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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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

"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.

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.

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

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).

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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?

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.)

For those of you who've never seen Mad Men, AMC's critically acclaimed period drama set in the advertising industry in the sixties, there's a well-known scene in the first season. After protagonist Don Draper invites his boss Roger Sterling over for dinner and Sterling makes a drunken pass at Draper's wife Betty (which she politely rebuffs), Draper hatches a scheme to exact his revenge on Sterling. Immediately before an important client meeting, Draper treats Sterling to a boozy lunch of oysters and vodka, then pays off the lift operator in the company's office building to tell Sterling that the lift is out of order, forcing Sterling and Draper to walk up dozens of flights of stairs to their office. Being older and less fit than Draper and a chain-smoking alcoholic, Sterling is not prepared for this level of physical exertion, and by the time they reach the office he's so exhausted that he promptly projectile vomits on the floor, directly in front of the clients he's eager to impress.

HBO recently produced a 4K remaster of the entire series for their streaming platform HBO Max. Supposedly, something went wrong during the production of this remaster, resulting in numerous shots in which crew and equipment are visible when they should not be. And we're not talking about the reflection of a boom mic just visible in someone's glasses: in the scene described above, the crew members operating the vomit hose can be clearly seen kneeling behind the cast.

My first thought was "ha ha, how clumsy and incompetent can you get". My second thought, less than a minute later, was "I bet they did that on purpose to gin up free publicity". As Scott would say, it's bad on purpose to make you click.

I'm not the only one to have this thought, and I find it almost impossible to imagine how such a thing could be the result of an honest mistake. Consider how many pairs of eyes must have approved this thing before it was made available for streaming on HBO Max. Errors of this kind most commonly happen as a result of remastering a piece of visual media for an aspect ratio different from the one it was originally intended for: many 90s TV shows were filmed in widescreen with the intention to crop the image to a 4:3 aspect in post-production, and many directors and DPs paid very little attention to the content of the shots on the extreme left and right of the image, knowing that it would be cropped out before broadcast anyway. As a consequence, HD widescreen remasters of, for example, Friends usually make it painfully obvious when one of the actors has been replaced with a stand-in in a reverse shot. (In fairness to these directors and DPs, they had no way of knowing that 16:9 would eventually become the industry standard in televisions and other monitors, still less that anyone would have any interest in watching Friends two or three decades out from its original broadcast. How many 90s sitcoms are popular enough to warrant the HD remastering treatment? Even the idea of buying entire seasons of TV shows on VHS or DVD was unheard of at the time of Friends's original broadcast.) But that excuse obviously isn't applicable here: Mad Men was originally broadcast in a 16:9 aspect, and so is the 4K remaster. I don't know what this "remastering" consisted of: the cheap option is just to take the original video file and run it through an AI upscaling program, while the more expensive option is to redevelop the original negatives (the first three seasons of Mad Men were shot on film, before transitioning to digital for the rest of the show's run) with a higher resolution, drop the resulting video files into your NLE, then replicate the shot composition and edits of the original broadcast. This is a labour-intensive task, but not one that strikes me as especially prone to error: display the original broadcast on one monitor and the remaster on the other monitor. Copy the original's homework. It's not rocket science.

So, I surmise that HBO did this deliberately: they'll apologise for the "error" and promise that their editors are working around the clock to prepare amended video files with the errors fixed. Two weeks from now, these amended video files will be pushed to HBO Max. But of course, these "amended" video files will be the original video files approved and signed off on a year ago: most likely, they made the proper remaster first, then a bullshit version thereof with all of these incredibly blatant errors in.

And it occurs to me that just about every high-profile mishap in the entertainment industry over the last decade has been met with comparable accusations of having been deliberately staged for promotional reasons. When Steve Harvey announced the wrong winner of Miss Universe 2015, that was staged, or so the Internet thought. When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, that was staged. When Will Smith took the stage during the 2022 Oscars to slap Chris Rock across the face*, numerous people (including those in attendance) assumed that it was a pre-planned skit; nearly four years later, after Smith tendering his resignation from the Academy, receiving a formal ban from attending any Academy events and his film Emancipation being delayed owing to the negative publicity, I still routinely encounter people who are convinced the whole event was staged.

And I'm concerned about what this trend implies for political sense-making.

As established, I don't think the entertainment industry is above staging mistakes and blunders for the sake of a little cheap publicity. But this fact should not cause us to ignore a more fundamental truth: mistakes do happen. No one is immune from carelessness or errors. Even Homer sometimes nods. While remaining agnostic on whether the 2017 Oscars thing was staged or not, considering the amount of moving parts involved in a live event like this, someone reading out the wrong winner was bound to happen sooner or later, especially given the Academy's predilection for having the winners announced by established Hollywood lifers as a "passing-of-the-torch" gesture, people who by definition have poorer eyesight and are more prone to senior moments than younger people (when they made the erroneous announcement, Dunaway was in her late seventies, and Beatty in his eighties). Indeed, we should have a much higher prior on these mistakes being legitimate errors when they happen in live settings like award ceremonies, as compared to errors like HBO's (they could have uploaded the remaster to their servers whenever they pleased).

