I would ask what did you expect? People who call themselves escorts or sex workers instead of prostitutes are going to be very prickly about any perceived slights. "How dare you judge me? How dare you seem to indicate to hint to suggest that whoring is somehow bad? How dare you say that fit/beautiful at any size isn't true? How dare you remind me of the market economics out there, which is that men like curvy women - not too thin and not too fat - and that whoring will only result in a big payout for a small slice of all the women who think that an OnlyFans or going on Craigslist or looking for sugar daddies is a way to make a living?"

It's the stress between trying to overcome their horrible repressive upbringing in the horrible repressive sex-negative society which tells them that being a whore is low-status versus all the political theorising and activism about 'sex work is real work'. And all the theory in the world won't change the realities around sexual attraction and what customers expect from a hired sex provider versus what they would expect in a relationship. It's true for incels - you can't regulate sexual attraction - and it's true for fat women and it's true for prostitutes.

Re: condom use, I have no idea around that except maybe they don't do full penetrative sex, or they can charge more if the customer doesn't want to use a condom. Using condoms with their regular partners makes sense, as they probably don't want to run the risk of infecting their boyfriend, whereas with johns that is just one of the hazards of the job.

Looks like it's less than ten percent of the total, which puts it within the realm of "add lizardman's constant and you get a real statistical outlier that could just be weird because it's a statistical outlier". The other possibility is she got some girls who were not escorts and were sugar babies/paid mistresses/whatever who didn't use condoms because it was an exclusive arrangement.

Others claim Aella is trying her hardest to stir the pot for attention.

The fact that this result is obvious doesn't mean there was no attention angle. A lot of very obvious statements could get heaps of attention; if someone made a twitter bot that just posted inconvenient facts about race/sex/religion/whatever, would you assume it was primarily there to dispassionately convey information to the masses, or to get attention?

That being said, I've met Aella in real life and I doubt her attention is primarily to piss off wokes on twitter. I mean, that might be a bonus, but I think she'd legitimately prefer if the responses were actual discussion of what the result means, meaningful statistical or methodological discussion, etc.

condom use shows no correlation with contracting STDs, which makes me quite suspicious of the data

I don't see a data column for catching STIs (just testing for them). In case I just missed something, then this sounds like a possible result of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox, where anyone who doesn't use a condom is compensating for the risk by tightly screening clients for STI status/limiting the acts they perform to limit chance of transmission. Could also be a limitation of self-report. Alternatively, aren't condoms only moderately effective at preventing infection? Could it be confounded by number of clients?

Maybe escorts accepting not using a condom simply charge a lot more as well? Sounds like something that would deserve a good premium. Who the hell really enjoys condoms?

I would assume escorts who don't use condoms are more likely to be desperate, drug-addicted, homeless, etc, and less likely to fill out surveys.

IIRC isn't it well established that men have a strong revealed preference for the upper end of a healthy weight(which, in childbearing age females, probably means curvy), and that the whole heroin chic extremely skinny twig thing is mostly women doing a bad job of modeling what's attractive to men?

While I personally have the preference of "upper end of healthy weight" I haven't seen anything that paints that desire as well-established.

The older I get the more I realize partnering with a skinny woman young is the way to go, as we all get fatter and older it rounds out.

her survey was about income. It's plausible that thin women are able to get higher paying clients , who have different preferences compared to the masses

Or that men have different preferences for women they pay thousands of dollars versus women they marry. A one time indulgence versus a permanent commitment is a very different event, which might prompt a very different aesthetic choice.

If she had come out with results showing the opposite, would there have been nearly as much criticism? I would be willing to wager likely not. A single counterexample can refute a math or physics conjecture, but this does not work in the social sciences ,but people act like it does in giving anecdotal counterexamples.

WHR is a better indicator of female attractiveness than BMI, but they are sufficiently correlated in women that these results are not surprising. There might be some low WHR/high BMI outliers, but even Christina Hendricks, the heaviest conventionally attractive person I could think of (a BMI of 25), has a WHR of 0.77 vs the "ideal" WHR of 0.67.

WHR is significant, but let's not pretend most of us are not thinking of Christina Hendricks's massive round boobs when making that calculus. Which would increase her BMI and not affect her WHR but increase her attractiveness significantly.

BMI is confounded by breast and butt size, so it's not the most reliable indicator of female attractiveness. WHR tackles half of that problem, but personally speaking, sometimes sheer absolute size can compensate for nonideal ratios.

The more I think about it, the more I am bewildered by this "study" and am in the Aella is trolling/baiting camp. Of course, men prefer not fat women; did we need a survey for this? Of course, you can find 100 proxies to show that. I am just irrationally annoyed by studies/experiments that try to rediscover the wheel, and then discussions where people who don't believe in the existence of wheels come out, and we all need to pretend to discover why wheels are good from first principles all over again. Such a waste of time.

I don't really agree. Lots of things that people assume or take for granted sometimes turn out to be not so true under rigorous examination. There is definitely a loud minority of people who insist that slender women are only valued because of societal values that everyone goes along with because they don't want to be low-status. And it's not like millions of science dollars are being taken away from malaria research to fund this. Aella did this in her free time as a project.

It's also worth noting that societal attitudes can change over time. Men prefer not fat women, but it's conceivable that this could change in the future, and it's worth examining the size of the effect.

and we all need to pretend to discover why wheels are good from first principles all over again.

Well, to me it's more like checking an existing assumption. In this case I think it's appropriate.

Others claim Aella is trying her hardest to stir the pot for attention. That could have been a valid point, if what she posted had been the least bit controversial.

Aella is clearly doing it for attention - why that claim is not true? (not that it is relevant at all, and pointing it out by someone with Twitter account is ridiculous)

I guess you could argue that most things posted to social media is for attention. Since she is probably making a living off of the attention she gets, you are probably right. She might have posted the chart expecting the response.

I mean it’s also sort of her marketing for aspergy tech workers. Post some studies to sound smart to attract higher income clients. That seems like her niche market.

Also isn’t Aella higher bmi. Atleast by my standards she looked plus size.

Ya i mean I was joking a little. Back when we didn’t have enough food and no one was fat she would be curvy. If everyone maintained appropriate weight she would be curvy or bigger for appropriate weight people.