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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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@RandomRanger made the following observation last week:

Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on?

As this was posted in the context of Scott’s recent article on the Vibecession and I’d say that is an issue largely unrelated to the porn industry I decided to post a separate reply.

Assuming that 800,000 figure is correct in the first place (there’s probably room for doubt but that is beside the point) I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

Warehouse workers and information security officers have a certain level of respectable standing within their social circles. The likes of Bonnie Blue don’t. Women understand that she condemned herself to the equivalent of crack whore Hell. It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc. She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed. Maybe she’ll become a porn director and people will pretend like she has talent for it. Either way, everybody knows she’ll age out rapidly. She’ll very probably never marry or if she does, it’ll be to a man who’s a laughingstock. She’ll never have children or if she does, they’ll turn out to be screw-ups. Society basically throws money at her because she was willing to turn into a social pariah without status for their amusement.

Now you might make the argument that she brought it all upon herself and thus should not be getting any sympathy and deserves poverty. But society doesn’t apply such norms to young women because they are seen as possessing innate biological value and also as naïve and easily misled. We’re aware that most young women who get drawn to porning probably don’t fully understand the long-term consequences of their actions, with the explanation being that they were fed modern feminism their entire lives and thus assume that women no longer live in sexual shame and that selling access to your orifices in camera is empowering. We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.

Ah, the famously feminist political bloc of “loser chumps.”

This is like seeing the sales figures for Modelo and acting shocked that “we” aren’t prepared to jettison Mexicans.

"Taylor Swift is just singing and dancing, LeBron James is just jumping and throwing a ball, Cristiano Ronaldo is just running and kicking a ball, and they are billionaires, wtf is going on?"

Well, if you are badly paid warehouse worker and see celebrities as people responsible for your misery, your proletarian consciousness is rather undeveloped. Instead of watching TV or tiktok, reading some theory is in order.

they are billionaires, wtf is going on?

Idolaters gonna idolate.

Nobody forces anyone to buy concert tickets or watch the NBA. Celebrity wealth is a measure of how much people want to worship them. The "exploitation" here is voluntary.

Instead of watching TV or tiktok, reading some theory is in order.

We agree about reading, but disagree on the content. Try Exodus 20:3.

A good suggestion. I would also recommend Exodus 20:17 in this situation.

We agree about reading, but disagree on the content.

Not really. The bible was extremely extremist and revolutionary book when it was written, and still is. Historically, when disgruntled people were massively reading this book, it was sign that the world is going to be set aflame.

If Early Iron Age Bible writers saw modern society, especially modern UK society, they would be as revolted and horrified as is humanly possible, and Bonnie Blue and her antics would not be even in top 20 reasons for this disgust.

the Early Iron Age

In the early Iron Age, the predominant religions at the time included:

•Sending your daughter to the temple of Ishtar so she can lose her virginity getting railed by some stranger for money

•Burning your firstborn child to death as an offering to Moloch

•Big orgies under groves to celebrate seasonal changes

Not to mention both Sodom and the tribe of Benjamin getting wiped out because they couldn’t keep their roving bands of gang-rapists under control. The early prophets of the Bible wouldn’t like modern society, but I doubt they would be particularly surprised. Neither would St. Paul, given the time he spent in Rome and the Greek cities.

But the proles are not upset about celeb pay. They might be upset about CEO pay, but rarely entertainers. They’re the fans here(that’s what celebrity means).

Are "the proles" worried about CEO pay, or is it the left-wing academics/intelligentsia who are worried about it and ascribe those worries to "the proles." Most of the proles would like promotions to move up to the higher paying jobs, but maybe don't know how to optimize their skills to climb that ladder. There may be some fraction of over-educated leftist agitators who work amongst proles who, instead of utlizing their intelligence in more important higher-paying positions, harbor fantasies about CEOs earning less than warehouse workers, but most proles probably think they're crazy.

I don't know about actual warehouse workers, but the people who comment on reddit love bitching about CEO pay.

When Luigi Mangione murdered that CEO a few security guards at my work laughed and joking asked which CEO would get it next. On their break in the lunch room where I could hear them.

The proles mostly understand that CEO’s earn more than them, but very few will defend how much more- which, TBH, is mostly an artifact of poor corporate governance.

But the proles are not upset about celeb pay.

And there is no evidence that "warehouse workers" are exceptionally upset about Bonnie Blue either, OP who started this discussion is probably not a warehouse worker (and if so, he is rather non representative one), and premise of this whole thread is faulty from the beginning (not that this could and should stop interesting debate from developing).

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. — Margaret Thatcher

I should note right off the bat that I’m out of the loop about modern porn, I haven’t consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn’t really serving any purpose for me. I only know anything about Bonnie Blue from posters complaining about her existence. Including buying her own PR created hype, such as inflated subscriber/income numbers, designed to make her look more successful.

There are a lot of men who struggle with porn addiction, and they desperately want porn stars to be extravagantly miserable. There’s a certain kind of man who needs porn actresses to be degrading themselves in order to enjoy the product. It feels like cosmic balance, Porn makes them feel bad after their orgasm, and they want the people in the porn who have power over them, who make them do this over and over again, they can’t possibly be happy.

If we don’t want porn stars to make money, if we don’t want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I’m not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee’s graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.

It’s at core a demand problem. If men consume porn there will always be porn stars. Though to be frank, my wife is reading a biography of Marilyn Monroe, and I’m not sure other actresses are any better off. There’s a reason actress and prostitute have long been similar careers. And reading Jenna Jameson’s wikipedia page, Jenna being the last big queen of porn I was aware of when she was dating Tito Ortiz and he was LHW champ in the UFC, she seems to have wound up pretty low, but not really that unexpected compared to any other comparable actress of the time. It’s quite likely that any porn star or prostitute will come to a bad end for the very reasons that made her pursue the job to begin with. But it seems like a failure that people consume her content, not that she produces it. It's entirely within the power of men to do.

I haven’t consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn’t really serving any purpose for me.

If we don’t want porn stars to make money, if we don’t want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I’m not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee’s graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.

Typical-mind fallacy. Maybe you have a wealth of experience and a great imagination, but I have only about three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine well enough to fap to (available upon request), in comparison to the dozens of text, hundreds of video, and thousands of image situations that I have compiled on my computer.

The problem is that porn and prostitution, like sports, are where you make a lot of money (if you make it) when you're young but you age out fast (I think for porn there's also the novelty problem, that the consumers want fresh content all the time).

So then you have to have something else to pivot to, when you're still in your 30s/40s (which is relatively young). And for porn actresses, the majority can't act (because that's not the talent they were hired for), so it's extremely hard to break into legitimate acting career.

And so, like the former sports star who blew through his fortune and now is no longer in demand, and who failed at running a business (it often happens, the Plan B of "I'll open my own sports shop/bar" does fall through) and didn't get a gig as a pundit, or a manager, the ex-porn star is left trying to squeeze the last drops of profit out of fading glory.

It's not so much to do with shame and stigma, as it is that nobody loves a fairy when she's forty.

Porn actress of the onlyfans kind is more of a marketing job than an acting job and the ones that make are pretty good at it. They'll have no problem pivoting to marketing for somebody else or social media management/strategist, IMO. The logical plan B for a sports athlete is to be a trainer of some kind.

I think giving this any sort of mind at all only further advertises snd normalizes it. Most of us live in radically free societies, where this behavior isn't illegal, and there certainly is no appetite in legally enforcing morality.

The question on a society level is income inequality.

On a personal level: ignoring this is the solution. Focusing any sort of attention at this is a waste for some other productive thing you could be doing. My parents were able to communicate and instill their values in my siblings and I without coming in contact with the gutter. And I think not tolerating or being a part such a conversation with colleagues is trivially easy. Get better friends, if with a co-worker unwanted sexual conversation (even if you're not the target of it) is harassment.

Per a Grok query, famous former famous porn stars marry “normal” men and enjoy a better than average social life. Sasha Grey is a Twitch streamer and does popular podcasts. Mia Khalifa is an influencer dating a rapper. Riley Reid is married to an athlete. So there is no significant trade-off here. This is probably because, even if 90% of men find them disgusting, there’s probably 1% who find them attractive, and a percent of that 1% will be well-adjusted and even high status.

A political party could probably gain voters by running on taxing pornstars, but maybe the connotation of being the “talking about porn” party is too negative to be worth it.

Sasha Grey is a Twitch streamer and does popular podcasts.

That's not much, if we're honest. Any young woman who's not hideously ugly can do a popular podcast and have beta simps orbiting her.

Mia Khalifa is an influencer dating a rapper.

From women's perspective, that doesn't mean shit.

Riley Reid is married to an athlete.

Fair enough; I don't know about his career so I can't comment. What I know is that he comes across as a miserable cuck in the one interview I saw with him. Again, my argument isn't that such women cannot marry, it's that they cannot marry a respectable man they're attracted to.

Sasha Grey is a Twitch streamer and does popular podcasts.

Not to mention securing a starring role in a film directed by one of the greatest American directors of his generation.

We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.

I am afraid that blaming sex work on feminism is rather big misunderstanding. Sex-positive feminism as far as it had any influence, had been thoroughly defeated.

Modern feminists tell little girls to aspire to become presidents, CEOs, soldiers, cops, prison guards etc, not OnlyFans super stars.

I agree that it’s defeated in the strict sense that the majority of self-identifying feminist women probably believe the Sexual Revolution had long-term negative consequences (but not net negative ones) for women and generally failed to deliver its promises. As far as I can tell, they also believe that toxic men in general and the still-existing vestiges of the patriarchy and its female useful idiots are responsible for such negative externalities. They aren’t questioning the goals and tenets of the revolution, only the consequences. As far as they’re concerned, the idea that promiscuous women should be able to live without sexual shame and that there’s no good reason to judge them is still legitimate. The idea that Bonnie Blue is doing something shameful does not enter their minds.

It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc. She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed.

This seems like extreme cope to me. Too many conservative folks here take the normativity of sexual prudishness for granted. We are rapidly accelerating into an age where this sort of thing is embraced, if we aren't already fully there.

I highly doubt she won't be able to find a normal job, in fact it may be a plus! I'm sure some business would love the publicity of hiring her, as FtttG outlined above, this is a new dynamic in the modern attention economy anyway. Our culture is extremely sexually immoral, don't get your hopes up that porn actresses are facing any serious consequences.

I highly doubt she won't be able to find a normal job, in fact it may be a plus!

Eh, Stormy Daniels had to go peddle her tale of Trump around the chat show circuit to make more money after spending whatever payoff she got. That's not someone who has gracefully transitioned into a new, lucrative career after aging out of acting in porn.

Maybe the new society will embrace the likes of Bonnie Blue, but I think she's probably just at the wrong time: already known, already labelled, not the fresh new e-star who will be the one to become the AI face of 'we're the new start-up so daring we hired an e-thot to be the face of our marketing' company.

This. A very important part of keeping prostitution illegal, or at least in a gray market, is so that it remains low status. But if a woman can engage in postitution with no legal risk, no personal risks, she benefits from it, she makes lots of money, well, that is going to be a high status job and it will make prostitution high status over time. It actually takes large societal effort to prevent prostitutes from having more status than mothers, it does not just happen naturally. Relatedly, young single women earning more than young single men has been seen as a consequence of modernity making male skills less valuable. I am skeptical. It may just be a result of DEI plus the legalization, protection, and normalization of "soft sex work" -- marketing, sales, being a secretary, etc. If young women were allowed to monetize their femininity in any era, they might have been out earning young men.

But if a woman can engage in prostitution with no legal risk, no personal risks, she benefits from it, she makes lots of money, well, that is going to be a high status job and it will make prostitution high status over time.

I don't think that has been demonstrated historically. You can have hetairai, geisha, and Les Grandes Horizontales, but while they achieve fame, a degree of wealth, and social influence, they never become high-status enough to overcome falling back into poverty; extravagance was expected of such women, but eventually the source of wealthy lovers dries up.

The Second Empire was undoubtedly the golden age of French courtesans, who became idols of their time. Legendary women, whose wealth and power were astounding, whose beauty and seductive charm overcame the reason of men... Virginia Rounding doesn't simply recount their lives; she also strives to describe the mythical aura that surrounded them. Take Marie Duplessis, for example, who became the prototype of the virtuous courtesan; Apollonie Sabatier, who knew like no other how to put everyone at ease in her salon, where the most bawdy conversation was the norm; La Païva, a Russian émigré who seemed to enjoy the fresh flesh of wealthy young men; and Cora Pearl, a flamboyant English beauty, who had the gift of "making bored men laugh." The Great Courtesans offer us a vibrant portrait of nineteenth-century Paris and its most brilliant personalities. A venal woman was judged not only by the price she commanded for her favors, but also by her degree of freedom in choosing her clients. The humblest prostitute, at the very bottom of the ladder, had no choice but the common man; the elite of the demimonde, the renowned courtesan, had an almost infinite selection at her feet. Generally, the size of the fortune outweighed the personal qualities of the potential lover—but still, she had a choice. At least, that was the optimistic view of her situation; in reality, the more luxuriously the courtesan was kept, the more she spent, and the greater her need for money became. Her role consisted of spending, rather than saving, the money with which her wealthy patron showered her, for the conventions of the time demanded that a man of the world's mistress be a highly visible ornament, proof of his social standing, and not a liaison hidden away in a discreet apartment.

I highly the doubt that prostitution being low status is a consequence of it being illegal. I'd say it's considered low status because it means ugly old men get to use your holes for money. In Germany, for example, it's legal but apparently also generates a great deal of human trafficking from Eastern Europe as there's a dearth of German women signing up to be whores.

I highly doubt she won't be able to find a normal job, in fact it may be a plus! I'm sure some business would love the publicity of hiring her, as FtttG outlined above, this is a new dynamic in the modern attention economy anyway. Our culture is extremely sexually immoral, don't get your hopes up that porn actresses are facing any serious consequences.

Good luck making a list of hardcore porn performers who notably go on to successful, fulfilling mainstream careers with stable relationships into middle age and beyond.

There's maybe a couple who quietly retired from the public eye and live on a ranch somewhere.

On the male side you have perhaps literally ONLY Ron Jeremy. And he's come to an extremely ignominious end.

EDIT: Wait, I forgot Sylvester Stallone. But he didn't have a very long adult career and it was softcore so I am comfortable discounting him.

Most of them that try to do something in the mainstream end up flaming out.

In no small part because there's a lot of other vices that tend to surround that particular career path, and you'll have very few respectable allies in your corner if you stumble.

Remember that one State-level Democratic candidate who had filmed sex acts for a Cam site? She lost.

The one porn actress I ever heard of going on to a mainstream career was Marilyn Chambers, and she seems to have ended up going back to porn eventually (but also some independent movies).

Traci Lords did. Not a great career, but definitely a career.

Our culture is extremely sexually immoral

Bonnie is in the UK, where the particular forms of extreme sexual immorality take quite a different form, as does the prudishness. Do you think the government would take her side if she tried to become a nurse or teacher and a customer or parent complained?

There's probably any number of roughly-anonymous, behind-the-scenes type jobs she could take if need be, but I am skeptical she would have much success finding a public-facing, non-porn-adjacent job.

Do you think the government would take her side if she tried to become a nurse or teacher and a customer or parent complained?

Yes, I could easily imagine a UK government tossing the complaining parent or customer into HM Prison after a (non-jury) trial.

The intended meaning of my post was that this is what other people think, not an accurate, complete model of reality:

I think people get quite upset about those who get ahead via unorthodox means too.

Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on? Maybe it's all lies and money-laundering but the point is that people believe it to be true. You are working hard and getting paid a miserly wage while someone else is doing fuck all and getting huge amounts of money.

I was trying to explain what might be lurking in the back of people's heads, who aren't neccessarily aware of power-law distributions or attention economies. The same could apply to the Island Boys or any number of other influencers. I was thinking of those /pol/ threads that show some lowlife making huge amounts of money that get 300 replies because it's ragebait and attentionbait.

And to a certain extent, isn't this whole discourse proof of my point? It's a potent topic both here and in less erudite forums. It makes people upset with how the economy is functioning, people in this thread are talking about income distributions. I was not trying to raise the object-level topic, only use it as an example and yet here we are in another huge battle/wealth of the sexes and pornography discussion.

Point taken. I'd ask a different question though. What would you think about a male porn performer making 800,000 pounds a month? Would it outrage you more? Less? How would people see it in your view?

It'd outrage people a less since it'd be 'damn that's impressive'. The sexes are different. It's like how when a female teacher has sex with a boy internet commenters are like 'Nice' or 'why couldn't it have been me' and when it's a male teacher and a girl there's a much harsher response.

Even I can't help but think that Bonnie Blue is worse than her male equivalent, in part because the male equivalent isn't really imaginable. I don't see a guy having sex with 1000 girls in a day as a PR stunt that boosts his profile to that level. But the hypothetical equivalent would be very bad. I support harsh treatment of Chad Thundercock if he goes around and disrupts the social contract or demoralizes people like Bonnie Blue.

That is exactly the point I was going to make. Being openly in porn as a man not only will not erode your social standing, which is the case if you’re a woman, but will even elevate it on average. Having the opportunity in itself to bone multiple beautiful women is generally seen as its own reward if you’re a man, which largely explains why male porn actors are indeed paid less than female ones on average. In fact, I think the idea of even getting paid to bone women on camera is seen as a sort of absurd idea by normies. After all, we can all imagine how many men would gladly be doing the same thing for free.

I’d argue that the working-class men outraged by Bonnie Blue would be much more outraged by a male porner earning the same sum of money (for whatever reason), because it’d seem even more unfair.

(The sex scandals involving women teachers that you mentioned is a different matter with a peculiar explanation in my view, but I won’t start discussing it in this comment.)

I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money

I am not sure that I entirely understand the point that you are trying to make, because it seems that you are not making any point, but there is no central committee that needs to condone every monetary transaction between people. If someone discovers a clever way to make and deliver 500,000 pizzas every month at a profit, society in general probably does not even know about it, unless it gets highlighted in media etc.

Like others pointed out, it is all supply and demand. Society condoning or tolerating people making money has nothing to do with it. The only way that society's tolerance affects things is how it limits the supply of people willing to provide the thing that people are willing to pay for. In reality the relationship between making money and society's tolerance is the opposite of what you seem to think. The more something is tolerated, the more people are open to doing it, and therefore the supply goes up and the money that any one individual can make goes down. If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.

I am not sure that I entirely understand the point that you are trying to make, because it seems that you are not making any point, but there is no central committee that needs to condone every monetary transaction between people.

People are generally OK with Bonnie Blue making around 800,000 pounds a month because they understand that she's sociologically damning herself so it seems only fair that she's making a lot of money while she can; it's also not illegal and complaining about it just makes you appear like a loser. The people making money for her are loser men anyway so nobody cares. In a similar manner, we're generally OK with fashion models (or at least some of them) making a lot of money because we understand that their careers are generally short, and with men doing dangerous jobs getting good pay because it's known that they might die on the job.

You seemed to be saying earlier that people being OK with Bonnie Blue earning a lot of money is the explanation for why she is able to earn a lot of money. Now you only claim that people are OK with Bonnie Blue making a lot of money, but are no longer claiming that that explains why she is able to. So your point actually seems to be quickly deflating into nothing.

If people were generally not OK with Bonnie Blue making a lot of money, how could we tell? What would be different in that hypothetical universe compared to our actual universe? And if people generally did not even know who Bonnie Blue is, and did not even care, how could we tell? How would that hypothetical universe be different compared to our actual universe?

If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.

This doesn't sound right. If 800,000 were willing. I'd guess the allure of it would fade and the pie would shrink.

I'm not sure I follow. What exactly doesn't sound right? Allure would fade for whom? How exactly would this loss of allure shrink the pie?

For punters who are willing to pay something for something unique. If lots of people all do the same formerly unique thing, they don't get a share of the spoils of fame, they (potentially) all get nothing.

In reality the relationship between making money and society's tolerance is the opposite of what you seem to think. The more something is tolerated, the more people are open to doing it, and therefore the supply goes up and the money that any one individual can make goes down. If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.

To be a bit more specific regarding doing the same thing… Bonnie Blue makes as much as she does through relentless self-promotion. Doing something degrading like having sex with dozens of men in a day, and then winding up in the discourse for it, is how she’s been able to stand out from the glut of wouldbe porn stars.

Only fans, etc. has millions of content creators and millions of women who are fine with showing various amounts of themselves. There is not an under supply of women open to being porn actresses/OnlyFans models. It is, rather, an attention economy. The top earners on OnlyFans make a lot of money while the overwhelming supermajority of women who expose themselves online will never earn enough to replace a minimum-wage full time job (but would certainly like to earn that much).