But there's a certain kind of person** who's extremely keen to claim that advertising doesn't work on him and he only buys products based on merit, and who can't stand the idea of falling for a publicity stunt which was disguised as something else — it makes him feel like a mark, no better than someone who eagerly replies to a 419 email. As such, whenever he encounters an event which seems to fit the broad contours of a disguised publicity stunt, he reflexively concludes that it must be, engaging in a lot of armchair theorising about how if it had been real then X would have happened, but because Y happened, it must have been staged. And a reflexive assumption that any apparent gaffe or blunder committed by any individual who works in the entertainment industry must have been deliberately, laboriously and painstakingly premeditated by the Powers that Be to garner clicks: I mean, it's not too much of a reach to see how this could push people into a more conspiratorial mode of thinking, is it? As Scott observed, it's "doing the very conspiracy-theory-ish thing of replacing a simple and direct picture of the world with a more complicated one without having enough evidence to justify such a move." A year and a half ago, Thomas Crooks shot Trump in the ear, and the attempt on his life was immediately met with accusations of Trump staging it as a publicity stunt. Compare the armchair theorising about the Will Smith slap ("A slow walk up, an open hand slap, no stagger, slow walk back with no scuffle and no security personnel stepping in? Feels absolutely staged for publicity") with the idle speculation about blood splatter packs concealed on Trump's person and how bullet wounds don't look like that (arguments usually made by people who proudly admit never to having handled or fired a gun in their lives) — I mean, they're not the same, but they certainly rhyme, don't they? Distrust of mainstream media narratives has traditionally been a right-coded phenomenon, but in the case of the attempt on Trump's life and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk, it's been progressives who've been the most vocal in their disbelief of the official narrative (granted, many rightists, most prominently Candace Owens, also have alternative hypotheses about who's ultimately responsible for Charlie Kirk's death).

To head off one obvious objection: I don't think this trend is evidence of media consumers becoming more savvy and clued-in, less gullible, less prone to falling for state propaganda dressed up as objective, disinterested journalism. Rather, it's a toxic stew of motivated reasoning, Gell-Mann amnesia and isolated demands for rigour: we've all become postmodernists when it suits us, believing the mainstream narrative when it fits our worldview and jumping to paranoid, conspiratorial explanations when it doesn't. The BBC or the Washington Post are, at once, trustworthy outlets when we agree with them and establishment Pravdas when we don't. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that any sufficiently politically active American of either stripe believes that American elections are simultaneously the most and least secure elections in the world, literally the dictionary definition of doublethink. As someone who believes that Biden was elected legitimately in 2020 and that Trump was elected legitimately in 2024, I find this intensely concerning. People will scoff at me and tell me that our brains didn't evolve to seek the truth but rather to help us survive and propagate and so it's silly to get so worked up about biases and motivated reasoning when these things are the water we fish swim in. But I don't care: I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to hold two beliefs at the same time which on their face seem mutually exclusive and contradictory. It is not conducive to good mental health to simultaneously believe "The [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) American presidential election was secure and legitimate, but the [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) election was rigged and manipulated".

I don't like that HBO almost certainly included these "errors" in the Mad Men remaster deliberately. For people who fall for it, they'll think HBO are incompetent and careless, and I think it's profoundly unbecoming for someone to present themselves as stupider than they really are just to get attention (and hence revenue) in the short-term. I particularly don't like that HBO will probably blame their perfectly qualified editors for a decision made by the executives and/or marketing department. But for people who don't fall for it (like yours truly), it's providing additional evidence for the "major media companies are lying to you and the sheeple are falling for it hook, line and sinker" mindset. It's contributing, however indirectly, to the erosion of social trust, the assumption that we cannot accept what huge media conglomerates (and large corporations, by extension) say at face value. Per "Bounded Distrust", we expect companies to make technically-true-but-misleading claims about the qualities of their products. Historically, we did not expect companies to intentionally release substandard products as publicity stunts which they pass off as the result of human error, only to release the quality product after the fact. Now that's a new item added to the "buyer beware" list.

Wait — intentionally putting out a substandard product as a publicity stunt, just so you can pull it and replace it with the product you intended to sell all along. Is the Mad Men remaster just New Coke all over again?

*Not strictly a "mistake", as Smith intentionally struck Rock, but certainly an instance of a live entertainment event not going as the showrunners purportedly intended.

**People like us, really.

Copy the original's homework. It's not rocket science.

I've never done video editing, but this strikes me as the sort of human task prone to predictable classes of error. Given a decent amount of schedule/budget pressure ("this is due by the end of the week") and the number of times the same (or very similar) footage has gone by, I'd bet it'd be easy to miss in a final self-review pass. I try to avoid it, but I've managed to accidentally watch test-only code changes make it embarrassingly far into the code review process.

I can only assume TV is worse: "Watch 40 minutes of this episode on high alert for a single missed shot. Yeah, you know the entire script by this point because you've watched every second multiple times over, but you have to focus." is exactly the sort of task I'd expect myself to fail at. And I assume even worse depending on how you broke up the whole series and might be reviewing larger chunks.

I think a large team would help, but I doubt the remaster tasks are given to a large group, and probably not to the most capable editors either. How many person-hours is remastering a single 40 minute episode?

Yeah, review editing is a super error-prone process where the only solution is more eyes doing more passes more slowly, which becomes expensive to do at any sort of scale very quickly.

Boy, if only there was a technology that could help with that the movie industry would embrace enthusiastically.

You're totally correct! There is such a technology. Forgive my mistake.

I think you’ll have to forgive that the industry that could benefit from it as decided to obstruct it.

I think you're replying to a joke in the obsequious, sycophantic style of current-gen AI.

The current-gen AI that is infamous for not being accountable.

The use-case for AI at the moment are tasks that take a long time to do but can be checked quickly (such as coding tasks sufficiently covered by tests, or generating pictures of cute girls). When tasked with checking movies for bloopers, I suspect it would not do good enough to save much time.

It is not conducive to good mental health to simultaneously believe "The [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) American presidential election was secure and legitimate, but the [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) election was rigged and manipulated".

