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Notes -
As a little bit of a palate cleanser for the Annunciation shooting and Scotland
All Female Braveheart Remakechildren-with-knives fracas, I thought we could talk about the financial state of internet whoredom:Matthew Ball Xwitter Thread on OnlyFans Financials
(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)
Big 3 Takeaways:
What actually got me to take the time to write this up was seeing this article on sports betting.
Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration. That these all disproportionately impact (there, I said it!) young males is all the more revealing -- society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.
Any values set has pathologies - ways in which dysfunctions manifest, and negative outcomes it is willing to tolerate. To take the Annunciation schooting topic you allude to: American gun rights advocates are generally willing to tolerate elevated homicide and suicide rates as well as semi-regular mass shootings as a cost of protecting civilian gun ownership. I don't think it's right to say they're more than happy with those outcomes.
It's true that we are collectively not as sensitive to certain kinds of dysfunction among young men, but it's also true that these problems are largely seen as an expression of genuine preference and thus None of Your Business. A heroin addict might thank you after the fact for forcing him through rehab (though he certainly won't during); a young man is significantly less likely to feel the same way if you confiscate his weed, porn, and gambling. The US has generally accepted the idea that certain kinds of anti-social business model are acceptable as long as the participants know what they're getting into (for small values of 'know what they're getting into'). It's your God-given right to blow all your money on drugs, strippers, and gambling, and fuck anyone telling you you can't.
What strikes me about this phenomenon is that both sides of the argument broadly come from the Right: social conservatives decry the public toleration of vice and masculinists object to what they see as the exploitation and neglect of young men, while business conservatives adamantly oppose anything that would curtail their ability to fleece the peasants.
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