Assuming that 800,000 figure is correct in the first place (there’s probably room for doubt but that is beside the point) I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

This paragraph inverts the justificatory burden, to my mind. If society wants to prohibit some profession they need a good reason for it. Thing are permitted by default, not forbidden. In the United States, at least, it's not like no one ever tried! They were consistently prevented by courts ruling that the first amendment protected the production and distribution of pornography. This in a sense just moves the discussion "up" a level, why not amend the constitution to permit restriction on pornography? But prohibition of pornography has never enjoyed that widespread degree of support.

Warehouse workers and information security officers have a certain level of respectable standing within their social circles. The likes of Bonnie Blue don’t. Women understand that she condemned herself to the equivalent of crack whore Hell.

Do they? I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.

It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc.

Why would she want any of these jobs? At 800k/month She will make the lifetime salary of many of these professions in a few years. Comparing to the warehouse worker, she made the equivalent of ~30 years doing that work in one month! It's also kind of funny if you read the first paragraph of her wiki page:

Blue was born in 1999[1] in Stapleford, Nottinghamshire. Before beginning her pornographic film career, she worked in finance recruitment for the National Health Service (NHS) and was married. In 2021, her marriage ended and she moved to Australia, although she told Cosmopolitan UK in 2024 that her ex-husband still worked with her "behind-the-scenes".

She had one of those respectable jobs and gave it up!

She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed. Maybe she’ll become a porn director and people will pretend like she has talent for it. Either way, everybody knows she’ll age out rapidly.

If you had collectively starred in/produced dozens or hundreds of porn videos that made millions of pounds, wouldn't you be good at it? Why would people have to pretend you were good? As far as longevity Alexis Texas and Angela White have been doing it for over 20 years. I don't know what their earnings look like over that time but it's clearly an industry you can stay in if you have the talent and desire.

Now you might make the argument that she brought it all upon herself and thus should not be getting any sympathy and deserves poverty. But society doesn’t apply such norms to young women because they are seen as possessing innate biological value and also as naïve and easily misled. We’re aware that most young women who get drawn to porning probably don’t fully understand the long-term consequences of their actions, with the explanation being that they were fed modern feminism their entire lives and thus assume that women no longer live in sexual shame and that selling access to your orifices in camera is empowering. We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.

She clearly has a talent that means she doesn't "deserve" poverty. Even before she was getting rich from OnlyFans she seems to have had a fine career. I'm also skeptical she wants or needs my sympathy. I suspect things are going pretty well, from her perspective. There are plenty of things about the current pornography industry I think are bad but few, if any, seem to apply to Bonnie Blue.

I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.

I am highly sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.

If you had collectively starred in/produced dozens or hundreds of porn videos that made millions of pounds, wouldn't you be good at it? Why would people have to pretend you were good? As far as longevity Alexis Texas and Angela White have been doing it for over 20 years. I don't know what their earnings look like over that time but it's clearly an industry you can stay in if you have the talent and desire.

It's a well-established finding that a woman's sexual desirability tends to decline over time, which has obvious implications for a sex worker's expected earnings and career longevity. Of course there are women who can keep it up well into their forties, but such people are the exception. This deep dive into the stats of the Internet Adult Film Database found that 47% of female performers leave the industry after filming fewer than three films, and that the career of a female porn star who enters the industry in the 21st century lasts, on average, three years.

I am highly sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.

Why?

It's a well-established finding that a woman's sexual desirability tends to decline over time, which has obvious implications for a sex worker's expected earnings and career longevity. Of course there are women who can keep it up well into their forties, but such people are the exception. This deep dive into the stats of the Internet Adult Film Database found that 47% of female performers leave the industry after filming fewer than three films.

Ok. But I think we have already established Bonnie Blue is hardly average. I am not sure how to compare traditional films to OnlyFans but I'm confident she has done more than the equivalent of three.

Why?

Imagine you're a straight woman. You meet a woman who must be in the 100th percentile for promiscuity (at least in terms of numbers of sexual partners); who's had sex with men who were cheating on their girlfriends with her; who's explicitly encouraged married men to cheat on their wives. Maybe she'll tell you that's it's just a persona she's playing and she's nothing like that in real life (or maybe not). Either way, are you going to take the risk of introducing her to your husband or boyfriend? Maybe you'll counter that you're extremely sex-positive, without so much as a single SWERF bone in your body, and that you'd never get into a relationship with a man unless you trusted him completely – but I would hazard a guess that that does not describe the average woman. And a woman you don't trust to leave alone with your husband or boyfriend (or even your potential husband or boyfriend) is not your friend, no matter how you slice it.

Ok. But I think we have already established Bonnie Blue is hardly average. I am not sure how to compare traditional films to OnlyFans but I'm confident she has done more than the equivalent of three.

I agree that she is above average. The point I was making about the average number of films a female performer stars in before leaving the industry is that a lengthy career is not the norm. IAFD has an "active from–to" field listing a performer's period of activity: if one were to scrape this data it should be trivial to find the average duration of a female performer's career. Given what I've read about the industry and what I know about the relationship between a woman's age and her perceived attractiveness (her value on the sexual marketplace), I would be astonished if the average female performer's career lasts for ten years or more. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a definitive answer to this question.

Imagine you meet a woman who must be in the 100th percentile for promiscuity (at least in terms of numbers of sexual partners); who's had sex with men who were cheating on their girlfriends with her; who's explicitly encouraged married men to cheat on their wives. Maybe she'll tell you that's it's just a persona she's playing and she's nothing like that in real life (or maybe not). Either way, are you going to take the risk of introducing her to your husband or boyfriend? Maybe you'll counter that you're extremely sex-positive, without so much as a single SWERF bone in your body, and that you'd never get into a relationship with a man unless you trusted him completely – but I would hazard a guess that that does not describe the average woman. And a woman you don't trust to leave alone with your husband or boyfriend (or even your potential husband or boyfriend) is not your friend, no matter how you slice it.

I guess two things that come to mind.

1. I notice the shift in goalposts from "she doesn't have any friends" to "the average woman probably wouldn't be her friend." I'll agree to the latter, but the former doesn't follow from that.

2. This also seems to ignore the existence of both happily single and lesbian women, for whom the potential partner stealing is presumably not an issue.

I agree that she is above average. The point I was making about the average number of films a female performer stars in before leaving the industry is that a lengthy career is not the norm. IAFD has an "active from–to" field listing a performer's period of activity: if one were to scrape this data it should be trivial to find the average duration of a female performer's career. Given what I've read about the industry and what I know about the relationship between a woman's age and her perceived attractiveness (her value on the sexual marketplace), I would be astonished if the average female performer's career lasts for ten years or more. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a definitive answer to this question.

I don't disagree with anything in this paragraph, I just question the accuracy of extrapolating Bonnie Blue's career longevity from the average porn star's career longevity, given the many other ways in which she is not average.

Well, it stands to reason that if no "average" woman would want to be friends with Bonnie Blue, her pool of potential friends is dramatically restricted. If the only women who would want to be friends with her are

  • lesbians
  • single women who aren't looking for a relationship with a man, or
  • straight, coupled women who don't have a problem with introducing their partners to a sex worker who actively encourages married men to be unfaithful to their wives (perhaps because the women in question are polyamorous or in open relationships)

it stands to reason that her pool of potential friends is minuscule compared to the average woman's. Not to mention that, even if a woman falls into one of the above categories (even if she loudly claims to believe that sex work is real work), she might just have an instinctive disgust reaction towards associating with sex workers.

So, no, I don't know for a fact that Bonnie Blue has no friends, but given that we both accept there are a lot of women who would have perfectly understandable reasons not to want to associate with her (and given that many OnlyFans content creators report chronic feelings of loneliness), it seems reasonable to assume that she has few same-sex friends, if any. (Maybe she's a fag hag who has a group of gay men she goes to brunch with: other than other porn stars, a promiscuous gay man is probably the only kind of person who could hope to match her in body count. They could trade war stories.)

I just question the accuracy of extrapolating Bonnie Blue's career longevity from the average porn star's career longevity, given the many other ways in which she is not average.

What "many" ways are these? I accept that she's an unusually successful and famous porn star, and that you would naïvely expect a porn star who's making bank to stick around longer than one who's making peanuts (although who knows? maybe the reverse is true – you make bank at the outset and then quit while you're ahead before diminishing returns kick in. Mia Khalifa was a household name comparable to Bonnie Blue, and she was very keen to point out that her initial foray into pornography lasted less than a year). But I don't know that Blue is "not average" on many axes other than her sizeable wealth and fame.

As an aside, I really dislike this style of argumentation where I try to make a prediction based on historical data, and you point out that the person we're making predictions about isn't average, therefore historical data is completely useless for making predictions and we might as well throw darts at a wall.

Like, imagine if we were curious about how long Michael Jordan will live for (I don't know why we want to know this, just roll with it). I might look up an actuarial table for the life expectancy of a black American male born in the year whatever. But then you jump in and say "but Michael Jordan is not average on many axes! He's unusually tall and unusually rich! Therefore looking up the average life expectancy of a person born in that year is of no help to us at all!"

Averages are just that, average. They will describe an average person more accurately than they describe a non-average person, but that does not in any way imply that they don't describe a non-average person at all. At best they might describe a non-average person just as well as they do an average person (we might find that Jordan's height and net worth have no impact on his life expectancy, or one has a positive effect and the other negative, which cancel out); at worst they give us a ballpark figure, a lower or upper bound which is more relevant to the conversation than pulling numbers out of a hat. As I said, I'm open to the idea that there might be a positive correlation between a porn star's financial success/level of fame and the duration of her career (but there might not be), but citing two examples of successful porn stars with unusually long careers doesn't come close to demonstrating that. And I find it kind of rude that I'm trying to answer a question with empirical data, and you're rubbishing these efforts because "Bonnie Blue isn't average, therefore averages are completely useless in making any predictions about her future career trajectory".

I missed this on a first pass: the link I linked to earlier did analyse this exact question and found that the average female porn star's career duration had fallen from nine years in the 1970s to three years in the early 2010s (the report was published in 2013). The analysis also found that the average woman (regardless of ethnicity) gets into porn at the age of 22.

Given my earlier point about how a woman's perceived attractiveness tends to diminish over time, we can tell a story about women getting into the industry when they're very young, making some money while they're pretty close to their prime years, then retiring when their star is starting to fade.

It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc

I don't think that's obvious at all. Imagine going in to your local school and telling them that one of the teachers there used to be a porn star. They'll ask "was she breaking the law?" and you'll say "Well, no, it's all legal, but the movies are pretty shocking." They'll ask "when was this?" and you'll say "oh, years ago. Then she retired and went back to school for an ed degree so that she could get a normal job. But we can't let her get away with that, you need to can her immediately for her bad morality from when she was younger." They'll ask "How did you discover all this" and you'll say "I make it my quest in life to investigate ex-porn stars and trace them to their current location so that I can find out what they're up to."

Somehow I don't think that conversation would go well for you...

Presumably the trick would be to release the news to the parents (possibly via Facebook/WhatsApp) and the children (if possible) before the school. Then the children won’t take the teacher seriously and when parents ask why their children are being taught by a porn star, the school’s response would be “WTF why did we hire a porn star?” rather than “we’re aware and it’s really none of your business”.

The other traditional method for disguising an attack is the old ‘expression of support’. “It’s disgusting that people are accusing Teacher X of being the famous porn star Y” or “there’s no way this is X, right?”.

As a wise man once said, “It is necessary to put yourself firmly behind somebody before you can stab them in the back.”

You really don’t have to look very hard to find examples of teachers getting fired over a past in sex work, some of it a lot tamer than that.

Can you find me an example of a teacher (or some other normie core job) getting fired specifically for only fans? all the examples that other people linked seem kind of old fashioned.

They'll ask "How did you discover all this"

One assumes something obvious like an interview question along the lines of "what's with this ten-year gap in your resume" or "oh, you were an actress, did you star in anything popular?"

what's with this ten-year gap in your resume

"I presume you are familiar with the Official Secrets Act?"

There are multiple cases of a teacher's former career in porn coming to light and her losing her job as a consequence:

Yeah but notice that there's extenuating factors in both. In the first, she was in a movie where she openly talked about being a teacher. In the second, the school initially defended her until it turned out she was still using her porn name to promote Libertarian politics. Both of those are news stories from 10+ years ago about a woman who was in porn 20+ years ago.

I disagree with your scenario outlined here. First, because a "concerned parent" probably wouldn't just go in to the school. No, she'd probably go to the PTA first. So then, it's not one person going to the principal, it's a bunch of outraged soccer moms, threatening to raise a stink unless they Do Something.

Second, just a quick Google search returned a bunch of results. Like this case in California, albeit it was almost 13 years ago:

A middle school teacher who was fired after students learned she had appeared in pornography has lost her appeal to return to the classroom, her lawyer said Tuesday.

A three-judge panel unanimously decided Stacie Halas, 32, was unfit for the classroom. Halas was fired in April from her job as a science teacher at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard after online videos of her in porn were discovered by students and teachers.

"Although (Halas') pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague," Judge Julie Cabos-Owen wrote in a 46-page decision issued Friday by the Commission on Professional Competence.

Halas was continually deceitful about her nine-month career in porn before she went to work at the school, the decision said.

Her lawyer Richard Schwab said Halas had tried to be honest but was embarrassed by her previous experience in the adult industry.

It's right there: fired for having done porn before she became a teacher, because the fact those videos are out there makes her "unfit for the classroom" in perpetuity.

And for a newer example, there's Texas in 2017, which also involves Libertarian politics:

A sixth-grade teacher at an all-girls school in Texas is out of a job and fighting to get her position back after district officials learned she worked in porn more than a decade ago.

Resa Woodward, 38, was removed from the classroom at the Young Women’s STEAM Academy in Dallas in November, after district officials received an anonymous tip regarding her work as an adult film actress, although a subsequent internal review cleared her of policy violations, the Dallas Morning News reported.

…

Woodward, who did not return messages seeking comment early Wednesday, told the paper that she was forced into pornography — saying “that involvement was not of my own choosing” — while living with an older man during a tough time financially. She eventually got herself out of the situation and finished school before becoming a teacher for the Dallas ISD, which serves roughly 160,000 students from pre-K through 12th grade.

But district officials got a tip in March claiming that Woodward worked in porn under the alias Robyn Foster, a name active in the business from 2001 and 2004, credited with 16 movies, according to a web-based adult film database cited by the Morning News.

…

Woodward, according to the internal report, told district officials she stopped working in the business in 2001 and thought a man she knew was retaliating against her by informing her employers of her past.

“I’ve been trying to live my life as far away as possible from this stuff for a long time,” Woodward told district officials, adding that no students, colleagues or supervisors knew of her sordid past.

Bauer then closed the district’s investigation in March, ruling that Woodward’s “past participation” in pornography did not constitute a policy violation.

Woodward’s work as a well-known activist for the Libertarian Party of Texas, however, would lead to her being outed, according to the Dallas Morning News.

…

Woodward told the Dallas Morning News that she wrote a post on Facebook last fall about a drunken driver that angered another man who claimed to be associated with the Libertarian Party in another state due to his beliefs about police. That man then detailed her past on social media websites, Woodward said.

Woodward then notified district officials of the post and she was placed on administrative leave on Nov. 29.

“They told me they were pursuing termination because it became public,” she said.

And it's not just women who get fired, either. From Florida in 2011:

A Miami-Dade teacher's past life in the adult entertainment industry has gotten him kicked out of the classroom.

The school district's investigation into Shawn Loftis, a substitute teacher assigned to Nautilus Middle, Miami Edison Middle, Fienberg-Fisher K-8 Center and Miami Beach Senior High, began last January.

…

But that time was cut short after administrators at Nautilus learned about Loftis' past. Under the alias Collin O'Neal, Loftis was a successful adult film star, even shooting movies on location in Miami Beach. After three to four years of success, Loftis went from in front of the camera to behind it and ran his own adult film company.

But then Loftis decided to change careers and get out of the business all together. Loftis said he wanted to sell his company and use his Master's Degree to teach. He qualified to be a substitute, taught for about a year until one day the past caught up to his present.

…

Loftis said he was terminated because it was determined that he broke a School Board rule which states:

"They are expected to conduct themselves both in their employment and in the community in a manner that will reflect credit upon themselves and the school system."

In addition to being fired, Loftis' teaching certificate is also in jeopardy. He said he may no longer be able to teach the lessons he wishes someone would have taught him years ago.

"I also want people to think before they dabble in that industry what they want to with their future," said Loftis.

Or then, moving over to Canada, there's Quebec in 2014 proving that time is no real remedy:

Pre-internet, you could likely move on from a career in pornography with only the occasional wondering glance your way. But now one Quebecois teacher, 73-year-old Jacqueline Laurent Auger, has had her past catch up with her after pupils went online and discovered softcore porn films she appeared in around 45 years previously.

She has now been dismissed from her position teaching drama workshops at the elite Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal. “As educators, we had to ask what message is transmitted to all our students, boys and girls, from the first year of high school to the fifth, by the fact that the teacher of their drama workshops could now be seen on the Internet in the most suggestive of scenes,” the school wrote in an online statement, adding that they wanted to preserve “a calm setting free of allusions or discomfort that is unfavourable to our educational mission.”

Laurent Auger has called the move “completely absurd. I’m 73 years old. When I made those films I must have been 28 or 29. It was to make a living so that after[wards] I could work with great teachers and actors, in Paris and in Quebec. Come on.”

Sure, the culture has shifted in the past decade, but not that much, and not everywhere. So, again, I still don't see it playing out like in your scenario.

Ah, a modern classic.

Ouch. Nine months? And that's enough to tank her teaching career. To be fair, if the 15 year old guys in her classes are all looking up Teacher's nude scenes that's not going to make for good discipline in the classroom.

These are the downsides people don't consider.

Alright, I'll grant you it can sometimes result in them losing a job. And props for researching all these cases. I still don't think it will happen all that often though, and increasingly less with time. Like in your second example, it sounds like the school initially took the side of the teacher, and only decided to fire her after it turned out she was still using her porn name to promote Libertarian politics. And the last one had no trouble working for... 45 years(!?) that's crazy that they still fired her. It will depend on the specific school board and administrator though.

Bonnie Blue has an entire team behind her (no pun intended) and they are world class at creating publicity. They manage to engineer her into relavence by getting her into lega trouble, e-drama and on interviews with legacy media. Far more people follow her e-drama than actually watch her porn. Her latest antics gets tens of millions of views on social media without containing any nudity.

Showing pictures of your privates on only fans isn't going to get you rich. In order to get rich you need a massive following and marketing. If Aella was just posting ass pics should would be making 500 dollars a month. She has turned herself into an influencer within a space with a lot of well paid nerdy men.

The problem is all the women who don't understand this and start an OF, make 300 dollars a month yet every one around them will eventually find their nudes.

The attention economy is just brutal since it is genuinely zero sum in nature and almost all rewards occur on a power law distribution.

Ain't nobody manufacturing more 'attention' in a factory somewhere, you've got to fight to draw from the same limited well as everyone else.

So you get the Red Queen's race as personified by Bonnie Blue (you have to do increasingly extreme and controversial acts, or pretend to, just to stay relevant), and the crab bucket effect where EVERYONE else you're competing with is looking for the smallest opportunity rip you down to give themselves a chance to ascend.

Does anyone remember Hawk Tuah girl in this the year of our Lord two-thousand-and-twenty-five?

Now... we're adding AI into this mix and expect the top performers in this space to get absolutely CUTTHROAT to stay on top. Although a few of them might decide to gracefully retire with their millions.

Are you guys trying to rediscover the labor theory of value?

It's a good culture war post because it demands a better answer than "This is why we need shame back in society!"

First, let's look at the opposite side of the coin; Men. The equivalent of sex work for men is violence. The Bonnie Blue equivalent is probably a professional athlete but, as many posters downthread pointed out, Bonnie Blue is the top 0.0001%. The median is truck stop stripper, part-times OnlyFans'er, club bottle girl who gets groped every weekend. For men? That's something like strip club bouncer, semipro MMA fighter, and Marine Corps Infantry Lance Corporal (no I am not joking). They're paid something like 40% of the median wage (often less) to risk maiming and death. Society views them mostly as disposable and, in cases like the MMA fighter, perhaps, kind of a weirdo. The USMC infantry vet gets some "thank you for your service!" awkwardness at times, the free breakfasts on veterans day, and a good rate from USAA, but then has to deal with the VA for his horrible migraines, busted knees and hips, and/or panic attacks.

And yet I, and many others like me, absolutely still see military service as a great job choice, be it temporary or career. And I see being a semi-pro MMA fighter as probably not something you should bank on working out (like NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) but, if you want to do it for some time because you love it, go right ahead. Strip club bouncer, eh, I've got some personal issues with that (related: Today is a Holy Day of Obligation, everyone make to get to mass). But let's just smooth out that rough edge and say bouncer at a nightclub. From me, you get a shrug - probably not a career, but if the cash is good for now, take it. Work on a plan to build a different and better career.