I unironically believe all these statements are true. It doesn't take schizophrenia.

US elections are not a monolith. They require every single voting district to behave well and consistently across the entire country. Some districts are going to be very competently run, and some are going to fail real badly. In a close enough election it is possible that incompetent or corrupt districts are enough to sway the election.

This is something that the electoral college protects against, since one state's messed up votes will just impact the outcome of that state, rather than the entire popular vote.

I saw what happened in Broward County in Florida during the 2018 election, and the aftermath.

That was a close enough election that one County could have flipped most of the races. Probably did, in one case.

Since then, I refuse to discount the possibility of wanton fraud as a factor nationally anymore.

It is arguably a glaring, Death Star-esque weak spot in our National Democracy that the actual sanctity of vote counts is reliant totally on local officials who are not beholden to some larger national standard/oversight. We'd hope that with enough voter participation all the fraud will end up being a wash, but the challenge is that one party has control of the districts in large cities where larger scale fraud is easier to hide, while the other has a coalition based in less populous but overall more numerous localities.

But wouldn't any kind of centralizing solution merely compound the problem? It's not like national level institutions have a strong track record of nonpartisanship. We definitely need more transparency and accountability, but the local (and therefore compartmentalized) nature of American elections is a Chesterton's Fence I do not want to tear down.

Oh, I would never suggest that voting counts need to be centralized.

My proposed solution was death penalty if you get caught fabricating more than, say, 100 votes.

Don't even have to re-do the election, just let the voters see that those who undermine it are punished.

I really like this death penalty proposal even though I would normally be against the death penalty in the US. The main difference, as I see it, is that working an election is an entirely voluntary endeavor, and I like the idea that the oath's people take have some sort of real legal meaning behind them.

Of course, there's lots of problems with the idea. The most obvious I see are that the number of volunteers would plummet and that foreign intellignece services would certainly try to plant evidence of voter fraud (and I'm sure they'd be able to do it very convincingly) and they could use the death penalty as leverage to have agents in the voting system.

Yes, False positives are an issue, but our Justice system is pretty decent at dealing with/avoiding those.

Hence why I'd put the threshold somewhere around 100 votes so we don't catch, say, some grandma who accidentally voted twice or something. High enough that a volunteer is exceptionally unlikely to 'accidentally' breach it.

I strongly suspect that after one (1) person is unambiguously convicted for election fraud and publicly executed (you KNOW that every single network would cover such an event) that EVERYONE would be aware of the consequence and so it'd be much harder to recruit them unknowingly.

And for people who knowingly collaborate with a foreign party to undermine an election... we already treat Treason as a capital offense.

If faith in election integrity is a critical piece of successful Democracy, better treat it with sufficient weight.

Yes, we treat treason as a capital offense and execute people for it. Nevertheless, the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc very explicitly design their procedures so that foreign powers cannot get leverage over people. If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.

For example, I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens. But I also suspect the vast majority of citizens to turn into traitors and sell information about the election to Russia if a Russian agent provides a credible threat of presenting falsified evidence that the honest citizen committed execution-worthy fraud. This is a textbook case of when falsified blackmail is an effective leverage.

If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.

Well, there was a whole whole thing about Russia allegedly recruiting Trump with a pee tape or something.

The only thing that makes controlling people involved in elections valuable is the aforementioned trillions of dollars tied up in the outcomes, and of course Diplomatic/military consequences.

All the more reason to take the 'extreme' measures to secure them.

I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens.

If you'd asked me this 10 years ago I might agree.

Nowadays, I'm not willing to say even a bare majority are.

But I do believe they respond to incentives! Be those incentives from malicious actors, foreign powers, or their own government.

I simply note that a lot of Election Officials don't have strong incentives for good behavior, and its probably insufficient to 'reward' good behavior on their part.

Which leaves...

The behaviour of the current President demonstrates that you would need to amend the Constitution to make it non-pardonable, of course - otherwise you get away with it if your candidate (for President or Governor, at least) wins.

It is a good idea in principle, but the problem is that the decline in public confidence in US elections is not driven by actual fraud, and definitely not by fraud that could be proven to the criminal standard but is currently being under-punished. It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.

Announcing that you are going to start hanging the people doing the election fraud and then not finding any of them will further reduce confidence in the system. This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.

It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.

The one thing I don't think that the architects of our Democratic processes realized was that literal Trillions of Dollars would become tied up in the outcomes that can swing with <100,000 votes.

And yet, I've lived in Florida long enough to see it go from being THE SINGULAR EXAMPLE of sloppy election processes (2000 was the year of 'hanging chads') to running effectively flawless elections that report on time and accurately. The state has only gotten more populous since then, too.

Its like so many complaints about social problems are disproven with a straightforward counterexamples.

"Oh man violent crime is complex and multi-factorial, you can't just arrest your way to safety." Why'd it work for El Salvador?

"Bureaucratic waste is inevitable, and achieving real cuts to government spending is futile because all the incentives run the other way." Why'd it work for Argentina?

"Elections are complicated and chaotic, and counting millions of votes quickly AND accurately isn't viable in many places. Incompetence will always seep in." Why'd it work for Florida?

So maybe the solution is to just send Desantis on a tour to every single state with fucked up elections and he can show them precisely what to fix.

This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.

Its clearly not non-existent. And if merely announcing the penalty is sufficient to scare people from doing it, so much the better.

That was actually the argument I made back when Desantis put together his election fraud task force or what-have-you.

Merely being aware that there's people out looking for it is a disincentive.

Since then, I refuse to discount the possibility of wanton fraud as a factor nationally anymore.

I mean, seeing what happened in Minnesota, holding your hand over your heart and swearing that no political operatives or voting bloc were ever involved ever at all in anything remotely dodgy is going to leave you with egg on your face.

I expect a certain level of mild corruption in any election in any country. Right now we've got both Texas and California competing as to who can be "most partisan gerrymandering in the history of the state". So all we can really expect is that most elections will be mostly honest, with any manipulating within small and manageable levels.

Minnesota providing an ongoing, real time example of most of the bad things that righties say happen when Democrats are in charge has been interesting to me.

Then you remember that they used Tim Walz as their answer to the Trump problem. Very odd they'd want to hold his state out as an example like that?

Kamala Harris just had no luck, or maybe no political instincts. She picked ol' Tim there mainly (what I've gathered from reading various reports) because he was willing to play second fiddle to her, while the likes of Shapiro were judged too ambitious (read: too much of a threat to her by comparison).

They wanted "redneck lite" and they got it, and now here he is: the much-touted successful smart governor with impeccable liberal instincts now shown to be presiding over multi-million dollar scamming where either he didn't know about it (doesn't look good) or it was known about but there was pressure to keep it covered up (looks even worse).

Doesn't look good for her if she's really going to run for governor of California. Then you have Gavin Newsom's social media putting out the likes of this which honestly makes my brain hurt trying to work out what the heck is going on (he was at some NYT bunfight? and there was criticism of how he crossed his legs? so this is meant to be a joke referencing that?)

That tracks.

Harris seems like the type who 'knew' she needed an old White dude on the ticket... but was ABSOLUTELY unwilling to accept someone who might overshadow her, like Newsom. She had to put up with being under Biden, after all.

When in reality, being in someone's shadow was the main thing that kept her viable.

I'm also willing to entertain the hypothesis that he was chosen in part so that when Kamala won, they could use FedGov power to cover up the problem/immunize him from consequences.

I'm also willing to entertain the hypothesis that he was chosen in part so that when Kamala won, they could use FedGov power to cover up the problem/immunize him from consequences.

I wish they were that efficient. That the scandal came out seems to have taken Walz etc. by surprise, so I don't think there was that much forward planning around "when I am elected, as of course I shall be, then we fix your little problem Tim, now hold my handbag for me while I speechify at this bunch of white liberal women".

I still haven't managed to finish reading her "107 Days" book, but searching through it on Kindle here's pretty much why she picked Walz:

He said he had no ambition to be president, that his aim as vice president would be doing meaningful work to improve people’s lives. It’s no bad thing for a vice president to want to be president, unless that ambition plays a corrosive role in the relationship and causes disloyalty. That wouldn’t be an issue with Tim. He had no fixed ideas about what the role of vice president should be, saying he would do whatever I found was most useful for him to do.

...To get a young person’s opinion, I called my godson, Alexander Hudlin, seventeen years old and very much a creature of the zeitgeist. He was for Walz. “Auntie, I like him.” [As an aside, I am very doubtful about any 17 year old who is interested in some old white guy governor of some state in flyover country. This little anecdote is a bit too pat for me to believe.]

My senior staff, to a person, strongly favored Tim.

...Maya and Tony were staying with us. They both liked Walz. Maya especially liked the fact that he was not trying to be anything but the best VP for her sister: “He’s loyal, he’ll have your back on the trail, and it’s clear that you like him,” she said.

...Our first encounter [Kamala meeting Walz' wife] was in the locker room of the Temple University gym, appropriate enough for Coach Walz. It was my idea for the campaign to lean into Tim’s brand as coach, a role that conveys both strength and caring. Tim was a relative unknown nationally, but there was so much about him that would be familiar to people’s everyday relationships and experiences. Not many people have met an astronaut, and they might not love politicians, but most people can relate to a high school coach. And with early voting starting in forty-five days, that immediate connection was important. Knowing that, I’d asked the team to print up COACH signs that people could hold up at rallies.

...My first job that night was to introduce Tim Walz to the country. This was not hard: the man has a biography that could provide scripts for several Hallmark movies. I led with how he’d coached a perennially losing high school football team—they hadn’t scored a single touchdown in the first six weeks of the season before he became coach—to winning the state championship.

I went on to tell the story of how a student who wanted to start the first gay-straight alliance at the school had gone to this storied football coach to ask for his support. Walz immediately agreed to become the group’s faculty adviser. Tim said he thought it would send a message of inclusion if the adviser was a football coach, a soldier, straight, and married.

...A local farmer introduced Tim as “a lifelong Midwesterner” who “understands rural America.” Tim proved it as he spoke, connecting to the enthusiastic crowd and finding a Midwestern cadence in which to talk about reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ issues, and how Trump’s Republicans infringed on basic freedoms.

And once again, why the flip did they not listen to Bill? The guy has bucketloads of charisma, also navigated successfully the image of being a hick from the sticks, and knows how to win elections:

Bill Clinton, speaking for the twelfth time at a Democratic convention, delivered firm words. Like the cop who arrives at the door of a rowdy party, he wanted the music turned down a little. We were getting euphoric too soon, he warned. “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen,” he said, clearly referring to Hillary’s 2016 loss to Trump. Don’t get “distracted by phony issues,” he admonished. “Never underestimate your adversary.”

Bill Clinton knows how to weave a tale. He’s one of the best storytellers in modern politics. And why was I surprised that this night, instead of his allotted twelve minutes, he would speak for twenty-nine? He wasn’t the only speaker who went long. Once again, the keynote speaker, Tim Walz, was pushed partially out of prime time in the East.

Which was too bad, because Tim gave a great speech, introducing himself to the country, making the case for me, attacking Trump on abortion and on Project 2025, presenting the values of our campaign by calling on specific examples from his own life.