The point is is that male violence as a "method of employ" is absolutely permissible (so long as the employ itself isn't illegal; gangs, mafia, etc.) And sex work as a method of employ is not. Because sex is a special category of activity that is 1) at the core of the basic political unit, the family and b) the only thing (for now, sigh) that results in the continuation of the species. It's too socially valuable to be commoditized. That's my argument against sex work. You, a young woman, are selling yourself short and also engaging in some seriously anti-social and socially damaging activities even if it's just pictures of your unclad self on OnlyFans. And this is, in no small part, because of the power law issue other commentators posted.

If Bonnie Blue wants to go out do all of these disgusting things for money, that's really up to her. She isn't forcing these men to do it with (to?) her. They are also making their own slimeball choices. But then you have the literally millions of young girls who get into stripping, porn (traditional), and onlyfans. They do it because "sex is fun!" (TM) and "no one should judge you!" It's a bill of goods underneath a bridge I have for sale. Soon enough, these totally normal girls realize holy shit this is not for me, and nope out of there. But there's a long distance between how those girls are going to feel versus how the guy who got into his first bouncer-fight at the club felt. To me, there is an intrinsic, basic human reason for that (see above). And those that promote "sexual self-expression" (what in the hell is even that?) are promoting a kind of spirital semi-suicide under the satanic word -"fun."

Addendum - to close the loop on male violence jobs.

These kind of jobs aren't good for the long term. Even the most badass Navy SEAL is retired by 45 at the latest, and that's an outlier. Unlike sex work, as well, they can all be done - even as a FULL career - without getting to the point of interpersonal violence. A lot of bouncing is standing around looking intimidating (and vomiting girls). If you joined the military in 1980, there was a not so bad shot you could've done 20 years without ever actually being in combat (deploying is different than combat, remember).

Sports, especially MMA, I will admit, are a little different. The NFL CTE "scandal" revealed how a lot of guys were actually destroying themselves, unknowingly, for decades. I suppose my argument might fall down a little here but I'll weasel out of it a little by saying that in sports no one is actually trying to kill the other person.

It’s really not a good post.

More like a window into a bizarro-verse where economics don’t exist, “everyone knows” that the OP’s views are the only moral ones, but “we” won’t risk offending our ruling feminist cabal.

I appreciate your willingness to write a more sane version.

The quintessential dude asks: Would you suck a dick for a million dollars?

A lot of people today will never marry. A lot of peoples children will turn out to be screw-ups. A lot of people have no social standing, get no respect, and are at the end of whatever stick is being swung around. They, unlike Bonnie Blue, work very hard and still get no money.

I think what most people feel when thinking of the huge amounts money these women are making is denigration. They see their own lot in life as even lower than that of a prostitute.

Bonnie Blue is the most extreme example, and is only held high since she is doing viscerally disgusting things that people can look down on. I mean, fuck a thousand dudes for a million dollars? Hell no. But outside of that there are thousands of girls making executive level salaries dancing on TikTok with an OnlyFans on the side. Every blue collar working guy is an objective loser in comparison. It's humiliating to know that there are teenage girls shaking their ass on camera for more money than they will ever make. The economy has to be a joke and your participation is the punchline.

To that end, no, most of these girls will never have trouble finding a boyfriend or creating a small bubble of privacy with all the money they've made. It's all cope. They can buy mansions, hire maids, babysitters, tutors, and never work a single day in their lives after grinding OnlyFans for a few years. There are plenty of pornstars that disappeared and their kids are growing up just fine since the old porn has been long buried with the new.

I can't find the article but a fair few years ago there was an Instagram model owning the Red Pillers back when RooshV and all of that stuff was at a highpoint. She wrote, as I recall, explaining how she got invited to Dubai or somewhere similar. She sucked a few dicks, denigrated herself in front of some rich arabs, and a few weeks later she was out with enough money to last a lifetime. She detailed how she set up investments and savings accounts, she bought an apartment near a university where she would start studying and so on. All in her early or mid twenties.

To a red pill 'high value man', this girl is crushing it. She can do whatever she wants. She looks good, is young, has more money than 99% of her peers. There's no argument. She has the power, men gave it to her.

What's stopping a blue collar working guy from also starting an OnlyFans and advertising to a gay/bi audience? Being straight can be a plus and play to the "turn him gay" fantasy too, or you can just lie the same way female OnlyFans models pretend to be interested in their subscribers. And male instagram models can also get invited to Dubai for highly paid sex work.

The vast majority of female OF whores don't make any real money on the platform. The lower demand and greater competition for male whores on OF means even fewer of them make any real money. This was already the case before OF, with male porn actors making way less per shoot than females.

An argument I've heard is that the vast majority of accounts on OF are barely active. They try it for a few days or a few weeks, upload a few low-effort selfies, and then give up when it doesn't instantly make them rich like they were hoping. Or they just get embarrassed, who knows. But the ones who actually stick with it and grind it out, uploading new content there and on other platforms daily, they tend to make quite good money. Maybe not "mansion in your 20s" money, but much better than most jobs. They have other options to make money too which kinda go together. The typical pattern is like: Make an instagram with sexy non-nude pics, make a twitter that's similar, and then an OF with the nude pics. Depending on how it goes they can make money from sponsorships, work as a model/dancer/promoter for regular clubs, dancer at strip clubs, or just straight up escorting. All of these things go together, and the OF account acts as a force multiplier for getting paid attention in other ways.

To some extent, it does happen: one of the many swerves of the Peanut The Squirrel saga from last year was that the squirrel's owner was doing very gay4pay-looking onlyfans while having a wife. Which could be bisexual, but you can be bisexual and work blue collar, and a lot of the framing was more 'what straight guys think gay guys want' than what even the bottomiest gay guys actually want.

Which points to a part of the problem, if you're a straight guy trying to sell to gay ones. Look at fantasy (art or written) gay4pay or orientation play, and there's a lot of stuff that's not just going to be uncomfortable for a straight guy to try (though there's definitely a lot of that: forget taking a dildo, who wants to wax their chest), but will also just be very hard to credibly recognize or sell.

On the other hand, SquirrelDaddy was an OnlyFans making in the top 1% and maybe top 0.1% of male earners, so maybe my tastes are just weird.

That said, the available business strategies are less viable. The nice thing about gay courting's that there's somebody into everyone, and sometimes the breakdowns can come in surprising ways (eg, one of the top 0.001% male earners on OF is outright obese)... but there's not necessarily many people into anyone. The entire male side of onlyfans pulls in about a fourth of the revenue that the women's side does, and the top (hurr hurr) is saturated with tops that are, to be blunt, not possible for the average man even if he wanted to. Any of the highest-end creators in any space tend to have people who are doing that career as a full time job and a half, but to be blunt, almost all of the top male creators are genetic freaks. Ain't no amount of zinc and pineapple that's doing that.

I wouldn't recommend a gay (or 'I'm just posing naked for my fans, which I totally assume are women') actor go to Dubai for sex work, though. The UAE's more extreme punishments are theoretical even for their own inhabitants, but they have made life miserable for tourists in the past. While those punishments theoretically include M/F situations, they're much more likely to hit man-on-man ones.

who wants to wax their chest

That does sound quite unpleasant!

They can buy mansions, hire maids, babysitters, tutors, and never work a single day in their lives after grinding OnlyFans for a few years.

I can't find the article but a fair few years ago there was an Instagram model owning the Red Pillers back when RooshV and all of that stuff was at a highpoint. She wrote, as I recall, explaining how she got invited to Dubai or somewhere similar. She sucked a few dicks, denigrated herself in front of some rich arabs, and a few weeks later she was out with enough money to last a lifetime. She detailed how she set up investments and savings accounts, she bought an apartment near a university where she would start studying and so on.

And you actually believe such claims??

There are plenty of pornstars that disappeared and their kids are growing up just fine since the old porn has been long buried with the new.

Yes, I concede that could plausibly have happened in the case of some women that are old hags at this point and have performed in films that were released on VHS and were later never digitized.

A lot of people today will never marry. A lot of peoples children will turn out to be screw-ups. A lot of people have no social standing, get no respect, and are at the end of whatever stick is being swung around. They, unlike Bonnie Blue, work very hard and still get no money.

Hold up. Who are you specifically referring to in this case? Average blue collar men?

What is not to believe? The top 1% of OnlyFans creators can generate everything from 20 to 100k per month. Factor in prostitution on the side and you can make a lot of money.

Yes, I concede that could plausibly have happened in the case of some women that are old hags at this point and have performed in films that were released on VHS and were later never digitized.

No one remembers the vast majority of pornstars, even those that were digital. Remove the makeup, change the hairstyle and have the publishers start scrubbing your scenes and/or stop republishing them. There's no pornstar purgatory for those girls that could cope with the profession.

Hold up. Who are you specifically referring to in this case? Average blue collar men?

Guys I've worked with. To clarify, some of them do make money, but it's generally not a lot.

Guys I've worked with. To clarify, some of them do make money, but it's generally not a lot.

So I’m assuming your argument is that many of them have such a low social status as men and earn so little that many of them will never marry and never gain social standing and respect despite working hard. Fair enough. But there’s a difference between eroding your own chances of marriage and respectability in exchange for money as a woman with society’s tacit approval and being downtrodden as a man to such an extent that you’re effectively shut out of marriage and respectability.

have the publishers start scrubbing your scenes and/or stop republishing them

How? Why would they do that? You don't own the scenes.

Remove the makeup, change the hairstyle

Let's assume that you're a guy in high school whose mother "starred" in a bunch of porn flicks but generally remained obscure and only one or two of those flicks were ever digitized and uploaded online. All it takes for your social standing to be demolished by bullies is one asshole finding those flicks and identifying your mom.

I don't understand the relevance of the difference you point at. The point is working men look at media where the success of public prostitution is advertised and they respond with a series of doomposting, copes and other dismay. Something about it fundamentally emotionally affects them.

How? Why would they do that? You don't own the scenes.

By asking the publisher. Professional porn production is a small world. Most want to keep a good reputation with former or would be actors. There are also laws regarding personal privacy. If you've quit for a few years you can easily make a case that your privacy is being harmed by the publication of pornographic material involving you.

I am sure there are a few kids who have had a hard time because their moms did porn. But there are also a lot of pornstars no one remembers or sees. The notion that they will all be facing hard times just isn't accurate. In fact most of them wont.

Why are you comparing top 1% on a platform with a blue-collar worker? Top 1% in almost every industry makes a lot of money.

That's who the blue collar workers are comparing themselves to when they see news about the latest OnlyFans sensation making millions in a week or Bonnie Blue sucking off a small township. It's not just about the money but how you get it.

Do the top 1% of blue-collar men have such complaints though? Because that'd be the valid parallel here.

The feelings of blue collar workers are not invalid just because they are not in the top 1%. I don't understand where that contention comes from.

They're not looking at engineers or sports stars going 'life is so unfair, this economy is a joke, how could these people make more money than me'. They are seeing prostitutes publicly sexually denigrating themselves on camera and making millions and it revolts them on some level.

If your argument is that they should not feel what they feel because of a wage comparison between clue collar workers and prostitutes then you are missing the point of the contention. Because it's not just about the money.

It's humiliating to know that there are teenage girls shaking their ass on camera for more money than they will ever make. The economy has to be a joke and your participation is the punchline.

Ouch, this is brutal to read but so true. It has always been thus, but at least in the past women & especially prostitutes were extremely low status. Now that prostitution is becoming normalized, the sting is far deeper.

Uh, doesn’t the average OF girl have quite poor earnings?

I read it was around 100 dollars. What are you getting at?

She detailed how she set up investments and savings accounts

Someone with that level of planning is probably even rarer in sex work than "hot, young, willing to do it all". The wealthy young sports stars and entertainers often follow the same trajectory: young, talented, making more money than they ever imagined or that their (working class/lower middle class) family would see in their entire lifetime, and along with that is the usual entourage of hangers-on and ways to spend all that money (including the tales we've all heard of managers and agents ripping them off). They generally are too young, too little educated, and not smart enough to plan ahead to the end of the career (which comes faster than they imagine) and when all the money will dry up. The smart ones get sponsorships and gigs as spokespersons for products and licensing of their image, savings and investments, plans for what they'll pivot to when the popularity wanes and the money dries up. But even there, starting up your own business can fail. The less smart ones? They're the ones end up "I used to be famous" and the subjects of "where are they now?" questions.

I'm afraid I didn't save a source on this, just the numbers, but the last studies I saw claimed that:

  • $12K/year is a 92nd percentile income for camgirls
  • $50K/year is a 99th percentile income on OnlyFans
  • The median OnlyFans income is around $2K/year
  • The modal OnlyFans income is 0.

Yeah, there was some girl who made $1M in 24 hours. That's how dualized labor markets work. From the outside, it looks awesome to be a multimillionaire actor, ball player, musician, or whatever, because the ones who become successful are almost tautologically the ones that everybody knows about, and the ones who don't make it big become invisible.

No, "most of these girls" cannot "buy mansions, hire maids, babysitters, tutors, and never work a single day in their lives after grinding OnlyFans for a few years". The ones who metaphorically won the lottery can, sure, but every blue collar working guy can literally buy a lottery ticket if he wants.

That said, I'm not sure if there's much more downside to the metaphorical lottery ticket than there is to the literal one. You do have to choose between being open about your sexual past with future partners (and risk scaring some off) or being tight-lipped about it (hurting the level of emotional intimacy you can share), but that's been a tradeoff that everybody's had to face since the Sexual Revolution, whether there were cameras involved or not. "I only did it for the money" might even inspire less jealousy than the standard "I loved my exes just as much, but don't let that make you pessimistic about our future; tenth time's the charm!" Worst case scenario: at some point somebody's going to set up a Reverse Image Search with much more advanced AI than Google originally had and much fewer scruples than Google currently has, and they're going to suck in every random archived torrent they can find ... but under what circumstances is even that really going to backfire on you? The modern liberal consensus is "that's your own business", and the most common conservative consensus is "that's awful, but you can repent and be forgiven".

I'm not convinced. The girls famous enough for the argument that their 'OnlyFans fame will bite them in the ass one day' to be applicable are making more than 50k a year. If not on OnlyFans specifically then on Instagram and other things.

You don't need to be "famous". I know of one girl I went to uni with who started doing porn. She isn't really famous or big (although I am sure she has a decent income with some business acumen), but pretty much every common acquaintance seems to know about this. Especially very difficult to escape if you make content in any other language than English since such markets are rather small.

The quintessential dude asks: Would you suck a dick for a million dollars?

As the joke goes:

Since you're the one earning much less than a million dollars, you're the one sucking dick here - I provide fellatio services.

Jokes aside, I recall recently reading that the median OnlyFans earnings are far below the wage of a blue collar working guy. Hardly soothing for him since he can't even earn an extra hundred bucks a month on the side that way the way those young women can.

And to compare this with the good old times, when was it really not the case that some prostitutes were called geishas or courtesans or favorites or royal concubines and enjoyed wealth and social standing that was even higher than Aellas of today?

median OnlyFans earnings are far below the wage of a blue collar working guy. Hardly soothing for him since he can't even earn an extra hundred bucks a month on the side that way the way those young women can.

Wait, why can't a blue-collar working guy earn an extra hundred bucks a month blowing dudes on the side?

She’ll very probably never marry or if she does, it’ll be to a man who’s a laughingstock.

Riley Reid, Mia Khalifa and Sasha Grey all turned out fine. Riley Reid is happily married to a handsome wealthy man and they have a child and apparently a nice family life. Faye Reagan on the other hand is one of those homeless tunnel people living underneath Las Vegas. Dakota Skye died of a fentanyl overdose. Usually the fate of ex-porn actresses (like anyone else) is more tied to whether or not they were already a drug addict with poor time preference and impulse control issues, not any kind of scarlet lettering from what they used to do. Given that Bonnie Blue seems to be a skilled intelligent grifter, she will probably turn out fine.

What I don’t get is why everyone sees this as some kind of moral issue and not the massive late-Soviet Union-style failure of economic allocation that it really is.

What I don’t get is why everyone sees this as some kind of moral issue and not the massive late-Soviet Union-style failure of economic allocation that it really is.

Can you elaborate please?

Faye Reagan on the other hand is one of those homeless tunnel people living underneath Las Vegas. Dakota Skye died of a fentanyl overdose.

There does indeed seem to be a high mortality rate among female performers due to suicide and drug overdose. Maybe it's just a case of bad vibes about the porn industry but I'm sure the statistics bear it out.

Usually the fate of ex-porn actresses (like anyone else) is more tied to whether or not they were already a drug addict with poor time preference and impulse control issues, not any kind of scarlet lettering from what they used to do.

Also due to the psychological damage that comes with porning in general, I assume.

Can you elaborate please?

On paper the free market is supposed to route goods and services in a somewhat rational manner and create value. In practice the system seems to have gone loony and catabolic in a lot of ways. What you are seeing now is the capitalist free market equivalent of the endemic product and commodities shortages seen in the late Soviet Union. In western countries, industry is gone, the critical infrastructure that allows for the market to exist is falling apart, wages are going down. There are shortages of housing, rising food prices, rising automobile prices, massive shortages of critical armaments and military equipment, shortages of computer chips. Meanwhile bajillions of dollars are being pumped into irrational and economically wasteful Skinner boxes like narcotics, gambling, OnlyFans, and video game micro-transactions.

In 50 years Bonnie Blue’s picture is probably going to be in a history book somewhere in the chapter about how the United States economically fell apart and dissolved.

She’ll very probably never marry or if she does, it’ll be to a man who’s a laughingstock

I would expect her to wind up in multiple relationships with high status entertainer men- isn’t that what sex symbols usually do?

That just makes you a loser in women's eyes.

I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

I'm not sure what is the problem here that you're positing an explanation for. Why assume that she makes that money because "society condones it"? Society doesn't decide what she makes, outside of the very broad question of sex work legality that is out of the hands of most of society anyway. A minority of rich whales decide what she makes. Society can condone it or be salty about it all they want, it's not going to stop whales from whaling.

I'm not sure what is the problem here that you're positing an explanation for. Why assume that she makes that money because "society condones it"?

OP was asking wtf is going on with Bonnie Blue earning such amounts of money. I offered an explanation that I think is the most plausible. I'm assuming that anything that routinely happens in society without inviting widespread outrage and without getting banned/suppressed is by definition at least tacitly condoned by it.

Yeah "supply and demand" is the explanation here. Reading more into it is as superstitious as reading tea leaves.

I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

This isn't even true. Most porn stars make less -- it's a steep pyramid.

It's the same with kids that want to become soccer stars or football greats -- sure Messi & Brady made $100M a year or whatever, but it's just not representative. Or rock stars or rappers. There is an allure of glamor and a draw of the very top of the pyramid, but the reality is that most live music acts are done in a local dive bar for barely a few bucks. Some kid in the hood really thinks he's gonna be the next Drake?

This seems like a far more parsimonious explanation about stardom.

A few porn producers make a lot of money; most make little. A few musicians make a lot of money; most make little. A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little. Society condemning or condoning the activity has little to do with it, so long as the activity is legal.

If there is a market for a type of a product (porn, music, soccer-play), and the product scales (once you make a song, you can make many copies for cheap), then the bulk of the market gets captured by the top talent.

Warehouse workers, on the other hand, get close to similar payment. Maybe the more experienced ones get three as much as newbs, but not a thousand times more. Warehouse work doesn't scale.

A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little

This is directionally correct, but European football is unusual among sports in how much less true it is than elsewhere. Large European countries have multiple divisions of fully-professional football, all of which pay the players a living wage. England, for example, has: Premiership (20 clubs, make the big money you expect of pro athletes) EFL Championship (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is around £500k annually, which is more than newly promoted IB MD or Biglaw partner, but less than the average for those groups) EFL League One (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is north of £100k, with stars earning £200-300k and even benchwarmers getting in the upper-middle class range if they play outside London). EFL League Two (24 clubs, average salary around £50k which is comfortably middle-class) Nationwide Conference (24 clubs, not required to be fully professional by league rules but all currently are, salary figures not published but anecdotally most are in the £20-30k range except for a few stars). Plus a few fully-professional clubs, or individual star players with pro contracts at semi-professional clubs, in the lower leagues.

Rosters are 25 per club plus youth players, so that represents a total of c. 3000 players making a full-time income as professional footballers. Essentially all of them are better off (relative to overall lower wages in the UK) than minor league baseball players.

A few porn producers make a lot of money; most make little. A few musicians make a lot of money; most make little. A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little.

If there is a market for a type of a product (porn, music, soccer-play), and the product scales (once you make a song, you can make many copies for cheap), then the bulk of the market gets captured by the top talent.

I basically agree with this. Although I would add that the stigma of sex work is probably a factor. In other words, the competition to be a superstar porn actress is probably less intense than the competition to be a superstar musician or athlete. Because a high percentage of women don't want the social stigma of being a sex worker.