Also she is really salty about J.D. Vance being the rival redneck and campaigning successfully by - get this for wicked underhand tricks - being moderate in the debate with Walz! Oh, the effrontery! How could poor, decent, honest, aw-shucks Tim ever compete with some slick Yale graduate pal of Silicon Valley billionaires?

It was not a comfortable role for him. He had fretted from the outset that he wasn’t a good debater. I’d discounted his concerns. He was so quick and pithy in front of the crowds at our rallies, I thought he’d bring those qualities to the podium. He’d prepared with Pete Buttigieg, a consummate debater, and I thought his big heart and his good humor would counter J. D. Vance’s malice and pessimism.

But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy. There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults. Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach.

When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”

I told the television screen: “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”

She doesn't like J.D. because he correctly forecast the election result 🤣

I got into my motorcade, but we weren’t pulling out. I asked Max why we weren’t leaving. That was when I learned we were being held up by J. D. Vance. He was out of his car and walking toward Air Force Two, in violation of every rule of security and protocol.

I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”

I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”

She (and/or the ghostwriter) is so good at making her enemies sound awesome.

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Texas’ new maps are pretty far from a maximal gerrymander. Indiana, on the other hand…

Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots. The only irregularity which goes to the correctness of the results is the discrepancy in precinct ballot tallies, with about 800 (0.1%) more votes in the boxes than there should have been.

Incompetence which is almost certainly non-fraudulent but which opens a 0.1% margin of fraud in an unusually bad county doesn't point to a possibility of wanton fraud on a nationally (or even statewide) significant scale.

That does not, of course, make it acceptable and everyone involved with adminstering that election should have been (and, as far as I can see, was) fired.

Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots.

Yes.

And if the incompetence is significant enough, that's precisely where someone would hide the fraud.

The money quote literally says:

"we are unable to provide assurance over the accuracy of the November 2018 election results as reported.”

Add that to the issue:

"Half of Broward County’s election precincts reported more ballots cast than the number of voters."

And that's precisely the place you'd want to look for fraudsters. But oh so luckily the process was so badly done that we can't really determine what the numbers should be.

If you're trying to swing elections, you WANT there to be enough plausible deniability that the numbers can't be directly challenged. Can't do that if things are well-run and accurate.

But its REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLYY convenient that the places where the 'incompetence' is actually so serious all tend to trend the same way on election night.

For 2018, if you add Palm Beach and Broward together (they are adjacent counties, BTW) there's about 1.3 million votes recorded between the two of them. It would be feasible if not likely to hide 10k-30k false votes in there if spread around enough, which as mentioned would be enough to swing the Senate race and several of the state-level executive races.

"Half of Broward County’s election precincts reported more ballots cast than the number of voters."

There's an "easy" solution to to this, just toss out all the votes for the precinct if it happens, maybe allow for a margin of error, like one or two more ballots than voters is okay, but more than that means the precinct doesn't get counted.

If this county's elections operate like mine, everyone working at the precinct is a volunteer from the local area, maybe further if they don't have any volunteers locally. Either way, communities that can't secure their elections shouldn't get their votes counted.

This nearly happened at my precinct in 2024. Guy manning the voting machines wasn't paying attention and nearly let someone cast their ballot and walk out with their voter card, thankfully we caught it before she left the precinct.

Either way, communities that can't secure their elections shouldn't get their votes counted.

I see the risk factor being malicious actors throw the count off to get certain districts disqualified.

It is such an odd situation, you can't really train many 'professional' poll managers for an event that happens like one day every two years.

So we rely on volunteers with minimal training and small motivation to go above and beyond the call of duty.

It sucks that this once again seems like something trivial to do in a 'high trust' society. But as trust degrades suddenly it becomes almost intractable.

Yeah, I think that's definitely a risk, though I'm hoping after a few elections of tossed out results the community would be more inclined to pay attention, and if they're not, well, I personally won't be too put out if their vote doesn't count in national elections anymore.

In theory it should be pretty obvious if someone tries to scan their ballot at the voting machine multiple times, you just need the guy standing next to the machine to be watching. Of course, it means the election results kind of hinges on him paying attention, but you can assign multiple people to that job if it really becomes an issue.

Volunteer quality is going to depend heavily on the precinct. I live in a fairly well-off neighborhood in a pretty wealthy county, and the election work pays less than minimum wage, and the more important jobs (such as being in charge of the entire precinct) basically require you to work the entire 12+ hour day. The only people willing to do it are going to be at least somewhat motivated to have their community's votes counted, there are much better ways to spend your Tuesday otherwise.

Yep.

Maybe if we don't want centralized control over vote counts, we could still have some central FedGov fund for paying the election expenses of given districts so long as they meet certain standards and can pass an audit.

And maybe those that fail, rather than toss out that election's results, the punishment is that their votes won't count in next cycle.

In theory it should be pretty obvious if someone tries to scan their ballot at the voting machine multiple times

In my precinct, the scanners don't give the ballot back to you --- it goes directly into a box that gets retained for recounts and hopefully random sampling. They also scan both sides so it doesn't need to be a specific orientation.

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You're being reasonable, cjet79. What I want is to laugh at the people online who were staunchly swearing up, down and sideways that the 2020 election was the bestest, most secure, safest, most honest election ever and that there wasn't even the teeniest-weeniest possibility of fraud, hacking, or error and who then swung to the opposite side about 2024 with evidence that the same voting machines which were impregnable in 2020 were leaking like colanders in 2024.

I went to the trouble of looking up the Maricopa county results in 2020 which seemed, on the face of it, to be suspicious. No need for fraud, just a tiny swing in votes was enough to flip from red to blue.