I think a better comparison would be to compare a warehouse worker with a run-of-the-mill sex worker. e.g. a dancer at a strip club. In that case, the dancer makes more money (presumably because the market is compensating her for accepting stigma and also because she will quickly age out of the job) but she's not making ridiculously more money.

I saw a bit of discussion downthread about Taiwan, and as a resident doomer, that's like red meat to me. Plus, I recently saw this actually fairly good and accurate - but still incomplete - WSJ article about what an invasion might look like in terms of nuts and bolts. But talk about the actual mechanics of an invasion get all the attention, so let's talk about something different: what does the world look like after an invasion, assuming it happens?

Unfortunately to answer this question we do need to backtrack and still break down exactly the way in which this invasion happens. There are, essentially, 3 methods for invasion:

Option One: The First Strike. To oversimplify, because of the reality of the geographic and power arrangement, much like Pearl Harbor, a similar idea presents itself. If you can knock out enough American ships, bomb the island bases, bomb bases in Japan (possibly; also Korea, Philippines are possible), attack the GPS and satellite systems, accompany it with a massive cyberattack on both military and civilian targets, cutting undersea cables, and so on, you make a military response ultra-hard mode, giving China carte blanche to invade at their own pace with the wind at their backs. Lots of the details are untested, but there's good reason to think that China would be at least moderately successful at this, depending on how hard they want to commit (a big question). And unlike WW2, it's unclear that America has the industrial strength or the allies willing to pitch in to win a war if it drags on longer. It should be said that buildup to this is virtually guaranteed to be noticed in advance. On Taiwan proper, the ultimate goal, this manifests as an amphibious invasion similar to what's described in the article. It's an outright fight. (One I tend to think is overstated in difficulty, but that's beside the point)

Essentially, three outcomes. The US wins, China loses in the initial stages pretty significantly. China wins, takes Taiwan, does very well against the US (and possibly allies). Or, fighting drags on and WWIII kicks off. Whether or not Taiwan itself folds with a big or a small fight, or even wins, is within this WWIII-esque scenario, because a first strike virtually guarantees a war. It's conceivable China might try something smaller-scale, thinking America might take it on the chin, but we all know America usually punches back.

Option Two: The Slow Grinder. China, possibly taking advantage of local Taiwanese political developments and/or American weakness, blockades Taiwan. Sleeper agents, propaganda, and intimidation blanket Taiwan. America dithers whether or not to intervene, because that would basically mean that America was starting the war, over an island they never formally committed to defend with arms (it's complicated) very far from home.

Two outcomes. Taiwan and/or America capitulates is one possibility. Though I suppose it might matter who blinks first? Or, China's bluff is called and America breaks the blockade, China backs down. I think politically, actions short of a blockade but muscly moves have similar outcomes and so belong in the same general bucket. If the blockade turns into a fight, outcomes also collapse more or less to the first option, albeit with notably different starting assumptions in terms of a fight. I'm not going to call that out as a separate outcome for simplicity.

Option Three: The Sneak Attack. Yep, you heard that right. China has been doing more and more major military exercises. It happens sometimes that these turn into real invasions. Even with some intel, people often second guess this - Russia-Ukraine being an obvious example. It's plausible. Central to this case is the somewhat Chinese military competence, but mostly the degree of Taiwanese resistance. Personally, I think that any appreciable number of Chinese soldiers get into Taiwan, and the nation folds without much of a fight. Picture this: internet blackout. President killed in a sneak missile strike and/or assassination. Chinese troops both helicopter in by the hundreds from offshore helicopter carriers, land on beaches, use temporary piers to land even more. Civilians don't actually fight back much, due to bad equipment, poor training, and poor communication. China eventually overwhelms with numbers, and the US doesn't think it's realistic to land boots on the ground to retake. Most of the Taiwanese strategy hopes to deny beach landings, and if they happen anyways, it's a bit handwavy "urban warfare".

So. Two outcomes. Taiwan loses is clearly one, and one that I find likely in this case. It could also be that China embarrasses itself and fails abysmally in the landing, and then backs off, giving it up as lost. I'll count this as its own outcome, because a failed invasion could still collapse into a larger hot war outcome.

So, we have approximately seven outcomes across three scenarios: China attacks the US first, and either wins or loses quickly, or else the world experiences a longer war. A longer threat or blockade results in China backing down, or the US capitulating (or Taiwan itself). Possibly accompanied by a political settlement or backroom deal. And finally, China takes Taiwan or fails all by its own, quickly.

What does that mean for the world order?

What's striking to me is that nearly none of these outcomes are actually very good for the US, like at all. Even the "good" options! Being attacked and winning? We all know what 9/11 neurosis did on the US, this would be just as major a shift in the attitudes, if not more. I suppose a smaller, cowardly first strike (or a neutralized one) is plausible, resulting in a more 'meh' reaction, but I don't find it likely. China failing a sneak attack might be viewed as good, but I worry about that. China has, historically, not reacted very well to national humiliations. A loss just kicks the can down the road to some other issue, in my view.

The one truly "good" option is where China tries a blockade (or threatens one), and the US resolves the situation with diplomacy - without selling out Taiwan. It's just that... that seems wishful thinking. Have you listened to what China has been saying for literal decades? They are dead-set on taking Taiwan. Maybe they could be (fooled into?) thinking that Taiwan will eventually vote itself into becoming a protectorate or part of China, by its own internal political process. Accepting the status quo.

Of course, that's the whole pin in it, right? I'm taking for granted that a conflict happens, or that China at least makes some kind of move. But isn't that a reasonable base case? The "window" won't be open forever, and we all know how groupthink can take over organizations. On the other hand, it could be I'm excessively poo-pooing this option. Successfully solving the crisis with diplomacy, maybe an economic deal, could also be great for the world, with one less looming crisis over everyone's heads. Maybe it's an agreement to hold a vote in Taiwan once and for all to settle it. Dunno.

I should note that all of these assume a hostile Taiwan, but that's also not a solid, fully given assumption! It only takes a single friendly or weak President to sell out their own country and offer diplomatic cover for the takeover. The US would find it ranging from awkward to impossible to intervene 'against Taiwan's wishes' so to speak, even if it's only a cover and doesn't represent the people. Additionally, and very critically, we've seen a "little green men" approach work in Crimea, so never underestimate the value of plausible deniability and the wide variety of "grey zone" ops, paired with misinformation.

What do Europe and other Asian allies do? That's a wrinkle I didn't address. Might be meaningful. There IS, I suppose, one nice outcome where US allies help us out in the negotiations, or even in combat, and our ties deepen, creating an even stronger power bloc worldwide by virtue of shared goals and arms.

What about the scenarios that are bad for the US/Taiwan? Here's where things get interesting, and I'm curious to know your thoughts. China winning a first-strike, and abject US defeat is plainly fascinating. In a single stroke the world order is upended. Americans are now insecure at their place in the world, outraged that they were beaten, playing the blame game. Perhaps they re-unite and re-dedicate themselves to making a comeback in 10 years. But either way the hold is broken. De-dollarization probably accelerates, global trade is now China-dominated via increased sea and political and economic power. China now has a guaranteed seat at any world table it wants in any international incident.

China winning a lightning strike? Honestly I view this as somewhat status quo, believe it or not. The US might lose a little face, but we never like actually, fully guaranteed we'd defend Taiwan this whole time (strategic ambiguity). Think Hong Kong - protest, followed by quiet acceptance. I view this status quo-like state, to be clear, as mildly good for China. The biggest thing is that China would now have access to the crown jewels of tech: GPUs. That is a pretty big deal, even if you're an AI pessimist.

"WWIII" is... well, I have no idea. Worst case, nukes get exchanged (maybe half a dozen). Russia gets involved on China's side. Things spiral out of control as many countries get pulled into conflict (Japan, Korea, North Korea, etc all have opportunities). Abroad, the American distraction provides plenty of cover for other wars to start (Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, various African countries, all can act with temporary impunity).

At any rate, I'm curious if one of these post-invasion scenarios captures the attention of anyone else. The US has been the head honcho for so long, it's hard to imaging a world where they've been beat solid and perhaps even retreat into a new generation of isolation.

And why is not the following scenario pictured - China invades Taiwan and USA shrugs. China doesn't seem to be too keen on military domination of the eight dash line, you have both okinawan and phillipino islands a stone toss away - you can contain them just as good there. There is no domino theory like in Vietnam. Does this island is worth so much USA blood? During the cold war the USA was scared by mostly by USSR ideology, not by their expansionism. There is no ideological difference this time. CCP are more laises faire capitalistic than all the other big players.

It pretty clearly is? Slow Grinder + America Capitulates, or Sneak Attack + America shrugs were listed pretty obviously in the set of possible outcomes. And combat in the South China Sea doesn't necessarily favor the US and its allies - although clearly we have tons of assets right there, China is also pretty nearby and with Taiwan they have more room to maneuver and the Philippines in particular has to pay greater attention to their northeast. But mostly, China has a decent number of semi-hardened airstrips built on the dredged islands there (in direct contravention of their promises to leave the area demilitarized, I might add). Still, the point about containment is a decent one - for us, perhaps, but not for Japan and Korea, and we still have plenty of assets there too.

Part of the whole reason to explore these scenarios is to get a broader, big-picture view of why the US should or should not defend Taiwan. It's not just about the near-term, it's about the medium and long-term. There is in fact a domino theory of sorts in some foreign policy circles, which is that if we decline to defend Taiwan, on top of the Ukraine thing, on top of the NATO wishy-washiness, suddenly there's really good reason to believe that the US cannot be trusted to honor mutual defense pacts (this is true even if we've taken pains to avoid anything even approaching a formal pact with Taiwan - perception matters). On top of that, an argument is made that taking Taiwan is a line where it's clear that China now has full, superpower impunity to do what it wants. On that note, I'd be interested in your thoughts as to whether or not the international community, such that it is, would be able to levy significant sanctions on China for a Taiwan move, or if such would even be wise.

In terms of ideology, that's not the threat. It's more about political-economic power. Right now China can't pull the kind of things we can do, like just randomly threaten Venezuela. They don't have the room or the respect. If they take Taiwan, it's a different ball game, no matter which way they take it. China can now use gunboat diplomacy in the following decade, in addition to economic coercion. And de-dollarization might also accelerate. The stakes are real.

And then on top of all that, there's just general sadness that a decently-functioning democracy, where people govern themselves, is taken over for nothing but pride and ego reasons by a non-democratic one.

China doesn't seem to be too keen on military domination of the eight dash line, you have both okinawan and phillipino islands a stone toss away - you can contain them just as good there.

The PRC has been building military bases all over the nine-dash line. And Taiwan actually is strategically critical; if the PLAN can base out of its east coast, they can more credibly threaten a blockade of Japan or South Korea (they can't do that now because the narrow, shallow straits might as well be labelled "insert sea mines here"). Would also allow them to put their ballistic missile subs into deeper water and hide them better.

The United States is going to sell-out Taiwan. The discussion we need to be having is what our price should be.

I propose 500 billion dollars, accomplished via the cancelation of China-held treasuries.

Sell-out in what sense? IMO the most likely longterm situation if China continues to be economically ascendant is that the most Hawkish Taiwanese literally die off and the culture reorients itself towards the Sinosphere.

Even if it where in the us interest to sell out(which this administration won’t, have you ever looked at any of Colby’s views?) Taiwan, that number is completely ridiculous. 500 billion, seriously? If the country really needed that kind of money it could get it easily.

Maybe I'm wumaoing too close to the sun but my understanding is that younger Taiwanese people are increasingly open to reunification or some sort of a new deal. Taiwan's got large income inequality & economic issues + a few popular democratic movements have been smote on grounds of being too open to negotiating with the mainlanders plus the nice parts of China are now nice enough to make it feel more viable to join the Sinosphere.

younger Taiwanese people are increasingly open to reunification or some sort of a new deal

And one thing I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned here yet is that the Chinese sympathizers are most densely concentrated in Taiwan’s own military forces

You're more reversed the direction than not. If you want a mental model, think more status quo bias that is both anti-reunification and anti-independence.

In Taiwan, it's the older people who are more open to reunification in the sense of 'there might be a deal they'd accept without the threat of death and oppression as the alternative,' and the younger generation who have less familial/emotional attachment to the continent. This is why the KMT, the party descended from the nationalists opposed to the CCP, have increasingly become the 'pro-China' party- they still identify themselves as 'Chinese', whereas the rise of self-identification as 'Taiwanese' is coming from the youth cohort. This is also the cohort who have have had their formative exposure to China being things like the Hong Kong crackdown on what remained of the democracy there, and recognize that they would be on a similar receiving end if they joined the sinosphere. The two-system system was the potential compromise, and the CCP renenged on it.

The age dynamic, it's a similar dynamic to the Korean views of reunification. It's the older Koreans (and increasingly dead) who fought against the North who also had the memory of families on the other side of the partition. Younger Koreans have no such familial sentiment, and are more concerned with the bad effects a reunification could have on them, even if it was from the top.

The relevance of this back for Taiwan is that the youth aren't necessarily 'pro-independence.' Formal independence would credibly mean a war which would be bad for them. The status quo preference bias that works against reunification also works against formal independence. The status quo- which is neither independent or unified- is preferable, and they are open to politicians who maintain that.

This is for the most part true, however there's a small but growing cohort of younger supporters of unification, in part because they're envious of all the shiny new infrastructure on the mainland, but also because the main pro-independence, DPP-voting cohort has aged out of being the cool young rebels and become everyone's cringe parents or teachers who can be triggered by loudly claiming that you identify as Chinese. This group more or less occupies the same ideological niche that the dissident/extremely online right does in American political discourse these days.

I'm mostly basing this off meandering around Taiwan previously plus a few interactions with young people studying abroad and the sentiment I get is that identifying as broad Chinese diaspora is cool whilst Taiwan's no longer doing much for people who aren't already landed or otherwise exposed to the cabal of large established businesses actually holding the economy together. Maybe I'm indexing more for people of pro-China sympathies since I've met these people either in China or Malaysia.

My loose understanding is that Taiwanese youth unemployment is high, and generally economic prospects for those who are not fortunate enough to get into the absolute biggest businesses are slim.

Young Taiwanese who enthusaistically identify as Taiwanese abroad as opposed to broad Chinese diaspora are nowadays volunteering themselves for PRC targeting. Those overseas police stations aren't just for monitoring 'Chinese of non-rebellious provinces.'

Taiwan's youth unemployment isn't great (about 12%), but it's not exceptional for the region either, and it's considerably better than China (about 20%). There may well be some 'the grass is always greener,' but 'our economy will be so much better if we join China!' would be more of a 'maybe China will hyper-subsidize the populace while installing the police state' as opposed to reverting to a higher median.

Yeah but the China they're interested in is coastal developed China which is how they expect a Taiwan umbrella situation would be managed. The overseas China police station is going to do... what exactly to a random Taiwanese person, there's plenty of patriotic Taiwanese around as well.

China can’t win WWIII: it is too dependent on foreign trade, which the US navy is more than capable of cutting off. Without ocean trade China cant supply the oil, iron, coal, or copper it needs to run that massive industrial base of theirs, and can’t supply the food it needs to feed its people. Nor does it have a blue water navy that can escort oil tankers from Iran: forget about escorting iron and coal freighters from Australia, there’s no way the Aussies will be trading with China if China attacks a NATO member. They’ll die on the vine without global trade, and don’t tell me they’ll bring it in by rail from Russia and India: they don’t have nearly enough throughput with Russia to supply even a quarter of their import needs, they have even less throughput with India, and India hates China and would love nothing more than to see them wither. They’ll probably jump in near the end and take Tibet while they’re at it.

In other words, the First Strike option is China committing suicide.

In other words, the First Strike option is China committing suicide.

Well, there is the off chance that the first strike succeeds very quickly beyond expectations and before the economic/industrial effects take hold.

I don't give it much chance of success, but if China manages to strike first and seize the island by force with low/minor US & Taiwanese casualties, it changes the calculus of the reaction.

I'd probably say 1 chance in 5 that works. And the downside of failure is pretty high.

There's a significant chance that it works. I give it 2 in 5, personally, though reasonable people disagree. However, that's missing the point a little bit. Our estimation is not the relevant probability of interest! The relevant probability is what Xi Jingping believes the probability to be, and that is going to be filtered through the presentations from his own military wing - loyalists, actually, since he performed a purge just a few years ago.

The other shoe, of course, is whether the US would stomach a defeat. We aren't used to it. It's unclear how the President (whoever it is at the time) or the populace would react. The assumption is that we'd do a second Pearl Harbor, but other people think we're too soft for that now or wouldn't have a "miracle" that the carriers escape to rely on.

I think that peaceful reunification is the base scenario at this point and Americans are a bit high on their own supply. It's not that there's more enthusiasm for it, but there is definitely less visceral rejection. The fundamental case against it has been not «freedoms and democracy» (Taiwanese adopted LGBT stuff largely to please their patrons) but the belief that the Mainland is a big, embarrassingly poor North Korea where you worship Mao, eat gutter oil, work like a dog at Foxconn and die.

It's still popular with the older Taiwanese, but facts change and speak for themselves. As a young graduate you can earn more in tier 1 city like Guangdong than in Taiwan, and Guangdong is plainly newer and bigger and cooler. The Mainland is increasingly seen as «awesome» by local influencers, DPP is unpopular (eg for shutting down their nuclear power on a Germany-tier green platform, which ironically makes reunification-via-blockade a lot easier, they'll run out of coal and gas in 2 weeks and their civilian society, nevermind those fabs, stops dead) and getting censorious in apparent desperation, KMT is likely to win this time, Ukraine as of 2025 serves as a warning rather than inspiration. The military buildup on China, including specialized assets like these zany barges that defeat the «few landing-worthy beaches» objection, seems very serious and increasingly impossible to deter. Basically, if you're against China, you can't rely on any shithole level deterrence like geography, they can simply engineer and build their way over it. You need to rely on hard military capability.

And that's the problem, because no matter how porcupine Taiwan gets, the real muscle has to come from the US. And they believe less and less that it will come. Lutnick-style opportunism is widely seen as dismantling their Silicon Shield, and I think they're right – the US that can make chips at home doesn't have an existential stake in Taiwan. China cares about the First Island Chain and about finishing the civil war. The US stopped caring about that back in 1979-1980, and using Taiwan as an opportunity to contain China is only worthwhile if that's the relatively cheap option. It doesn't look cheap. Only chips, then – and once chips are made in Arizona, not even that. There's broader logic about «our allies in the Indopacific» but at the end of the day that's hubris and imperial overextension, all of these arguments are downstream of the ambition to contain China and Win History, and as Trump's National Security Strategy demonstrates, ambitions can be downscaled in response to new circumstances. The US can keep Guam and Okinawa in a world where Taiwan has fallen, and will try to.

So I think that by default, China takes Taiwan within 5-20 years, either by a face-saving «1 Country 2 Systems» arrangement, or with a brief blockade followed by polite demonstration of overwhelming power. I believe China (Xi) has a similar theory and so won't rush into a hot conflict, which serves everyone for the moment just fine, even if me and Xi are in fact wrong.

P.S. People who argue about blockading China are not very familiar with the facts. They aren't dependent on imported food, these soybeans are for pigs. They don't actually biologically need to eat that many pork bellies. They have vast stockpiles too. They're electrifying very rapidly, from cars to trucks to ships now, and in a few short years their core logistics and power generation will be able to maintain wartime economy without any maritime fossil fuel supplies. Commodities like iron ore are harder but that's not even a blockade issue, the US can compel Australia/Brazil/Chile to stop exports. Even then, it's not going to be decisive. The Chinese can just do things, it's actually mesmerizing to see.

and so on, you make a military response ultra-hard mode, giving China carte blanche to invade at their own pace with the wind at their backs

I don't think that works. Even with a massive first strike leading to a hot conventional war with the US right off the bat, if China doesn't actually compel Taiwan to surrender in short order, the US has the easy option of having the blue water navy camp outside of Chinese missile range and completely stop shipping in and out of the country.

This isn't hard mode at all, unless China decides to sally their entire Navy and challenge the US outside the range of their land based assets.

This forces a kind of timeline on it. China can surely survive for a considerable time, but it also puts a limit on it that's not "their own pace" -- they have to either seize the island or fold, they can't just wait.

Did you know that the Navy can blow their entire anti-ship missile arsenal in just a few hours? China has the advantage of time, including in naval engagements at missile range. Edit: There's a legitimately interesting strategy where they accept a large amount of losses on purpose if they manage to get the engagement in a favorable spot. The missile ranges in question don't necessarily favor the US, and camping outside missile range is possible generally, but not if you want to intervene in an actual invasion. They also have built up a fairly sizable oil reserve.

Right, you can’t intervene in an invasion from outside missile range, but you can entirely choke all seaborne commerce.

Hence it puts the timeline pressure on the invasion. Even the largest oil reserve won’t last that long.

China is a continental power with a direct land connection through Central Asia to some of the largest energy producers in the world and Taiwan is an island, every indication is that the timeline for the latter would be much shorter than the timeline for the former.

First, the land connection doesn't and can't carry even a tiny fraction of China's foreign trade, and certainly not enough food and fuel to get through a cold Beijing winter.

Taiwan would have benefit of replenishment via their eastern ports by the largest blue water Navy in the world.

If China absolutely needed to they could drastically increase their rail and pipe infrastructure and could endure a significant decrease in living standards whereas Taiwan could not survive a total blockade in the most literal sense. Even the backwards and isolated China of the Mao era was able to survive isolation and a direct war against the US, why would you think they couldn't survive a naval blockade today?

and no, they wouldn't have "the benefit of replenishment", if the US Navy sailed into China's AShM umbrella (which reaches well beyond Taiwan) it would quickly go from the largest blue water Navy to the largest underwater Navy. Hence why the original post was about how they'd stay out of range and impose a blockade instead.

Increasing infrastructure takes significant time.

China has, historically, not reacted very well to national humiliations.

What incident are you thinking of, exactly? I can't recall of any incident where they've been in an actual position to react to said national humiliations, though that might be due to alot of my focus on China being more historical than present day.

Broadly historically speaking? The Opium Wars left a century+ long impact on the national pysche. Even farther back, the Mongolian invasion was a huge deal. One they ended up (partially) whitewashing into a "Yuan Dynasty" as if it were just a normal thing. More recently? Online Chinese hypernationalist netizens have reacted very harshly to a wide range of perceived insults abroad. Sometimes encouraged by the government, but lately they have had to be restrained in some cases. There are a ton of media examples from the last 10 years.

Edit: and yes, as magicmushrooms said, humiliation implies national weakness which implies governmental weakness, and would indeed threaten the CCP's claim to legitimacy, crazy as it might sound to us here. That's partly why the "how" matters, because some resolutions can be "spun" better than others. Outright military defeat? Yikes. Collapse of the government is just as likely and scary as a vow of revenge, Versailles style.

The impact and influence of hyper-online nationalist Chinese netizens is often very much overstated. The reasons are multifaceted but are essentially that most western “China watchers” are (by very nature of their own demographic - mostly white young men in the Anglosphere - their education and academic interests, their experience in China proper, and their literal profession and their clientele) mostly interested in Chinese views on geopolitics. The reality is that most Chinese have few to no prominent views of geopolitics beyond the bland centrally taught views of the wider society in which they live, they are almost uniquely parochial even when compared to Americans.

So these guys hyperfocus on a relatively small minority of very online young Chinese men who have very strong opinions on what Chinese foreign policy should be and who have strong views on things like the Ukraine War, Israel Gaza, American foreign policy in South America, immigration to Europe and other stuff that people discuss all the time on X.com. Thus even serious professional China analysts often post about the views of “Chinese netizens” as if someone in China was writing about, say, groyper views those of all “American people”, uncritically.

I realize netizens are obviously non-representative, but it's equally true that generalized Chinese patriotism is on the rise, relatively speaking. That was part of the deliberate plan after all! Put your heads down for a decade or two and work single-mindedly to grow economically and scientifically, and only after you deserve respect do you demand it. Whether that patriotism is generalized enough to produce a genuine "war fever" that happens in a wide range of societies is an open question. It's clear the Great Firewall and censorship generally has been somewhat effective in establishing norms and contours to national conversations on some of the issues, ironically that is somewhat a counterbalance. But you also have the increasing popularity of war films, increasing participation in various boycotts after international incidents they don't like, and other sort of second-order effects, so I wouldn't be quite so quick to immediately say that Chinese people don't care about geopolitics at all and will never care.

Ah, that sort of reaction. Fair enough. Question answered, thank you.

The period from the first Opium War to the eventual reunification of the Chinese mainland at the end of the Civil War lasted about a hundred years, hence the Chinese Communist narrative regarding "the century of humiliation", the main consequence of said humiliation being that the regime that lost legitimacy cannot reunite the country and thus needs to be replaced by another.

@EverythingIsFine may be referring to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven - that the Chinese tend to violently chuck out governments that are seen to have failed. If the CPC were forced to relinquish its claim to Taiwan as part of a peace deal, it would have a hard time holding on to power. This potentially means loose nukes.

Would a full-blown attack on GPS satellites not cross the nuclear threshold for the US? Also, it seems like a lot of the elements of the "first strike" scenario you outlined are not ones that short-term countermeasures are readily available to; hence, from a Chinese perspective, signalling willingness, ability and poise to (attack GPS, destroy undersea cables...) and then proceeding to do a full-scale invasion as if the US could be assumed to not intervene (and then executing the "first strike" if it shows signs of doing so after all) seems strictly superior to the "first strike" which would test the initial proposition upfront.

As for the "little green men" scenario, it seems unrealistic for Taiwan for various reasons, because it probably only worked on Crimea due to an alignment of opportune circumstances (geographic proximity, a local low point in Ukrainian state capacity and coherence, overwhelming support for the invaders among the population and frequently even local military units since the UA military had no functioning political alignment machinery at that point) which are all unlikely to be met in Taiwan.

My own sense is that a more likely way a takeover of Taiwan would go would actually be something like blockade -> half-hearted attempt at a blockade run by the US, without a consensus in favour of it -> overwhelming Chinese military response to the blockade run -> no popular consensus behind any sort of "Pearl Harbor 2.0" narrative to rally popular support for a full US war entry -> US limits itself to an economic-political response -> blockade continues, eventually resolved by a Taiwanese surrender or a much more weakly opposed invasion as it has been demonstrated the cavalry won't come.

I'm not positive it would start with GPS satellites, but with the current setup of space weaponry and capabilities it could escalate to that pretty easily. Also, it's hard to justify "we nuked (potentially) millions of people and broke a three quarters of a century long precedent" with "they made our maps harder to read".

Are you suggesting that they can do lots of non- or less-lethal things in their first strike, then? It's possible, but seems unlikely beyond some of the easy fruit like a smaller-scale cyberattack and internet shenanigans. The point of a first strike is to prevent a counterattack, decreasing overall risk. And militarily it seems quite plausible (in their view, which is what matters for their decision making) that they'd be able to prevent US intervention if they took out enough air and sea bases (and carriers, potentially) to buy them the ~2 weeks to do an invasion (would Taiwanese resistance be less if they saw that China beat the US and no aid is coming? Probably yes).

Re: grey-zone tactics, it doesn't have to look exactly the same. What if Zelensky had just lost an election to a Russia-friendly President who rolled over? Would he really be forcibly removed, or would the situation create just enough confusion to allow the tanks to finish rolling into Kiev? I think you underestimate Taiwan's geographic proximity, potential low points in governmental trust, support for China among the population and even political leadership who might stand to gain promotions under a Chinese takeover. What if they hold a sham vote, either among the people or in the legislature? Or even hold a vote, lose it, allege fraud, and use that as an excuse? False flag something? Stage a partial civil war with sleeper agents? Have commandos take hostages? There are a lot of options, and to emphasize this point, they might only need to work for a week or two, and dilute local resistance.

I agree that your scenario seems somewhat likelier than some of the others (though part of me wonders if Chinese military leadership gets too high on their own supply, they could do something 'illogical') - what do you see the world looking like if that happens, US weak response included? Do you think it's a sea change, or just another part of a slow slide towards something else? Personally, I think any Taiwan resolution has the potential to be the biggest geopolitical world event since the end of the Cold War, but I'm open to other perspectives.

Would a full-blown attack on GPS satellites not cross the nuclear threshold for the US?

30 years ago? Probably not. However I can imagine a scenario where someone in the decision loop interprets it as an attempt disable American early warning and missile defense assets in preparation for a more general nuclear strike, and then makes that case to the President.

Today? Absolutely not. The huge expansion of civilian space infrastructure along with massive improvements in the fidelity of both space and earth-based sensors means that we are no longer dependent as we once were on a small number of strategic satellites that could easily be knocked out by an adversary. And with the US representing a super-majority of world's total space lift capacity I think the more likely outcome in the event of such an attack would be a bunch of Chinese Satellites suffering sudden unexplained failures or falling out of the sky for no reason while the US Space Force conspicuously refuses to confirm nor deny playing any role in the matter.

Parsing US Space Command comments carefully, you get the sense that both China and the US have some slightly different advantages in the space realm, it's not universally one side with all the cards. Both have antisat capabilities of at least two varieties. I feel like their attitude right now is medium confident but slightly nervous. And it's worth noting that China is potentially only 3-4 years away from pulling closer to SpaceX, which would jive with potential timelines in terms of lift capacity backstops.

What's striking to me is that nearly none of these outcomes are actually very good for the US, like at all. Even the "good" options!

But it's important to note that many of these "China loses" scenarios are incredibly bad for China. So it's sort of a mutually assured destruction so to speak.

I was actually thinking about this scenario earlier myself, and I think if China wins, it will be essentially bloodless. A modern army requires an immense amount of logistical support, and if left without supplies and air support, will find itself easily destroyed by far inferior and outdated opponents. Even more so an insertion of a bunch of paratroopers and helicopter infantry is just going to get blown to bits by militias with half century old m60 tanks, artillery, and airstrikes. As a result, the "sneak attack" option is essentially a nonstarter. But, on the other hand, the requirements to land a full scale invasion force are so challenging that if the Chinese are able to be in position to make a landing, the war is essentially won already and all resistance on land will be token.

If China can demonstrate an anti-ship missile strike capability credible enough to scare the carriers off, SAM capability to scare the F-35 off, and fighters powerful enough to control the skies, the ability for foreigners to intervene will be seriously blunted. And if the Americans know that getting involved would result in major losses, they'd likely back off without firing a single shot. Unlike Ukraine and Russia, Taiwan is not a near peer power. Their stuff is significantly worse then Ukrainian stuff, and Chinese stuff is significantly better than Russian stuff. Without foreign support, the Chinese would gain air superiority quickly and the land forces would just be sitting ducks.

We have no idea if Chines stuff is actually better than Russian stuff: they haven’t been tested in a war in decades. Russian stuff seemed like it was better than Ukrainian stuff until the war actually started, and Russia fell on its face and revealed it was a paper bear. China might do the same.

The Russian stuff was better than the Ukrainian stuff. The Ukrainians were fighting with

  1. US/NATO weapons
  2. Much more importantly, US/NATO intelligence apparatus. Since Russia has no desire to fight NATO and Ukraine at once, it didn't shoot down US satellites, ISR aircraft, etc. meaning that in a very real sense Ukraine had an easier time of it, in some ways, than NATO would have during a shooting war with Russia.

If Russia had just been fighting Ukraine I think it's very plausible the results would have been "as predicted." My recollection was that NATO intelligence was responsible for ensuring the Ukrainians responded to Hostomel in something like a timely manner. The odds of the Russian shock attack succeeding look much better, I think, if the Russians successfully complete an airbridge and start rolling over Kiev in the opening hours of the war.

I don’t know about better, but they definitely have more. They are probably the only country other than America that could do 2000 PGM strikes a day for two weeks straight.

I dunno: how many of their missiles do you think are filled with sand instead of explosives? Corruption is a real problem in China, and you saw what that led to in Russia: huge amounts of military equipment that was not maintained properly and broke down almost immediately.

you saw what that led to in Russia

It seems to have led to Russia winning the war.

It seems to have led to Russia winning the war.

Yeah but it is/was a massive grindfest when a lot of people thought it was gonna be over in weeks or months.

That’s because those people were morons who didn’t know anything about Ukraine’s actual force composition. They thought Ukraine had roughly the same military strength as Latvia.

And I’m saying that the people saying that China has a superior military to Russia may be the same “morons” who said that Russia would win the war within a month.

It led to Russia needing several years of grinding combat to potentially gain some Ukrainian territory, maybe more if they stick it out longer instead of settling, instead of them cruising into Kiev and victory within a month as they and everyone else expected them to do. We all thought their military was so powerful that Ukraine would be steamrolled. Instead their military is just about capable of beating Ukraine, eventually, at the cost of exhausting their war machine.

Buddy, look at frontline map computer!

I think we actually know what the US win situation looks like, because we already saw it happen.

Picture this: the Chinese decide that their window is closing but they have a moment of opportunity (perhaps after a US or Taiwanese presidential election). Their plan is really simple: surround Taiwan with troops and ships doing increasingly provocative exercises to demonstrate Taiwanese weakness, give Taiwan an ultimatum of some sort (e.g. "stop buying US military hardware") and then when it is denied, a limited ballistic missile strike on Taiwanese C&C facilities, combined with a lightning heliborne assault to seize a port, coordinated with a large amphibious landing. The Chinese decide not to open with an attack on Japan and the US, reasoning that the thousands of ballistic missiles they have in reserve will send a clear deterrent signal and the Taiwanese will give in under the shock of the offensive, capitulating as soon as it is clear that a bridgehead is established, an estimation made based on accurate intelligence assessments of Taiwanese will to resist.

And this is basically correct: just like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US and its allies don't militarily intervene. Unfortunately for China, just like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese government keeps their ultimate plans secret from their own leadership until the last minute for reasons of operational security. This means that the United States, with its sophisticated signals intelligence apparatus, actually has a clearer picture of the battlefield than the Chinese commanders on the ground. This allows the US to do the in-real-life equivalent of "streamsniping" the Chinese, directly transmitting targeting coordinates and other intelligence to Taiwan, while Chinese commanders are operating largely in their own lane, without broader situational awareness of the battlefield. The air assault troops are met by an armored brigade and cut to pieces; ballistic missiles are intercepted or hit empty buildings and airfields; Taiwanese antiship missiles (guided by US assets in orbit, allowing them to hit assets the Taiwanese are blind to) strike vulnerable Chinese naval flotillas that are traveling with their air search radars stowed to avoid broadcasting their position, and the Chinese amphibious assault/port seizure operation runs into a recently planted minefield and is ignominiously sunk by mines designed during the First World War and artillery shells designed during the Second in the last mile before the beach. The survivors are eliminated by tanks and helicopters without making a significant bridgehead.

And that's it. Because the difference between the invasion of Ukraine (where substantially similar events took place but merely shifted the mode of the war) and the invasion of Taiwan is that Russia has a land border with Ukraine and no problem consolidating whatever gains they have, pulling more tanks out of their stockpiles and drafting more men if their first push fails. But an amphibious landing is a much more binary thing, and when the Chinese lose a third of their amphibious and air assault transport capacity? They can't call a time out and build more ships, or dig in and hold ground, as the Russians did. Ten years worth of procurement underwater or stranded on a beach in 72 hours. Sure, the Chinese still have a large fleet of second-tier ships, including many transports, but those will be, if anything, less survivable than the purpose-built amphibious fleet they've lost, and the Taiwanese still have a cool five digits of contact mines in their inventories.

Now, in this situation, the Chinese could attempt a blockade, or nuclear threats. But we're angling for an at least somewhat plausible hypothetical best case scenario for the US here (not necessarily the most likely scenario) so we'll say instead the government collapses in the face of thousands of casualties with nothing substantial to show for it and the military remove the Secretary General from power.

Most likely scenario? Eh, I wouldn't bet on this happening. Possible? Sure, I think so.

give Taiwan an ultimatum of some sort (e.g. "stop buying US military hardware") and then when it is denied, a limited ballistic missile strike on Taiwanese C&C facilities, combined with a lightning heliborne assault to seize a port, coordinated with a large amphibious landing.

The problem with ultimatums is that it telegraphs the next step. By the time the ultimatum is denied, the C&C facilities and all leaders have been dispersed/hardened, all civilian air traffic is stopped and the air defense have orders to destroy anything that flies.

Definitely! But that hasn't stopped it from happening.

give Taiwan an ultimatum of some sort (e.g. "stop buying US military hardware")

"Well, we have no clue how they got thousands of Exocets. You know the French, they'll sell to any despot who can say 'oui': maybe they were laundered through some third party. But we didn't make them."

Worst case, nukes get exchanged (maybe half a dozen).

Half a dozen nukes is not the worst case or a likely case. If the USA detects Chinese launches, it will go full counterforce in an attempt to destroy as much as possible of their arsenal before it's airborne. That in turn means the PRC is in a "use it or lose it" scenario and will likely launch as much as it can (excepting, possibly, the sea leg).

Of course, then there's the issue of the peace terms. If PLA nukes have hit cities, the West's peace demand would be along the lines of "denuclearise/demilitarise China, free Tibet/Xinjiang, formally cede Taiwan" with little room to budge (particularly given the need to prevent the PRC trying again later). The PRC is aware that, as you note, this means no more Mandate of Heaven, so it plausibly refuses. Plausibly, Trump/Vance then order countervalue in order to force a capitulation (or state failure), because Rule 2 of war and they aren't the sorts to just back down. End result is that China is a basket-case again, like the early 20th century. Russia, if it stays out, does well in some ways (with the West significantly weakened), but doesn't become outright hegemon. Probably no more culture war, as SJ would suffer base existence failure to a fair extent and would be blamed for weakening the West and thus causing WWIII.

China winning a lightning strike? Honestly I view this as somewhat status quo, believe it or not.

No. The immediate problem is that the PLAN would have un-interdictable access to the Pacific proper via Taiwan's east coast, which means Japan and South Korea would have Beijing's hand around their throats via the threat of blockade (neither is even remotely close to being able to feed itself). They probably both withdraw from the NPT, Beijing in its overconfidence (and with popular support due to the long-standing cultural antipathy) plausibly attacks, and you're back to WWIII. There's a reason that Japanese PM Takaichi Sanae made those comments about a Taiwan invasion posing an existential threat to Japan and justifying the use of the Japanese military, and there's a reason (though not a good one) that one of China's diplomats to Japan publically threatened to cut off her head in response.

Maybe I should have elaborated on this point. Frankly, for all the attention on MAD, I don't think this is the 21st century model. Rather, there's a series of escalations that appear reasonable on the surface: someone uses a "tactical" nuke, then someone nukes a single semi-military target, then the other retaliates with two civilian-target nukes, then three in response... and then people regain their sanity and meet for talks, because it's obvious to everyone that this cannot continue. Like, for example, let's say LA - and LA alone - is nuked. Obviously a calamitous event the world has never seen before. But even then... would the President really pull the trigger on a full MAD response on all of China in response to a single lost city? MAD says yes, you need to, but human behavior says no. We're too hardwired for proportionality for full-MAD to really work. That's my mental model at least for the most likely 'worst-case' scenario, but it's possible I'm a little too optimistic.

Going full countervalue in response to a single nuke? No. Going full counterforce in response to a single nuke? Yes, at least on the US side. The question isn't so much of retaliation as prevention; you want to destroy as much as possible on the ground.

(Also, a single nuke pointed at a city probably won't do much due to ABM.)

I predicted the USA going countervalue against China in a big way if the PLA had nuked cities, the counterforce response ran China out of nukes, and the PRC still refused anything but a white peace. At that point, there's just straight-up no alternative; the Western public would not stand for a white peace (not to mention that it'd let them try again in a few years), and invading China wouldn't work (rule 2 of war). Hence, "after I destroy Washington DC Shanghai I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour, that is unless of course you pay me 100 billion dollars unconditionally surrender". Same trick as was used on Japan in WWII.

Japan is 90 days from a nuclear warhead. The funny (well, not haha funny) thing about that is that it is both a very short and a very long time.

My point exactly.

If PLA nukes have hit cities, the West's peace demand would be along the lines of "denuclearise/demilitarise China, free Tibet/Xinjiang, formally cede Taiwan" with little room to budge (particularly given the need to prevent the PRC trying again later).

If our cities get nuked then our peace demand will be “There is no PRC”. We won’t stop until we’re writing a new constitution for China in Beijing. We did that to Japan and Germany and they didn’t destroy even one of our cities.

You and what occupational army?

The Americans were worn out by a decade trying to occupy a country of 30 million when they had the ability to walk in from friendly buildup areas at the outset. Occupying a country of 1,300 million is just a wee bit beyond the capacity of the modern United States, even without the literal and figurative fallout of a nuclear war.

If a nuclear exchange has happened, there are no longer 1.3 million Chinese. Not even close. We have more than 10 times as many nukes as they do, and if they launched even one of theirs at us then we would have launched most of ours in response. Second, we’d most likely partition it like we did Germany, I imagine Australia taking a bite, Japan and Korea taking some large bites, and probably India will jump in and take most of western China once it’s clear the CCP is about to lose.

If a nuclear exchange has happened, there are no longer 1.3 million Chinese.

I think you meant "billion" here; I would expect high Chinese casualties, likely over half a billion if they don't surrender immediately, but not >99.9%.

if they launched even one of theirs at us then we would have launched most of ours in response.

Nah, it wouldn't take that many.