So there could be several such instances, as well as common error and yes, even perhaps some scattered fraud here and there. But nobody wants to hear that. When Our Guy won, it was the best election ever. When Their Guy won, it was fraud and foreign influence.

This is something that the electoral college protects against, since one state's messed up votes will just impact the outcome of that state, rather than the entire popular vote.

Er, no, the electoral college makes this problem worse. It serves to magnify the votes of certain districts over others, and it's often well-known which ones are the important ones (e.g. flipping a California district makes zero difference, flipping a Florida district is enough to change W to Gore). With the popular vote, it really requires a massive effort to shift the result by a few percentage points. With the electoral college, you just need to "fortify" the vote in a few well-chosen places.

Mind you, I still don't believe the 2016/2020/2024 elections were invalid (despite America's uniquely insane lack of voter ID). You'd still need a pretty large conspiracy to actually commit fraud at that scale, AND you'd have to overshoot, because you'll be wrong on some of the districts that you think will be "important".

Furthermore, democracy's most important feature is just to make government answerable to the will of the people. That survives even if every person on the [left/right] with 49% support will get frauded up to 51%. They're still reliant on that 49%; it doesn't make them an omnipotent dictator.

Hmm we might both be right here.

What I meant by making it harder is that if you have a candidate that is crap and gonna lose 40 states, you need to commit probably 20 different instances of election stealing to have a safe outcome.

If the candidate is going to lose the popular vote by two million you just need to commit enough fraud in LA and New York to swing the election.

Er, no, the electoral college makes this problem worse. It serves to magnify the votes of certain districts over others

Note that this is by the choice of the states. Two states divide their EC votes in ways I think are probably better, but the game theory is that for each state, first-past-the-post maximizes the utility of marginal local votes, presumably maximizing the attention (up to and including "pork") that politicians give to them, especially in swing states. I think unilateral disarmament there probably requires Congress to force them all to do it together.

OP's point was that the EC distributed vote count is robust against single points of data corruption: each can only swing state outcomes, not national. Related: I think the Interstate Popular Vote Compact would only last until some state (maybe not even a party) threatens to certify ten billion votes, and challenge the standing of other states to question its counting ability.

I unironically believe all these statements are true. It doesn't take schizophrenia.

I do not understand how this is even a controversial statement. Look at Bush/Gore 2000 election, which was decided by margin of 537 votes out of 5.8 million for Bush in Florida and by 366 votes out of 572 thousand for Gore in New Mexico. I have utmost confidence that Bush won thanks to some type of cheating, which was enough to offset Gore's cheating. And it is not as if Bush was some unimpactful president. One can say that whole US history was changed thanks to electoral cheating.

The whole system incentivizes - and as the previous case shows - rewards cheating. It is no conspiracy theory to have priors in favor of cheating deciding the elections, especially if the margin was couple of thousand of votes in contested states.

Yeah, people who were not around or memoryholed the 2000 election as "Republican SCOTUS picks Bush as President" forget what the real takeaway was, which was that Miami-Dade county was a hive of scum and villainy that had been doing shady things for decades to tilt its results in the direction of Democrats. It took such and embarrassing display for the state government to get cajoled into fairly authoritarian measures to force them to actually run their elections competently and fairly.

It beggars belief that anyone would really think that places like Vegas, Philly, LA, Atlanta, etc don't have similar problems. To put it bluntly, if you don't have votes fully tallied within 12 hours of polls closing you are so grossly incompetent, or are intentionally manipulating vote totals, that none of the votes in your jurisdiction should be treated as legitimate.

Is the Mad Men remaster just New Coke all over again?

I was around for New Coke, and I don't remember it feeling like a publicity stunt. They really were pushing it as the new, improved formulation. That people hated it wasn't the problem, it was that enough people hated it so much that they stopped buying Coke. Hitting them in the wallet forced the re-introduction of 'Classic' Coke, and even there, that rebranding ("This is the original version, the classic one") was necessary because people didn't want to buy the new version by mistake.

So maybe HBO did this clever stunt. Or maybe they actually were that stupid. Maybe they went all-in on AI, outsourced the remastering to "overseas chop shop promising to deliver the moon with AI" and this is what happens: you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Never underestimate the greed of any company trying to wring yet more pennies out of a property, but they don't want to spend more on producing the new director's cut extended edition remastered now in 4K Han shot second sign over your first-born to us version.

I think you overestimate the attention to detail people have. There's a bluesky thread here full of mistakes in AI-generated captions on anime from Crunchyroll. I cannot believe a human fluent in English read all of these along the lines they are supposed to caption and signed off on them. You would think a very simple and fundamental step in review would be "and then a human reads the caption alongside the line it's captioning" but no! Clearly not!

To take another example, in a legal filing by Anthropic their AI messed up a citation to a journal article. The AI got the journal, page number, and link all correct but got the title and authors wrong. The attorney's declaration was very clear that if you went to the link the citation provided it was the correct article (with correct title and authors). You might think a step in verifying an AI generated citation includes "do the cited title and authors match the actual ones" but, again, apparently not!

Given the rank incompetence with which companies deploy AI I am happy to believe HBO just put the un-edited originals in some AI upscaler and hit publish on the result, without any human sitting down and watching it all the way through.

Given the rank incompetence with which companies deploy AI I am happy to believe HBO just put the un-edited originals in some AI upscaler

That can't have been what happened, because the vomit hose guys weren't visible in the original 1080p episode. Ergo, one of two things must have happened:

  1. They redeveloped the footage from the original negative but at a higher resolution, then reconstructed the episode from scratch in a NLE.
  2. As above, but rather than redeveloping the footage from the original negative, they took the original digital video files which were created from the original negatives, upscaled those (perhaps using AI upscaling), then reconstructed the episode from scratch in an NLE.