The US didn't occupy Japan proper, and would have no need to occupy China proper after a literal nuclear war. If the US is in a position to demand peace, it means the PRC no longer has nuclear capability while the US does, and that means the US gets to write a new constitution for China in its capital. Or we continue the nuking; we've done exactly that before. The remaining Chinese aren't going to fight to the last man for the integrity of the PRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan

The occupation took place AFTER the surrender; that is, it was (mostly) not a contested occupation as @Dean is suggesting would be necessary. Same thing for China in the unlikely event there's a nuclear war that they decisively lose.

I think the word you're looking for is "invasion" rather than "occupation", then. The USA invaded and occupied Germany, but only occupied Japan.

@Dean's usually fairly precise with his terminology; I believe he was specifically raising concerns over the USA's ability to occupy China - concerns which I share to at least some extent. Invading China is a completely-different kettle of fish, and one I dismissed out of hand in my first reply in this chain ("Rule 2 of war": "do not go fighting with your land armies in China"); I don't think Dean was even entertaining that idea.

Indeed I was not. I view it about as dimly/lacking in competence as I do the nuclear holocaust scenario. And you are correct in that I was referring to the occupational role alone.

I can absolutely model a nuclear exchange scenario between the US and China, but 'we're going to nuclear genocide 99% of the population and impose a new constitution like this is post-WW2 Japan and no one will resist it like Japan' is enough of a difference in starting positions that I felt it better to simply not to return to the topic.

If Dean was talking about occupation, it doesn't make sense; we occupied Japan after they surrendered and allowed Eisenhower to write their new Constitution.

Regardless of the terminology, I stand by the claim. If, after a nuclear exchange, the US is in a position to dictate terms to the PRC -- which basically means we still have nuclear capability and they don't -- then the US will be able to (and almost certainly will) re-write their constitution and the remaining Chinese will not do anything about it. Their official armies will have surrendered (and if they don't, the nuking continues) and there will be little enough insurgency that US forces will be able to handle it. The bulk of the Chinese are not going to be fanatical supporters of the PRC. As in Japan, almost certainly much of the mechanism of government below the national level will remain largely intact -- the US is too small to directly administer China. But not to dismantle the PRC.

Possible, I suppose (though occupying China to that degree wouldn't be trivial). Largely ends in the same place, though, of "PRC refuses, China burns in countervalue strike".

Europeans are effortposting on X right now, centering around a reported $140 million fine apparently for how X changed the blue checkmark and restricted API access to researchers. But this comes at a time when Europeans are bearing down on Musk for not curating feeds based on the opinions of paid 'misinformation experts', an industry effectively invented post-2016 election.

It is a terrible look for Europe. They are falling behind China and the US economically while acting as the global regulators for industries they are no longer capable of building themselves. Their posture has become so hostile to business that Apple is now withholding major features from the European market. Jamie Dimon just sounded the alarm on how their hulking regulatory regime is dragging down their ability to innovate, warning that they’ve effectively driven investment out.

My impression of European bureaucrats in the last 24 hours is of a body staffed by a bunch of snooty has-beens. The economist Robin Brooks has been noting the deep hypocrisy here too: their moralizing doesn't match their actions on things like Ukraine, given they are still buying endless amounts of Russian oil via backchannels and refineries in places like India.

The free speech thing is really annoying too. I was actually surprised to see Trump hold back on this when meeting PM Starmer in Scotland. There is a real and serious difference in free speech between our nations. As an American, I can express myself without fear that some busybody will knock on my door.

It’s upsetting because while things might have been less turbulent under Harris, I’m truly glad that the attempt to codify a global regime of 'acceptable' online speech has met resistance. It’s odd to think that we nearly saw a unification of US/EU efforts on this front, importing their safetyism to our shores.

Europe is and always will be our friend, but they’re not on their game right now. The reactions aren't principled—they’re distasteful.

I am not the biggest fan of European attitude towards free speech, but it's amusing to see how it just displays the ignorance of Americans to think that something has fundamentally changed in Europe in relation to the treatment of free speech when it has always been like this in Europe. Nowadays the issue is just that speech is increasingly online. I think it's far to criticize Europe, but I think most of the dunking coming from US actors are in terribly bad faith and nonsensical. You have the most brazenly corrupt president in the history of US and country full of non-White immigrants (with VP's wife being Indian for god's sake), and we get lectured for seemingly failing to be democratic and preserving our cultural identities. As far as European weak military goes, this is has been fully devised by US policy. I think dunking on economy is fine, but even there when Musk makes snide remarks about how EU should be dismantled in favor of sovereign nations, you know he is full of shit. EU is the best thing that could've happened to a business wanting to export into EU with the exception if you favor Putin-style cronyist regimes where single people can be paid off. I am self-critical of Europe as an European, but most of the criticism I'd take as fair if it came from a country like Japan, not US.

...

a) Firewalls so hard that one of the most actual effective anti-immigrant parties is leftists? Also if you actually familiarized yourself with actual policy as of latest for whole of EU, illegal immigration in and refugee entries in particular has decreased significantly due to measures taken by current EU governments. Getting in legally isn't too easy of a feat either. b) What is this historic break represented by the administration? Crackdown on illegal immigration and putting a pause on some 4th world countries? Won't move a real needle on legal immigration.

...

Germany has a firewall. France has a firewall too

It's called "two thirds of the voters voting against right-populists". If that changes, the incentives on politicians change. As long as two thirds of the voters oppose right-populism, centrist and centre-right parties who break the firewall will be punished at the ballot box, as we just saw in the Netherlands.

My understanding is that, in France, they genuinely attempted to uphold a government with negotiated support from Le Pen's party (not an uncommon model in other European countries) only for Le Pen to end that co-operation for populist reasons at basically the first opportunity.

Barnier’s minority coalition had been essentially propped up by Le Pen, who, although outside government, had an unprecedentedly powerful role as Barnier attempted to placate her to avoid her party joining a no-confidence vote. Barnier had negotiated with her directly, tapering the budget to her demands.

But Le Pen pulled rank, saying Barnier’s budget was a danger to the country. She said French people had expected Barnier’s appointment to calm government institutions and provide a “vision for the country”. Instead, she said, the budget was a disaster.

Le Pen wrote on social media that, by following the “catastrophic continuity of Emmanuel Macron”, Barnier, who led a coalition dominated by the right and centre, “could only fail”. She said she was “protecting and defending” her party’s 11 million voters, who she said were deeply concerned about the cost of living. Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a National Rally MP, said: “[Having] no budget is better than the actual budget, which says a lot about how bad it is.”

Not only is that not something that happens in countries where the firewall actually continues to exist (meaning Germany and... what? Belgium?), it's also an example that mainstream parties may have legit reasons to not work with populists even beyond "they disagree on immigration and are afraid of being called racist fascist Nazis" and similar stereotypical reasons.

...

As far as European weak military goes, this is has been fully devised by US policy.

?????? Hasn't usa always asked europe to pay more money into nato and they always don't?

just displays the ignorance of Americans to think that something has fundamentally changed in Europe in relation to the treatment of free speech when it has always been like this in Europe.

Americans didn't give a shit when it was just european despots imprisoning their own people for memes. But now that they want to fuck with memes on American platforms, Americans are pissed.

?????? Hasn't usa always asked europe to pay more money into nato and they always don't?

Look at AUKUS (where the Americans and the UK undermined French submarine sales), or the recent Palantir contract in the UK (where the US undermined UK AI development). America wants cheaper, more easily defended vassals, not peers. Paying for a standing army (controlled by the Americans, natch) is expensive and doesn't really have any use except when the Russians are actually literally invading, which isn't really a concern for most of Europe at the moment since the rich nations who fund the thing are on the opposite side of the continent. Development is where the money, influence and power projection is, and the Americans guard it jealously.

None of which is to say that the Europeans don't also shoot them/ourselves in the foot by working hard to destroy their own industries and repel investment at all costs.

where the Americans and the UK undermined French submarine sales

As I understand it, the French submarine sale deal wound up being... pretty horrendous, cost-wise. Granted, AUKUS may also wind up being do, but the French deal was not exactly an amazing bargain for Australia.

I’ve heard different stories from different people. The French broadly say that the Australians kept changing their mind on the specs they wanted, the Aussies say the French were costing too much and taking too long. I haven’t done a deep dive myself.

My understanding is that AUKUS happened because the Americans and the UK decided to offer nuclear technology which is usually verboten, basically to split off Australia from France.

Have you ever heard of a major French arms deal that fell through that the French admitted to being the cause of its failure?

At the risk of being flippant, I can't remember any deal that fell through when one of the parties admitted to being the cause of its failure.

There are entire volumes of 'self'-critiques of the problems in American foreign military sales practices that undercut American competitiveness below what it 'could' be. The American arms deal failures tend to be in the form of 'the other party went elsewhere rather than sign a deal' rather than 'the deal fell apart after being signed,' but there's no shortage of Americans placing the blame on the American side for partners making arms deals with countries like China.

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Is there a term where only one party is ever granted full moral agency, responsibility, and blame, while everyone else is treated as passive, contextual, or structurally determined. In the United States itself it's white men at the end of the agency chain, internationally it's the United States.

Ultimately, the US is a big elephant in a small room. A single change in policy by the US can and has torpedoed entire sectors in foreign countries.

To take an extreme example, if you receive a letter from your landlord telling you that you are going to be evicted then in a sense your choosing to leave peacefully rather than squat or lay makeshift pit traps under the welcome mat is a moral choice. But only in a sense.

And a corollary, there will always be an excuse.

If you are uninterested in actually discussing the phenomenon, you may of course use any term for it that you please.

To take an extreme example, if you receive a letter from your landlord telling you that you are going to be evicted then in a sense your choosing to leave peacefully rather than squat or lay makeshift pit traps under the welcome mat is a moral choice. But only in a sense.

I mean, you say this, but while the Zizians opening Door #3 there was pretty obviously doomed, I understand that people do get away with squatting in California.

Privilege, in the woke sense?

I don't know, it feels like something changed with respect to speech between 2010 and 2020. Like, people would look down on you for saying non-PC things loudly in public, but you didn't get arrested for it. And as for the VP's wife being Indian, for a while we had in the UK:

  • The Prime Minister of the UK
  • The Taoiseach of Ireland
  • The First Minister of Scotland
  • The mayors of almost all major English cities

All either Indian or Arab, at the same time.

No need to list examples of these Indian or Arab mayors in UK. It's just hypocritical to hear it from US and even current administration. If it came from Japan, sure.

As for feeling, possible, but not enough if you are critical. Mind you, haven't looked into data proper, but it wouldn't be damning to the change in free speech standards if the feeling coincides with clearly people communicating more in online spaces and issues that seemingly would have been censored anyway having become more prevalent.

I am personally skeptical myself about there being that many ardent defenders of free speech in principle. I identify myself as a principled one (at least now), but time and time just shows that people are just interested in their version of free speech. These days it's even exemplified by US President himself.

No need to list examples of these Indian or Arab mayors in UK. It's just hypocritical to hear it from US and even current administration.

This is not just mayors. These are the leaders/president-equivalents of the UK, Scotland and Ireland: the most powerful people in the land.

What I am trying to say is that, if we were talking about alcoholism, then maybe Japan is teetotal and the US sometimes comes home drunk from parties, but the UK is an alcoholic drinking fortified beer at 9am. Is it hypocritical for the US to tell the UK they drink too much? Sort of. But it's still true.

I don't know, it feels like something changed with respect to speech between 2010 and 2020. Like, people would look down on you for saying non-PC things loudly in public, but you didn't get arrested for it.

The laws themselves aren't new, the enforcement has changed.

Before everyone was on the Internet, enforcement was hardly necessary. The media oligopoly was on board with it and self-censored. Any would-be politicians would need the de facto consent of the media to run a campaign. They didn't bother listening in on pub conversations to find people to arrest. Commoners had no reach anyway, so there's no real point going full Stasi. That left a handful of enforcement actions against a small-time publisher here, a politician who goes off script there, but that was it.

Nowadays people can find each other via the Internet, and there's a lot of discontented people who know there are more and can organize. It has removed the media's role as approval committee, and upended politics. So now in some places they suddenly find it worthwhile to arrest people at their house over tweets.

The early 2010s were a transition period, where the media lost their grip but the enforcement had not yet been stepped up.

I don't know, it feels like something changed with respect to speech between 2010 and 2020.

It is not only about free speech. During 1990s and early 2000s there was a huge discussion of how will the EU look like post Maastricht, labeled as Europe of Nations vs federal Europe - with the former being labeled as "eurosceptic" and latter as proeuropean of course. The eurosceptic side basically lost with 2007 Treaty of Lisbon. The new empowered EU beurocracy started churning regulation at breakneck speed - doubling the already burdensome regulation by 2024 so now majority of national laws are passes just to implement EU regulations. It now borders with comical, such as the latest EU Space Act which despite declining EU space programs boasts how it will bring about safe, sustainable and green space exploration or something silly like that. EU institutions and bureaucrats are unironically proud of EU being regulatory superpower, some of them really believe in how they are essential for regulating the whole world.

EU is basically a paradise for bureaucratic structures - the so called Deep State - with byzantine rules hiding responsibility behind layers and layers of structures and almost no real oversight. Just look at this simplified graph of EU institutions from wikipedia and keep in mind that each of this rectangles hides layers of equally byzantine rules of how they are constituted. I'd say that with EU institutions gaining more and more control, the whole thing is turning into something akin to ancient Chinese system of true bureaucracy or maybe something like late Soviet or post Deng and pre Xi system of collective leadership, where it was not dear leader, but party structures controlling the state.

EU institutions and bureaucrats are unironically proud of EU being regulatory superpower, some of them really believe in how they are essential for regulating the whole world.

It's practically dark humor that EU efforts to be a regulatory superpower abroad are fuel to the EU-US divorce, which in turn justifies further strengthening the EU institutions. It may be all according to keikaku to some EU advocates, but I've heard many express incredulity about how various US political leaders might take issues with attempts to fine American companies with great political influence into compliance with European Union political interests.

The sort of default Atlanticism that might view continental political propaganda as unobjectionable but Russian political propaganda as toxic is passing away with the Boomers. The emerging generations filling the bureaucracies are increasingly likely to see it either from a neutral principle lens, in which case either European propaganda is just as bad or Russian propaganda is just as harmless as the other, or through a partisan friend-foe lens. The later case is just as bad in its own way, as it means the European-Russian axis only matters in so much that it provides a stick to beat the opponent with, regardless of from which direction.

Geopolitical alliances crack when one party is seen as the partisan partner of one's own domestic political opponents. Sometimes that crack can be overcome by sufficient time, see the South Korean left's political evolution regarding views on the US following the dictatorship period. But actively pursuing it unprompted is somewhere between feckless, malpractice, or a deliberate tradeoff for shorter-term priorities considered more important.

Geopolitical alliances crack when one party is seen as the partisan partner of one's own domestic political opponents.

TBF, this kinda goes both ways.

From the US point of view, the EU supports the Democrats against the Republicans (in a lot of ways), and thus the Republicans see the EU as backing their domestic enemies.

From the EU point of view, the US is supporting the European far-right (by providing communications that circumvent the various EU censorship laws), and thus the EU establishment see the US as backing their domestic enemies.

I happen to be extremely unsympathetic to the EU establishment's position, but that's because I see their suppression of the far-right as an oligarchical attempt to revoke democracy and thus not a legitimate state interest.

It indeed was written to go both ways. The number of alliances that have died after a suppressive elite supported from afar was overthrown is uncountable, as are the number of alliances that are stillborn because one party excepts assistance / pardon for suppressing domestic opposition.

It does not help the European Union that it is not actually a treaty ally of the United States, but rather that its elites tried to transfer the benefits of alliances with various national members to the EU itself.

Europeans since the invention of the internet: You silly Americans, why do you think you need that huge military now that the Cold War is over? I bet it's just to oppress oil countries. Here in Europe we enlightened souls prefer to spend our budgets on our social welfare systems.

Russia: (rolls over and farts menacingly)

Europeans:

As far as European weak military goes, this is has been fully devised by US policy.

Yeah remember when Trump went over there in his first term and asked them to hit their NATO spending obligations and they basically laughed in his face? I do.

Or when Obama and Bush told Europe the same about defense spending.

Okay what's your worst example of free speech under attack in the UK? I see claims like this posted to X a bunch but whenever I look into it the people are being so offensive to the point of derangement or they're co-mingled with violent threats or slander.

Here's one where a guy got threatened with a hate crime for asking a foreigner to speak english fluently.

The larger problem is that England in particular has always used suppression of speech (See 'D' Notices) liberally to keep the peace. This was culturally supported as traditionally the English have by and large enjoyed their peace and quiet. This vestigial cultural limb has now metastasized into something else entirely.

I just don't think the UK govt has the funds to police itself correctly so it is using its traditional tool of suppression of communication instead of dealing with the root cause of ethnic tension and cultural instability.

Edit:

This was culturally supported as traditionally the English have by and large enjoyed their peace and quiet.

This isn't quite accurate. It's more because there was a significant degree of trust that such non-legislated 'powers' (which were more of a gentleman's agreement) would not be abused and only used in genuine cases of national security. It still created a cultural precedent.

Also London was known for having one of the highest known levels of cctv surveillance in times past. Again, this was a sign of great trust in govt and authority. It was accepted on the presumption that such things would not be abused.

To what extent is this applied fairly in England? E.g. if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?

I prefer American speech norms, but if it's a matter of different cultural approaches to conflict and politeness, I don't object to it. Different folks, different strokes.

if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?

You will have to clarify if the individual is a white Briton (in which case they will throw the book at him) or not.

To what extent is this applied fairly in England? E.g. if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?

What do you think? They're still dragging their heels about the rape gang fiasco, you think they'd do anything approaching fairness regarding Muslim shitposting?

A quick search reveals several counterexamples, to say nothing of those with non-Muslim perpetrators, but I guess vibeposting is more satisfying.

Thanks for pulling in some actual counterexamples, that was interesting for me to learn. It's good to hear the opposite side of the story now and then.

I'm sorry how is that a counterexample to anything we've posted so far?

ThenElection's post seems to imply that "death to Jews", "English people should die in a fire" exist on the same vein of hate speech that would be opposing Muslim/Trans hate speech. I guess to some extent that makes sense because of Muslim/Jew enmity. But it's smuggling in too much to pretend the the fairness here on most people's mind is not white person, nationalistic person, straight person, conservative person, and not just that Jewish is treated as a protected class along with Muslim.

There are a couple different speech policy regimes that could exist in England, all consistent with "you're not allowed to criticize Muslims or migrants." I'm just trying to get a better sense of which one best describes England.

  1. Muslim supremacy: you can't criticize Muslims, but white people and especially Jews are fair game.

  2. Inter-ethnic protections: you aren't allowed to criticize people outside your ethnicity.

  3. Wokeness: depends on who, whom, and the particular ordering of the progressive stack. 1) is kind of a degenerate version of this.

  4. Universalism: no one is allowed to criticize anyone aggressively.

None of those are my preference, but 2) and somewhat 4) seem like defensible approaches. My guess is that 3) is closest to what's happening, but that's just based on Twitter vibes.

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Asking a question instead of making (plausible) assumptions. Some cultures do take being polite more seriously than child rape.

These 'non-crime hate incident' investigations and other 'hate crime' investigations seem to be clearly directed at white heritage British and not at minorities. Its why there are claims of 'two tier policing'. There's plenty of YouTube clips out there comparing similar behavior between the majority/minorities and the differing official response.

I didn't see the need for American style free speech norms until I saw the path that the UK has chosen to go down. Other Western nations are struggling with how to respond with mass migration and multi-culturalism and suppression of the heritage majority seems to be cheap low hanging fruit for their governments.

From the Telegraph this morning:

A TEACHER was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that “Britain is still a Christian state”, The Telegraph can disclose.

The primary school teacher was referred to his local child protection board over comments made to the pupil at an inner-city primary school in London. A senior detective from the Met’s child abuse investigation team also became involved.

In this case, the teacher was suspended and subsequently sacked for an incident in which he allegedly admonished students for washing their feet in the sinks in the boys’ toilets. Police were also called in to investigate an alleged hate crime.

According to the child who made the complaint, the teacher told them the school was not a religious one but that there was an Islamic school a mile away if they wished to go there instead. He also told them: “Britain is still a Christian state” and pointed out that the King was head of the Church of England.

The teacher tried to explain to the year six class the importance of British values of tolerance. It was claimed he reminded the children that Islam remained a minority religion in the UK.

In his legal claim against the local authority, lawyers for the teacher pointed out the school was a non-faith school and that prayers had been informally banned from the playground – and by extension that included washing feet in the toilets – and confined to a prayer room set aside for the purpose.

But the school suspended the teacher in March last year and subsequently sacked him. A month later in April 2024, he was informed he was being referred to the local safeguarding board as well as to the Met. The police inquiry was subsequently dropped.

Is it an indictement that there was a policy inquiry, or reassuring that it was dropped? Pick your poison.

A lady got sentenced to probation and community service for calling her rapist a name in a private text conversation with her friend.

Is this what you're referring to? It says it happened in Germany so I'm not sure.

https://eutoday.net/german-woman-jailed-for-insulting-rapist/

I was actually referring to the UK case that others mentioned down-thread. I should really start checking before I post to see if someone else has already brought things up. It’s disheartening that this type of case seems to have happened more than once.

Where do you see these claims, specifically, and what have you looked into?

We recently discussed the case of Graham Linehan, though my favorite example is some blokes getting arrested for arrenging trans flags to look like a swastika. The UK in particular is documentably so bad, that at this point the burden of proof is on you to show that they are being reasonable.

A woman was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment for making the following tweet in the aftermath of the Southport mass stabbing, where three children were murdered:

"Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care... if that makes me racist so be it."

She regretted it and deleted it four hours later, but that didn't stop the UK bobbies from scooping her up to meet their quota for the month. While distasteful and based on erroneous information (the perpetrator was in fact a second-generation African migrant, not a recent arrival residing in a migrant hotel), this tweet would be perfectly legal in the US. Throwing housewives in prison for years, for getting a bit heated online after a terrorist attack, is absolutely insane. It's even more ludicrous when considering how the UK police claim they don't have the resources to investigate rapes, burglaries, and other actual crimes that actually impact citizens' day-to-day lives.

based on erroneous information (the perpetrator was in fact a second-generation African migrant, not a recent arrival residing in a migrant hotel)

Talk about misinformation. It doesn't matter he isn't fresh off the boat. He isn't english. So she was completely right. Send the refugees back, send the migrants back, and their progeny.

Second-gens are Schrodinger's Immigrants. If he commits a crime, he was born here and is as British as any Tom, Dick or Harry. If he obeys the law and pays taxes, he's an example of how immigrants enrich our society.

Both things can be true at once.

People (including Elon Musk, who can't be prosecuted, and Lucy Connolly, who quite properly was) called for arson, directed against actual, identifiable human beings who were Muslim asylum-seekers based on a crime committed by someone who was neither an asylum-seeker nor a Muslim.

Some of us think that, morally, facts matter when burning people out of their homes.

Legally, actual incitement has always been a free speech corner case, going back to John Stuart Mill's writing about when it is legitimate to say that corn-dealers are responsible for starvation. (He thinks this is fine under normal circumstances, but not if said directly to a riotous mob outside the home of an identifiable corn-dealer). The US tradition is deliberately overprotective of free speech in the corner cases to avoid chilling effects. "Grass is magenta, therefore you should burn down a hotel with people in it" is exactly the kind of speech you would prefer not to protect, but need to if you want as strong a free speech culture as the US is trying to produce.

  • -14

Lucy Connolly did not call for arson. She said she wouldn't care if all the hotels were set on fire. That's quite a bit different from instructing a specific person to set a hotel on fire.

Perhaps she could have tried pleading innocent on this basis, she didn't though. Her tweet said 'Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care', so I imagine lawyers could debate exactly where this falls on the spectrum with inciting statement at one end and expression of apathy at the other.

Whether or not her post was intended as a call to action would matter under US law, but the UK crime with which she was charged ('inciting racial hatred') has no such requirement.

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So to steelman the case, this is very similar to the Charlie Kirk situation; no one specifically told anyone in particular to assassinate him, but there is definitely an air of "won't someone rid me of this turbulent priest" around.

There are objections to this; like, for example, it matters whether it's a private citizen of no particular standing or following vs a public figure, it matters how specific the call to action is, etc. - but it's at least not completely unreasonable as a rule of thumb.

That being said, I absolutely believe that if a white man had gone on a stabbing spree through a Muslim community, and a Muslim woman had posted something like "Throw all those right-winged white **** in jail, hell, shoot them all in the streets, see if I care", nothing would've happened at all.

Well, people did lose jobs for tweets about the Kirk assassination (and we had like 5 blissful days of Kimmel being off the air), which isn't great from a free-speech perspective. But being sentenced to 2.5 years of prison goes way way WAY beyond that.

This one blew up recently during Tucker Carlson vs Pierce Morgan show: A UK woman who was battered by her boyfriend was sentenced for calling him a faggot in text message to her "friend" who reported her to police. The charge for texting the word faggot was "malicious communications offences". The boyfriend who obviously was not gay was not arrested. Pierce Morgan invited her to talk about it.

By the way, there are 12,000 arrest for online communication offenses a year in the UK. So there are plenty of examples.

  • A man posts a video on Facebook expressing his opinion that immigration to the UK is out of control, and that those migrating to the UK include "scumbags" and "psychopaths". Arrested and charged with inciting racial hatred.
  • Street preacher tried (and thankfully acquitted) for "religiously aggravated intentional harassment" after saying "We love the Jews" to a Muslim family.
  • Former footballer posts a tweet arguing that a certain black female football commentator was a diversity hire. Convicted for malicious communications.
  • Shopkeeper posts a sign in the window of his shop explaining that, owing to "scumbags" shoplifting, he has no choice but to keep valuable items in locked cabinets. The police instruct him to remove the "offensive" sign.
  • Man posts a meme depicting Pakistani men armed with knives arriving to the UK in boats, with the caption "coming to a town near you". Jailed for eight weeks.
  • A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.
  • A Jewish man carries around a placard mocking the recently deceased leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Arrested.
  • Retired police officer tweets about a rise in antisemitism since the October 7 attacks in Israel. Arrested. In a real mask-off moment, the bodycam footage of his arrest features one of the arresting officers expressing alarm about the "very Brexit-y" books on his bookshelf.
  • The headteacher of a primary school retires, and the board of governors elect not to recruit a replacement, leaving the role vacant for several months. Parents of a pupil in the school (one of whom was on the board of governors last year) are exasperated by this, airing their grievances on a parents' WhatsApp group. The chair of governors objects to this and sends the parents a letter asking them to stop making disparaging comments on social media. Furious, the mother posts the letter on Facebook, venting her anger. Subsequently, the couple are arrested.
  • A list of people who've been arrested (and, in some cases, convicted) for doing things like praying outside abortion clinics or holding up signs reading "here to talk, if you want".

Just to illustrate that accusations of two-tier policing are entirely warranted, a 25-year-old influencer posted a video in which she called for the deaths of all conservatives. After being questioned by the police, she was not arrested.

A lot of these are genuinely shameful, and I'm not about to argue that the following one should actually be illegal, but this:

A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.

strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume @dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim. The linked article describing Steele's behavior as "polite questions" is ridiculous. In the first place, this was clearly a stunt, not some good-faith attempt to have an unprompted theological discussion with a stranger, as that blurb implies.

But more importantly, it was a mean-spirited and counter-productive stunt. If you're actually concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse in Muslim households, a woman currently engaged in an outreach effort whose whole purpose is to acknowledge and deal with the problem - and a volunteer, mind you, not a professional NGO grifter! - is the last person you should antagonize for the sake of drawing attention to yourself. If you've got balls, ask a Muslim preacher. At a push, ask a random woman in a niqab. But for fuck's sake, when someone actually tries to do something about the exact thing you're complaining about, don't put her on the spot in public in such a way that she must either obfuscate and come across as a hypocrite, or own up to an actively anti-Muslim stance. (Never mind that the latter might put her at genuine personal risk: it would instantly destroy her credibility with the very abused women from fundamentalist households that she's trying to coax into trusting her!)

So - Steele's stunt was stupid, cruel, and cowardly behavior. In a common-sense world the appropriate response would be a slap across the face that no one sensible would think of prosecuting as physical assault, but of course, in the age of TikTok ragebait, giving him "minority punches preacher who was just asking questions" as his claim to fame would just be giving him what he was after by other means. Is suing him in a court of law an appropriate substitute? No. But I sympathize enormously with the desire to punish this kind of heel behavior in some way and wipe that smug grin off the guy's face. As it stands, he wasn't charged with anything, just briefly detained, and I think that's probably a fitting level of inconvenience for the offense, societally speaking, though I wish it didn't have go through the justice system.

  • -15

strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim

That's insane. "Offensive to the point of derangement" means insulting and harassing people, not "being mean-spirited" or "not actually being concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse", if this was the actual standard, you'd probably have to arrest the entirety of the BBC, possible the whole of the UK government.

Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior. He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head. I think that's plenty offensive enough to make the man a deeply unsympathetic victim of unjust laws, even if the laws are unjust. It's not about what he believes, it's about his actions.

And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse, i.e. the exact societal problem his stupid little stunt was intended to highlight. At the point when point-scoring for point-scoring's sake comes at the direct expense of actual furthering of the goals that points are nominally being scored for, I think you can start to talk about derangement.

  • -10

Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior.

For a given (very expansive) definition of "hostile", sure. The problem is that no one, and I mean absolutely no one, is under any obligation to be non-"hostile" to others. This sort of behavior is completely normal. Media, including public media, do it all the goddamn time.

He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head.

And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse,

The only people who are being offensive or deranged in this situation are the ones that would target the woman. Under no circumstances is the person asking the question describable as such.

I think your comment says more about the Muslim community than anything.

Well, yes. Just because I am very progressive for this website on a number of issues does not mean I am an automaton repeating the maximally woke point of view on every issue, and the dangers of Islamism, and illiberal customs perpetuated by Muslim communities more broadly, are among the things I take very seriously that the current progressive bloc is very bad at seeing for the massive problems they really are.

Well, the point is that free speech is important because it can be ugly while telling important truths. I agree the speaker in this context was not polite but he shined a light on the evils of Islam.

I'm reminded of the highly insulting but hilarious British satirical puppet series "Spitting Image."

The fact that you think asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence — even as a "stunt" — warrants assault does not incline me to give much credence to your attitudes towards censorship. Frankly, the more I learn about your worldview, the more infuriating and alien I find it.

A doctor knowingly lying to the concerned parents of a trans-identifying child about the efficacy of "gender-affirming care" in preventing suicide? A-ok. Asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence? Grounds for assault.

I object to the characterization of what I advocated as "assault" - perhaps my reaching for the image of a slap was needlessly confusing. I refer to a slap of the old-fashioned kind that women could once give to men who behaved like cads - not as an act of violence intended to cause physical harm, but as the strongest available signal of public disapproval. Feel free to substitute your preferred kind of public finger-pointing to shame people who behave in horrid but non-illegal ways. Personally, so long as it is understood that the purpose of such a slap is not actually to knock anyone down, I rather wish we brought it back; I mean it very differently from the "punch Nazis" meme, for which I now realize it could easily have been confused. But that's a whole other conversation and not relevant here, so again, perhaps I shouldn't have gone there.

I also object, and more strongly, with continuing to characterize what Steele said as "asking someone a question", as if he had just asked for directions to the post office. He did not "ask the woman a question" in the sense of genuinely seeking information from her. What he did was either intended as a gotcha, or as intimidation - in other words it was bullying. Moreover, as I said, had she been incautious in her answer, it may have goaded her into a response that jeopardized her volunteer work, or even put her safety at risk - which Steele knew perfectly well. Now again. I do not believe that what Steele did should be a crime, any more than I think high school bullies should be clapped in irons unless they get too physical. But it was, to my way of thinking, incontestably bad behavior, and over-criminalization of bullying is not the same thing as criminalizing the earnest expression of political or religious opinions, let alone the criminalization of "asking polite questions".

A gotcha is not bullying.

Not in a private discussion. Where you disrupt a stranger's activities in public and put a gotcha to them to engineer a viral moment, yes, it is bullying.

  • -10

I agree, but that leads us to the next question: do Muslims deserve to be bullied? That is, is the humiliation/ostracization of Muslims in Western societies an effective means towards generally desirable outcomes? (For the record, I think so, but preferably in a more limited sense.)

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This is the same kind of transparent nonsense as that stupid "sealion" comic, isn't it.

What "viral moment"? He wasn't filming anything. He politely asked one of his fellow citizens a rhetorical, non-personal question in a public place.

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Thank you, I am now convinced free speech is under attack in the UK.

I'm glad I was able to persuade you.

A man who was convicted and fined for setting a Koran on fire, while the man who attacked him with a knife while he was doing so only received a suspended sentence (the Koran-burning man's conviction was overturned on appeal).

Okay here's where I boiled over into rage.

Glad some of these are being overturned on appeal, I guess? Still, yeah something's fucked in the UK.

Glad some of these are being overturned on appeal, I guess?

Yeah, though these reaching appeal is still 4 steps too far. They shouldn't have been 1. convicted, 2. charged, 3. investigated, 4. reported to the police.

I could see how maybe the police are idiots and leaving it up to them to try to interpret speech laws is a disaster. But the fact that convictions happen at all is batshit.

When are we going to start seeing this in British crime dramas? There's got to be a plot somewhere, in everything from Slow Horses to Down Cemetery Road to Law & Order: UK, where we see someone arrested for tweets as if the criminal drama it depicts is considered legitimate, and the audience on board.

A woman visited for a "non-crime hate incident" over an image of two police standing next to two men holding a flag of a major Pakistani political party, captioned "How Dare They"

An American in England told by police to apologize for an unspecified Facebook post

English blogger arrested for "Fuck Hamas" tweet

There's tons of these, to the point that the claim "whenever I look into it the people are being so offensive to the point of derangement or they're co-mingled with violent threats or slander." is just gaslighting.

There's tons of these, to the point that the claim "whenever I look into it the people are being so offensive to the point of derangement or they're co-mingled with violent threats or slander." is just gaslighting.

It was a genuine question. Not everyone has the time to exhaustively get to the bottom of every culture war claim.

This entire year for example I've seen reported /outrageous thing Trump did that violates democracy/ and then I spend an hour checking into it and find oh actually the thing he did was totally legal and I'm just so tired of this shit and now treat every claim as epistemically flimsy by default.

It was a genuine question. Not everyone has the time to exhaustively get to the bottom of every culture war claim.

Didn't you say that you actually looked into several of them, specifically related to the UK and free speech?

Yes. Just because I clicked on three random ones on X to look into doesn't mean I was able to exhaustively review the culture war claim "free speech is under attack in the UK".

The handful I randomly clicked on, the perpetrator seemed like he crossed multiple lines and the UK wasn't clearly crushing political speech.

Since it's being mentioned here, and because I trust TheMotte more than X, I thought I'd ask for the worst examples (and y'all delivered, thanks!)

English blogger arrested for "Fuck Hamas" tweet

All the more bizarre given that they were seriously considering prosecuting the hip-hop band Kneecap for yelling "Up Hamas" during one of their gigs.

I understand the logic that it's illegal to offer support to a proscribed terrorist organisation, even if I don't agree. But it's also illegal to criticise Hamas? Are you just supposed to pretend they don't exist, or something?

Are you just supposed to pretend they don't exist, or something?

Everything I’ve seen out of Britain in the last few years suggests that yes, this is exactly what a Good Subject is supposed to do.

There’s the freedom to remain silent on Hamas.

What also hasn’t been ruled out is the freedom to make neutral statements about Hamas: “Hamas is one of the organizations of all time!”

Checkmate, smug freezepeach Americans.

A man who was convicted and fined for setting a Koran on fire, while the man who attacked him with a knife while he was doing so only received a suspended sentence

A German girl was jailed for ...defaming (cyberbulling?) a gang rapist whose sentence was entirely suspended. Similarly, in Oragen a stabber was acquitted because the victim said a racial slur.

Similarly, in Oragen a stabber was acquitted because the victim said a racial slur.

Obviously this is outrageous, but I do think it's important to put jury nullification and infringements on free speech in different categories. It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.

It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.

In what way is "you can be justifiably stabbed for saying that" not an infringement of free speech? The only thing I can think of is that it might not be covered by the Second First Amendment of the US.

EDIT: off-by-one error

I hate to fall back on the "they're a private company, they can do what they want" argument, but there is an important distinction between the government arresting and prosecuting you because of something you said vs. a jury of your peers collectively deciding that something you said was so appalling that it retroactively exculpates the person who assaulted you.

The former is indicative of government overreach. The latter is indicative of ethical myopia and skewed priorities among political progressives. Both grave issues, but distinct ones. It's yet more evidence that Western progressives no longer see themselves as upholding the spirit of the First Amendment (even if they will grudgingly uphold it to the letter) — but then, we already knew that, they haven't even been pretending otherwise for a long time.

there is an important distinction between the government arresting and prosecuting you because of something you said vs. a jury of your peers collectively deciding that something you said was so appalling that it retroactively exculpates the person who assaulted you

No. There is not.

The entire Liberal political formula is based on this particular fiction (amongst others) but there is actually no difference at all. It's the same people, doing the same thing, with the same outcomes. What they call themselves is a trick.

And indeed Liberals know this because the main entity from which they sought to free themselves was not the state, but the Catholic Church. A more canonical "jury of your peers" you will not find in history.

That progressives have done away with any sort of true belief in the ideas of John Stuart Mill is a foregone conclusion at this point. They are Rawlsians first and Marxists second.

That progressives have done away with any sort of true belief in the ideas of John Stuart Mill is a foregone conclusion at this point.

I agree with you. But I will reiterate that there is a distinction between the government throwing you in jail because of something you said, and a jury of your peers electing not to convict someone for assaulting you because of something you said.

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An Old Town stabbing case ended in defeat for Multnomah County prosecutors once jurors learned the wounded man had been videoed uttering a racist slur in the struggle’s aftermath.

So the jury accepted that saying a slur can justifiably provoke aggression backwards in time? Incredible.

No. The defense's theory is that the wounded man was the aggressor; yelling the slurs afterwards was part of the evidence.

Transit cameras showed Edwards, a fixed-blade knife clasped at his side, approaching Howard from behind as he sat on a bench. The video has no sound, but Howard springs up and pushes Edwards as soon as he sees him. The duo scuffle against a wall for a brief moment, ending with Edwards stabbing Howard in the shoulder.

Edwards is the defendant, Howard is the man who was stabbed.

Note this wasn't "violent homeless guy attacking ordinary commuter", this was "two violent homeless guys get into a fight". So I can see there might be reasonable doubt, although based on the still in the article (I haven't seen the video) I think Edwards should have been convicted.

British man visits some friends in the states, during which trip they invite him to try his hand at firing a gun. They take some photos of him holding assorted various firearms, in a fashion which highlights his inexperience. When he gets home, he posts some of these photos on LinkedIn with self-deprecating captions.

Arrested.

effortposting on x

I’ll believe it when I see it. Wait, no. We have rules against nutpicking, so I can’t exactly ask you to dig up an example.

Xitter is possibly the worst medium for estimating public sentiment. Even wild support might be real and representative, or it might be astroturf. Something as relatively subtle as “trust the experts” is only going to be harder to measure. How would one know that the people bitching about Musk are the same ones who have suddenly discovered a libertarian streak?

they’ve effectively driven investment out

they’re still buying endless amounts of Russian oil

importing their safetyism

Who? I think you’ll find that the subjects in each of these sentences are actually different people with different incentives. For example, did you know that neither Scotland nor the UK are actually in the EU?

For example, did you know that neither Scotland nor the UK are actually in the EU?

It's baffling why people on this site try to use UK as example of Europe anything when it comes to legislation given the entire legal system has very different traditions.

What's baffling about it? Most European elites are on board for the same program. Particularly when it comes to free speech, they definitely do not see the UK as an aberration.

Americans have a tendency to be provincial at the best of times, but drawing a meaningful distinction on topics like speech and social media? And there are times the UK is still beholden to various agreements like the ECHR- it's not like the UK is radically disconnected from the EU, especially to an outsider, regardless of their "traditions."

It’s more complicated than that. Partly because of the intellectual mixing on both sides, partly because successive UK governments have been importing European legal concepts and theory since the ‘90s.

See e.g. the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into UK law.

For example, did you know that neither Scotland nor the UK are actually in the EU?

If anything the UK is considerably worse on speech than the EU, though yes in ways distinct from OP's conversation-starter with the EU-levied fine. The UK is still under the ECHR and probably another half-dozen or so overlapping agreements besides.

Quite. That’s why it’s a bad example of EU failures. Guilt by non-association.

Minus the association (eg ECHR)

That’s the UK importing EU policy, not the other way around, isn’t it?

Sure but if the UK is implementing EU policy, then UK can be used as an example of bad EU policy.

Who? I think you’ll find that the subjects in each of these sentences are actually different people with different incentives.

Every institution has different decision-makers in it, with various incentives, it's still completely normal to talk about the decision made by the institution as a whole.

For example, did you know that neither Scotland nor the UK are actually in the EU?

And? The EU is still importing Russian oil, pushing safetyism, and driving out investment. The only axis where they're not-quite-so-bad as the UK is freedom of speech, and it's probably just a question of waiting a few years. And the fine in question is actually being levied by the EU anyway.