If they'd upscaled the original video using an AI upscaling tool, you would've doubtless seen some weird upscaling artefacts and colour correction — but if the hose guys weren't visible in the input file, they wouldn't have been visible in the output file. An AI upscaling algorithm will invent visual artefacts, but it's not going to spontaneously hallucinate crew members standing behind the actors.

I intended to convey something like (2), appreciate the clarification.

I saw a screenshot of the friends remaster on twitter where you can see right off the edge of the set.

I think they just trusted the process. The guys scanning and cleaning the film just did their jobs. Then the watchtesters got drunk and binged the series, and when it seemed on the face fine they shipped it.

There might even be a number of "acceptable" oopsies that leadership decided on. Because these days everyone wants widescreen, and if you instead crop stuff out, then other people are gonna conplain about what you cropped out. Better to give a bit of behind the scenes sneak peak instead.

There might even be a number of "acceptable" oopsies that leadership decided on. Because these days everyone wants widescreen, and if you instead crop stuff out, then other people are gonna conplain about what you cropped out. Better to give a bit of behind the scenes sneak peak instead.

But as I said in the OP, that can't be the cause of the error here: the original HD release of Mad Men was widescreen out of the gate. It's not 4:3 being upscaled to 16:9, it's 1080p 16:9 being upscaled to 4k 16:9.

Better to give a bit of behind the scenes sneak peak instead.

They rewrote the plot to include a sly, crafty mountain?

Why did they remaster friends? Serious question. It’s a sitcom. There are no special effects or panoramic vistas. ~no one watches it for the costuming. On a deep and fundamental level, who cares.

Unless it’s just copywrite extension.

It's just annoying to watch a fuzzy mess on a big screen tv

People have this stupid idea that a 16:9 aspect ratio is "better" than a 4:3 aspect ratio, and don't like watching movies or TV shows with black bars on either side of the image.

The obvious thing to do would have been to release a HD edition of Friends, but retaining the original aspect ratio it was intended to be broadcast in when it was filmed. But it seems the market decided that because a 16:9 edition of Friends was possible, it was therefore preferable to the original 4:3 edition, even if the 16:9 edition includes loads of distracting elements that were never intended to be displayed onscreen at all.

I don't think Candace Owens is any sort of useful metric here; she really is an attention grifter. Does she have fans? Honest question.

Per Wikipedia, over 5 million subscribers on her YouTube channel and over 1 billion views. Her Patreon says she has 177 paid subscribers which at the lowest tier works out at $3,500 a month.

That wild difference between patrons and views screams "bot inflation" to me. There are tons of youtubers getting like 5% of that viewership who have an order of magnitude more patrons.

That Candace is an attention whore and the fact that she touts those viewer numbers to make herself seem like a big deal, and that she is a conspiracy theorist who surely assumes everyone else is already botting (many are of course, but hardly all) are all ALSO reasons to make me think her support is largely fake. I assume a mix of bot views she buys to big herself up and ones provided by China and Russia who benefit by promoting the biggest morons (same reason I assume Hasan Piker and the other craziest leftists you can think of have a ton of bots).

I assume a mix of bot views she buys to big herself up and ones provided by China and Russia who benefit by promoting the biggest morons

Look, just because I live in a server in the basement of the Lubyanka building doesn’t make me any less of a real person than you.

There are also a ton of Youtubers who don't do Patreon. I think her popularity makes sense once you factor in the Qanon market. There might very well be bots, but there are also a lot of conspiratorially minded Americans...

She also is number 10 on the Spotify podcast charts.

Candace is probably the biggest political streamer in the world right now. In large part because of her conspiracy minded take on Charlie's death.

This depresses me more than Hasan Pikers' popularity.

I don't think it should. There has always been a large portion of the red tribe that's seeped in outlandish conspiracy theory. They have to go somewhere.

Even then, the things they believe are, to me at least, no more outlandish than believing infinity immigration is a good thing or that evolution in humans stopped at the neck.

Yes. Conspiracy oriented women love her.

I've believed for a long time that conspiracy theories in general are a cope to deal with the fact the people who are in charge of our institutions are just people, like everyone else, and even when competent, they simply aren't capable of being perfect all the time. When there's universal agreement that things like presidential assassinations, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks shouldn't happen, and shouldn't be able to happen, it's oddly reassuring to blame them on the malevolence of a shady cadre of global elites because if this is the case, then the solution—getting rid of the malevolent actors—is simple. If instead such tragic events can happen despite competent, well-meaning, hard-working people doing their jobs, this lack of control makes things much scarier.

I don't want to dwell on dark subjects, so I'll go back to media remastering, which is about as low-stakes as you can get. For the past decade or so, I've made a habit of chasing down the best-sounding versions of audio recordings I want to add to my collection. In a rational world, this would mean simply finding the most recent releases, since one would normally expect that the continuing improvement of technology and best practices would yield increasingly superior results. Of course, you don't have to get too into the weeds to know about the "loudness wars" in CD (and now digital) mastering has hobbled sound quality since the late 90s, leading some to believe that the earlier versions when they didn't do this must be superior, but even then the answer is not always clear cut. And even going back to the original vinyl doesn't solve the problem. With any given release possibly having dozens of unique versions, finding the best one through trial and error would be expensive (especially if you're trying to get your paws on rare or foreign issues), and there are no quick and dirty rules you can follow.