That’s why it’s foolish to present UK policy in a screed against the EU.

I agree that institutions may be judged by their works. I don’t believe the OP is talking about a coherent institution. The consumers of Russian gas are probably not steretypical Brussels bureaucrats; the safetyists in government are not upset about fining Twitter; the people who are upset are largely separate from the Musk haters.

That’s why it’s foolish to present UK policy in a screed against the EU.

But the fine in question is EU policy? The bit about Scotland and Starmer was an aside at most?

The consumers of Russian gas are probably not steretypical Brussels bureaucrats

Did he say they're literally tanking their cars at Lukoil gas stations? The point is that they made the decisions that resulted in the EU buying lots of Russian gas/oil (part of why that chart you linked doesn't give the full story is that it's laundered through India, and other countries). This might be a necessity at the moment, but it's entirely a self-inflicted wound.

the safetyists in government are not upset about fining Twitter; the people who are upset are largely separate from the Musk haters.

Yes, the safetyists aren't upset at the fines, the safetyists want to fine Musk. That's the criticism.

The reactions aren't principled—they’re distasteful.

Hmm.

Not sure what to think of this account of this comment. There's definitely some AI used here, and that's bad, but it also seems that there is some sort of human touch involved. There are also other comments from this account with obvious AI usage.

There's something odd about the comment as well. What's with the namedrops of Jamie Dimon and Robin Brooks with absolutely no context or links. The entire comment is incoherent, which could easily be from a weak writer, but feels suspiciously like copypasta from ai here.

Something is also extreeeemely suspicious about how this user almost always uses contractions "it's" but somehow end up using the uncontradicted form here and there. It's (lol) unlikely for a writer not to use the same form across a short body of text written quickly. But also it's also a sign that the entire text isn't wholesale copied from ai.

Personally I think this poster has the right intentions overall and the mods just need to tell him to knock it off with the slop.

Hey it’s not slop right? Mods I openly admit having Gemini check my rough drafts and rewrite them (with light touches after to remove most of the ai hallmarks). I provide it a ChatGPT report on sources and current events to ensure the references are clear. I feel that this is a good way to clear up my thoughts, make them more organized and coherent, and provide higher quality than I would otherwise. I try to have it maintain my original tone where possible.

I don’t think I am outsourcing my thinking or perspective to AI but using it to improve my thinking. If I’m reprimanded for it, that’s fair. I feel I’m contributing good faith, honest arguments and will stop if told to do so.

Also Gemini 3 still does the em dash thing, obviously. I removed two of them but hey I’m only human (?)

I don’t think I am outsourcing my thinking or perspective to AI but using it to improve my thinking.

This is what they call a "cope" -- you're rephrasing the distasteful truth to something less accurate but more palatable. If an external actor "improves" your product in ways you couldn't have done yourself, you have in fact outsourced at least that part of your product.

Please read pre ai draft above - I wanted to start a conversation on a topic, most of which was mine. I don’t love that some hallmarks of ai came out, but it really was mostly editing.

There's a difficult question in the difference between "your product" and "my thinking or perspective".

For a toy problem, I threw together a short story today, about 1200 words in the original draft, zero AI. Wrote it in FeatherPad (a notepad-like), so not even spellcheck.

Except no, that's a bit of a lie. I Googled a well-known phrase about birds in gilded cages, because I wanted to play on the original text, and Google's awful built-in LLM did give me some interpretations, even if not the one I actually went with. Still, I can't say I completely avoided influence from it. In this case, I am doing the thing and the thinking, the AI's just helping save time doing it. Am I outsourcing my product to Google? To a song from the 1900s?

After finishing the draft, I shoved the full text as a file upload into Grok with a request to check for spelling errors, overall coherence, typographical errors, and clarity. It caught a dropped fragment I didn't, and had a few suggestions. I took some, and didn't take others, but every keystroke going into the final product I wrote by keyboard, no copy-paste. In this case, these fixes are something I could do, but some parts probably not as reliably as the AI, while other parts, the AI is doing stuff I don't want.

Okay, what if I wrote the original really badly: a rough outline that hit all the same story beats and general concepts, but without any of the stylistic techniques, writing quality, or many specific segments I wanted in the story. That'd clearly be against the rules for where I submitted the story, and probably not result in anything nearly as good. And since I'm not a good writer, that's really damning it with faint praise.

Actually, let's try it: Grok (story) and ChatGPT (story).

For a tl;dr, not great, not terrible. Definitely didn't get the themes down, and the humor's not great, but ChatGPT's tone is mostly on the right tack, and I could probably inject a lot more dry comedy if I pushed it harder or feed it back in on itself with instructions to crank those aspects up. I'm not exactly a prompt expert. They did a good enough job on the 'enrichment' lists that I'm pretty glad I didn't try them before writing my own version, because I'd have probably gotten stuck on them and not moved to the ones I did use. And even if those were 'worse' from a realism perspective they were imo 'better' from a thematic writing one.

These LLMs clearly produce a better product than the outlines I put into the prompts. Whether it's better as a product than the short story I actually wrote is pretty dependent on what you're measuring; I'd argue I went quality over quantity, but writers get paid on the latter. The only real ideas the LLMs shove out are the enrichment concepts, and I could demonstrably come up with different ones. Indeed, a lot of the token cost for the LLMs is poking it into even moderately-good ideas. Does that outsource my ability to do things that way?

... except ironically, a guest-mode story prompt came up with an additional good theme to introduce: spelling out the main character's lack of trust in himself. It's a theme that works great for most horror fans that this story archetype is built around, but it's not really one I could see without being prompted. I don't think it's necessary for the product, but it's definitely a different idea.

I dunno where on that line Ademonera's post falls. I'd be less happy with it if they were using ChatGPT to source names and events, and then just using the names and events without reflecting on what they actually meant (or if they even meant anything). I wouldn't really care if it were glorified spellcheck, since at least it's not another Grammerly user. And if it's that messy spot where they had an outline of all the material they wanted to hit, but let the LLM reshuffle it into a narrative... well, I guess I wouldn't really see the point.

But the problems are separate ones.

I provide it a ChatGPT report on sources and current events to ensure the references are clear.

This is the part I like the least for the tiny bit that's worth. ChatGPT hallucinates sources fairly regularly. And setting that aside, you shouldn't write (or let an AI write on your behalf) as though you could safely assume everyone is familiar with the sources, especially when you yourself wouldn't have been if not for the AI.

I don’t think I am outsourcing my thinking or perspective to AI

If it's obvious to people reading your post that you used AI, then yes, you are.

I have no doubt there are other people using AI to help or generate their posts, but if you edit it enough that we can't tell, it might as well be yours. If we can tell, though, then I put you in the same category as a bot. There's a difference between using it as a spelling and grammar checker and using it to generate entire lines (like the telltale "It's not X-emdash-it's Y").

@cjet79 already decided not to ban you and remove your post. I might have decided differently.

This was my draft prior to AI review. It sucks getting this kind of flack from mods and posters but do realize that the post is probably 85% my thinking with minor edits. I think you might realize the assessment is a bit harsh:

Review this post for the Motte given widespread EU/US dynamic on twitter in last 2 days:

Europeans are effortposting on X and it centers around a 150 million dollar fine apparently for how they changed the blue checkmark and not allowing api access for researchers. But it comes at a time when Europeans are bearing down on Musk for not curating feeds based on the opinions of paid misinformation deciders, a position invented in 2016.

I think it’s a real bad look for Europe to be falling behind China and the US economically and also acting as major regulators of companies they can’t build themselves. Their posture has become so unfriendly to business that Apple just doesn’t release some features for Europeans anymore. Jamie Dixon just sounded the alarm on their economic policies dragging down their ability to innovate.

My impressions online of European bureaucrats in the last 24 hours have been of a hulking regulatory body with a bunch of snooty has-beens. This European economic, Robin Brooks, has been noting too that their actions don’t match the rhetoric on things like Ukraine, buying endless amounts of Russian oil etc.

The free speech thing is really annoying too. I was surprised to see Trump hold back on this when meeting PM Starmer in Scotland when asked about it. There is a real difference in free speech that means as an American I can feel comfortable expressing myself without fear that some busybody will come knock on my door.

It’s upsetting because while things may have been much less turbulent under Harris, I’m truly glad that the attempts to codify a global regime of acceptable online speech over last X years has met resistance. It’s odd to think that there would have been a unification of efforts on this front under her.

Europe is and always will be our friend but they’re not on their game right now and the snooty reactions are distasteful.

So how did you arrive upon "effortposting" in the first paragraph? Do you actually mean to say that Europeans are posting well-researched, high-effort longform comments on it?

I'd like to hear more about how this draft came to be. Did you actually create it yourself from nothing, or did you arrive upon it by a preceding "conversation" you had with the LLM to "clarify your thoughts"? At this point, I don't think this is a sort of interrogation, as the mods have already decided to let it pass; I'm just wondering from where the qualium of wrongness that I'm getting even from this version of your post comes. Am I just slowly going off the deep end with paranoia (I just threw a speculative accusation of LLM use at another poster in a different thread, and he denied it flatly), was there in fact more LLM usage that you didn't "declare", or could there be something going on like that "LLMisms" have snuck into your own writing voice?

(The last possibility reminds me of a moment I had a few years ago, when I returned to Berlin after some 12 years of absence from Germany and was surprised to overhear traces of a Turkish accent in the speech of seemingly native German city kids, perhaps paralleling how modern hip US blue-tribe speak especially in big cities is AAVE-tinged regardless of speaker ethnicity.)

I think for effortpost, I try to throw internet slang into things to make it interesting. Your definition of that phrase is more accurate than the way I used it. I couldn’t think of anything better but it sounded funny.

I think honestly the disjointed references and unclear organization of thoughts is evidence it was truly typed out by me. I didn’t use any LLMs to make the initial draft. I will say I use LLMs every single day for 8 hours so it very well could be that I’m picking up on their quirks in my writing — — —. Some of my older comments are more obvious. My deep dive into Taylor Lorenz show the most obvious LLM usage. I used them as well to grab references of left wing antisemitic attacks, which was posted in quality contributions. But here I think the tone has obvious misunderstanding and flow that would not be typical of an LLM logically progressing to a conclusion.

I think educators are having the same struggle. I also believe it’s nearly impossible to detect ai writing unless providers introduce watermarks, which they seem resistant to for now.

But yeah lesson learned. I don’t really type my thoughts out anywhere except here so I’m not great at using LLMs very effectively and subtly. Also there are apparently self published books with prompts to fix writing left in by accident.

Going forward will shoot from the hip and effortpost without questionable help

... I'm going to be blunt, and this is separate from Motte rules since my expectations don't matter for that, but I don't think you gained much from the AI-gen, here.

There's a couple fixes ("Dixon" vs "Dimon"), but there's also spots where the LLM is introducing changes in meaning that either aren't correct or aren't what you were going for ("attempts" to "attempt", "can’t build themselves" to "no longer capable of building themselves", the introduction of "importing their safetyism to our shores").

Asking the AI for information or directly for grammar checks tends to be more productive than just asking it to rewrite text, though you should still review any recommendations and especially anything involving math before acting on or implementing it, and be aware that it's going to guide you toward toward least-common-denominator answers.

Not a mod, but for what it's worth, I would rather read your slightly less coherent, less well-sourced, but fully organic comments rather than something passed through a slop machine. I thought your ideas were interesting enough on their own. The cons of being called out for slop outweigh any minor stylistic improvements you might gain.

The entire comment is incoherent, which could easily be from a weak writer, but feels suspiciously like copypasta from ai here.

Yeah, it's got the elements of a comment that could make sense, but doesn't really cohere and has a few significant signals. I'm not opposed to someone touching up with AI or using it for a bit of analytical assistance, but this particular one doesn't really pass muster.

Ahahaha!

Eventually people are just going to ape the Ellellem style and it will be their own voice.

Nice catch. I also thought that the use of "effortposting" in the first paragraph is strange (contextually it seems like the insinuation should be that Europeans are working themselves into a rage or similar). It would make sense if the prompt included something about "effortposts", and the expression just wound up weaselling itself into an LLM-generated response as tends to happen.

  1. The EU Omnibus I proposes to deregulate a bit, let's see where it goes.
  2. The Western European elite hasn't changed in ages, the same families control London, Milan etc. as 800 years ago. European class structure is roughly: super elites with assets, wealthy politicians gaining from their place in the apparatus, middle class bureaucrats (earning less than a McDonald's employee in the US), poor working class, lumpenproles (indigenous and foreign) including retirees which consume 1/3-1/2 of GDP (bribes to keep riots down). Politicians (in nearly all parties) don't understand how to drive economic growth besides by hiring more bureaucrats (but there's no tax base left for this.) In the US, it's been possible to work hard, even at McDonald's and invest everything and build enough wealth to retire early (although consumerist culture infects people away from this). In Europe, most remuneration comes in the form of mandatory expenses (like bureaucracy controlled retirement funds with below market returns or high taxes for social services). Everything functions better than the US, with less waste for transportation, healthcare, school etc. (similar to better results for far less GDP expenditure) places you can physically socialize in (because you don't have a long commute far from work and friends) etc. but it's rarely possible to do better or excel. Class mobility is almost impossible - certainly not creating generational wealth. The middle class is tiny, because big business is structurally encouraged and even amassing capital to start or receive a loan is difficult. (Hell, after 20 years the EU still lacks a common capital market..) And well, I made a few million working in Eastern Europe which would have been impossible in the West. All this is to say: The West European elites truly hate you and me and structurally tries to keep everyone down (high income and capital gains taxes retard capital accumulation, so generational wealth in Europe remains the only wealth around.) The US at least has competing elites, rising through entrepreneurship (vs. the bureaucrat happy establishment side).

always will be our friend

That's definitely in doubt. Demographic forces will make them more friendly to third world shitholes in the Middle East and Africa, and economic forces may well push them away from the US and towards China or other potential up and comers (BRICS?).

My impression of European bureaucrats in the last 24 hours is of a body staffed by a bunch of snooty has-beens.

My experience from living in down town Stockholm is that they are rejects from all good institutions. The people at leading tech and finance firms are utterly incredible. Our political elite are often their dumb sisters. They don't work nearly as hard, they are substantially lower Iq, they are socially anxious, boring at parties and lack general education. It is women whose parents work in genuinely impressive jobs but have regressed to the mean that end up at these positions.

A big difference between the US and Europe is that politics is a lot less lucrative here. A PM at spotify will make far, far more money than a minister in the government and more than any government employee.

Much of the private sector elite consider the political elite to be utterly incompetent. However, the econmic elite tends to focus too much on economic issues and not see the overall decline of society.

Yeah, as an American resident dual citizen, this is pretty much my reaction. I'm not exactly gonna be upset if the administration snaps back at them.

The European elite has always despised you, and they barely even tolerate the Democrats. Trump is anathema to them. Musk, Trump, and the American right are clearly aligned with Europe's burgeoning counter-elite, so they're moving to punish that alliance.

I'm pretty sure they liked Obama.

They liked the direction that Bush -> Obama signaled, but there's this idea amongst European elite class that the US is so far right that the Democrats would still be considered a right-wing party in Europe.

Which is neither right nor wrong, the axis of left and right in America and Europe are not parallels. On economic policy for the most part Democrats still seem to consider having a functioning economy requires letting businesses operate without overly burdensome regulation, something which even "center-right" european parties often struggle with. Yes, sometimes Democrats will strangle some sectors with regulation, but the strangulation is the point and the regulation is the tool, there's full understanding of what will happen, whereas europeans appear unaware of the link between lack of competitiveness of their companies and the regulations they keep piling on them. But on some social policy, Democrats have pushed further left, for instance the previous status quo in the Roe v Wade era of abortion rights went much further than most European countries.

On AI use:

Having gone through this comment and others I don't think this needs to take any action.

No one here really wants to talk with an AI.

Using AI as a copy editor aka fixing grammar, spelling, and sentence clarity is not against the rules. But people will eventually notice and they won't like it. And they will likely call some of your original thoughts "AI slop", and you'll have little to dissuade them otherwise

I think most here would be fine with reading slightly worse grammar and spelling along with the certainly that they aren't reading AI stuff.

I think most here would be fine with reading slightly worse grammar and spelling along with the certainly that they aren't reading AI stuff.

Tank heaven for that.

I think most here would be fine with reading slightly worse grammar and spelling along with the certainly that they aren't reading AI stuff.

Finally, my time has come!

Europe is and always will be our friend

Europe isn't a country and we've been enemies with most of Europe one time or another. We're friendly now because none of them have an economy or a military that supports their self-image as "first world nations". Their choices for international big brother are Russia and us, so they side with us, but they hate us for it. The US' ability to influence international politics and project military power is a thumb in the eye for nations who used to be able to do similar things.

They gave it all up for cradle-to-grave welfare, 20k average incomes, tens of millions of muslim migrants and a military capacity roughly equivalent to my family reunions. The nation that once gave the world the Rollo and Harald Hardrada now gives the world Greta Thunberg. A seafaring adventurer of a different sort, it must be said.

Europe isn't a country and we've been enemies with most of Europe one time or another. We're friendly now because none of them have an economy or a military that supports their self-image as "first world nations". Their choices for international big brother are Russia and us, so they side with us, but they hate us for it. The US' ability to influence international politics and project military power is a thumb in the eye for nations who used to be able to do similar things.

For what it's worth, this is all laughably incorrect in the case of France. Say what you will about the Frenchies (some of your second paragraph hits), but them pathologically always doing their own thing leaves them in a much better spot than the rest of the Euros.

pathologically always doing their own thing leaves them in a much better spot than the rest of the Euros.

Can you clarify? I'm not sure I see what you're gesturing at.

The French are pretty well known to value their independence highly, sometimes to their own detriment or at least that of their close friends.

There are countless examples for this:

  • military procurement: the French have always pretty much exclusively fielded their own military hardware. If you can even get them to consider cooperating with their alleys, they will usually nuke the entire project and then do it alone anyway. Never, ever, would they consider buying US aircraft or missiles. Annoyingly, this results in... decent hardware. Seriously, they spent comparatively little money - all of it domestically - and got a full nuclear triad (historically, today "only" sea and air), a blue water navy with expeditionary capabilities and carrier air wings, and an effective air force and army. This means not only do they not need a global Big Brother, they don't get bullied all that much.
  • the french decided that energy independence is important, and then just built 60 reactors. They have uranium only in their... colonies, so of course they just built a giant fuel rod reprocessing industry as a backup, invented at least half the relevant processes and then where done with energy for the next several decades.
  • less relevant now, but before SpaceX kicked everybody's teeth in, Ariane was an impressive system. Still is, in some niches. It's pretty much the embodiment of French refusal to fly on American or Russian rockets.
  • The French have slowly accepted that they're not quite a global superpower anymore, and I think this was a painful process. Still, they are notoriously bad at following their hegemon, i.e. the strong opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and countless UN security council veto situations. They are also notoriously bad at keeping their finger out of Africa, and so far nobody important seems all that interested in stopping them.

they will usually nuke the entire project and then do it alone anyway

FCAS cries out in pain

I blame the Germans - for trying that again. They should have gone to the French and told them "you do the jet, we do the tank. We only meet again when both are done, until then we trust each other not to fuck it up to badly - because we usually don't".

I blame the Germans -

So do the French! Lol

Never, ever, would they consider buying US aircraft or missiles.

The French are flying US aircraft (E-2s) off of their aircraft carrier right now. (ETA: I think your post is directionally accurate, though.)

Oh wow, you are correct! They also fly the E-3, because apparently Airbus historically didn't have any AWACS in their portfolio? Maybe the western market is so small that it doesn't support two manufacturers (the French have 2 E-2s and 4 E-3s)? That must have been humiliating for them.

There are now lower-performance Western alternatives to the E-3 (and now the E-7), such as the Saab 340 (I think Embraer may also market one?) but that's not a carrier-based aircraft. The French Navy also used F-8 Crusaders until the end of 1999, so I suspect the French were willing to set aside their pride to simply buy a reliable off-the-shelf solution (carrier aviation is already hard enough.)

I wouldn't be super surprised if the French produced their own AWACs to replace the Sentry. I imagine the US had a bigger edge in airborne radar use and production during the Cold War than it does today, if only because the French now have a decent amount of experience operating them.

Say whay you will about the French, but a Frenchman never apologizes for being French, and I greatly respect that about their culture.

I mean to be fair Europe has both first world militaries(France) and first world economies(Netherlands, Denmark). Not in the same places, mind you. But still.

Europeans are effortposting on X right now, centering around a reported $140 million fine apparently for how X changed the blue checkmark and restricted API access to researchers. But this comes at a time when Europeans are bearing down on Musk for not curating feeds based on the opinions of paid 'misinformation experts', an industry effectively invented post-2016 election.

I would appreciate links here.

EDIT: Here's one. Can't source the second sentence.


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