The best resource for researching this is the Steve Hoffman forum, hosted by the namesake mastering engineer known for his high-quality audiophile issues. While Mr. Hoffman's warm, buttery sound is controversial, his forum attracts people from the industry, and there's a lot of inside baseball regarding the way things actually operate, a lot of it coming from Steve's own recollections. While things have changed in the recording world since the introduction of the compact disc and subsequent changeover to all-digital recording, an explanation of how the process worked in the vinyl era is instructive on the pitfalls of trying to remaster older recordings for CD.

Say an album is recorded in 1975. The band recorded that album to multitrack tape. Once the recording was finished, the engineers mixed the album down to a two-tack stereo tape, called the studio master, at which point their role in the process ended. But the tape still had to make it onto a vinyl record. The studio master, or a copy, would be sent to a mastering studio where this conversion was done. The limitations of the format required that bass be cut and treble boosted on the record according to a standardized formula, the end user's equipment reversing this process during playback (this is why a special phono preamp is required to use a record player with a stereo). The mastering engineer would also make other adjustments so that the recording would fit within vinyl's physical limitations and make large scale adjustments to ensure that all the tracks had similar volume, equalization, etc. This resulted in a "production master" which the mastering engineer would use to cut a wax "laquer" (more adjustments were made during this process; the art of cutting vinyl is mostly lost and most modern reissues sound like crap because of it), which was plated with metal and thus became a "mother". The mother was used as a mold to create "stampers", which were sent to pressing plants for the manufacture of the final disc. It should be noted that copies of the studio master would be sent to foreign labels or distribution arms in other countries, and these would create their own production masters and laquers for their domestic releases. Both the mothers and the stampers wore out with use, and popular albums would need to be cut again for reissues.

Fast forward ten years and you're a young mastering engineer who just got a job with Major Label. Both you and your employer are excited about the burgeoning digital revolution and they want you to put together a CD release of the 1975 album, which was very popular. Since compact disc doesn't require the same compromises that vinyl did, you want to use the studio master to ensure the best possible sound and as accurate a representation as possible of what the original engineer intended. You quickly realize, however, that this will be impossible, since the record was a British release and you're working for the American label that owns the rights to it, and with your deadline you don't have time to make inquiries to see if you can get the tape on loan. To make matters worse, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the past decade means that even at home, tapes have been stashed hither and yon and no one seems to have any idea about where everything is or even what anything is, since nothing is clearly marked with anything other than a track listing. Some tapes are nth generation copies that sound terrible, one was split up oddly for an 8-track release, one has interesting mastering choices that make it sound wholly different than any version you've ever heard, several are okay, several are Eq'd for vinyl and will require processing to make usable, and one has "DO NOT USE!" written on the box in magic marker.

Of course, the one with cautionary language was the best sounding by far, and in your time crunch, you don't have time to ask questions so you just ignore the warning and master the album without asking any questions. You find out later that this was indeed the copy that had been sent over from the UK, and it was marked Do Not Use because it wasn't a production copy with RIAA equalization and if it had been used to cut a lacquer it could have ruined an entire pressing. Six years later no-noise is invented and the label wants to release a "better" version that takes advantage of the new technology to eliminate the tiny amount of tape hiss audible on the CD issue you made. But by this time you've moved on and the engineer, in a time crunch, takes the warning literally and uses an inferior copy that requires him to crank the noise reduction up to 11, absolutely killing the recording. Your original remaster was fine, and any benefits of additional noise reduction would have been dubious at best, but this new improved version supersedes the old one and is now the only thing available in the US market. Then ten years after that the British label decides to do a global deluxe edition touting that it was "from the original master tapes", which was true, except by now the loudness wars are in full swing and the whole thing is compresses to shit.

Meanwhile, back in 1986 the British label exec decided that the CDs should sound as close to the original albums as possible, and specified that the production masters should be used. The Dutch couldn't find their own tapes, so they requested the master tapes from the British label, and were given the actual master tapes for their 1989 domestic release, which is clearly superior to every other available release, but they started using the US mastering 2 years later. So now you're looking to buy the CD and you're confronted with a bevy of options. The 2002 global release is available in any store but sounds harsh and overcompressed. It's an ear-bleeder. The 1991 US version is readily available on the used market but sounds even worse. The old British version is easily available and sounds okay but not great. The original US version is kind of hard to find and sounds better than the British version but still has its problems. And the 1989 Dutch version is obviously the best, but it was only in production for 2 years and used copies go for top dollar.

The point of all of this is that no one intended for there to be a whole bevy of crappy releases. Record companies had discovered a gold mine in reselling albums their customers had already bought, and to do so they had to tout some improvement over the previous sound. So they latched on to anything they could find that was technically true, regardless of whether it was the best possible version or even an improvement over the original vinyl. I highly doubt the Mad Men errors were part of a cynical ploy to drum up publicity through a fuck up, because I don't see what they have to gain. The show is from 2007 so it's not like anything is going to require a great deal of restoration. The whole 4k thing is a marketing gimmick because the benefits over 1080p are dubious to begin with on most televisions, and are completely obviated by whatever lossy compression algorithm they're using. As long as it's technically in 4k they haven't lied, and the goal is to get the product out as cheaply and quickly as possible. They probably sent out the wrong files to production, or raw, unedited files, and asked for a conversion into 4k, and didn't bother to verify anything. This isn't a restoration that's done frame by frame but a combination of computer upscaling and rescanning film at higher resolution. They weren't paying anyone to pick over all 100 hours or whatever with a fine-toothed comb.

So there were obvious mistakes, but they'll be fixed in a week, and nobody will care or even remember after that. I certainly don't think a significant number of people are going to subscribe to HBO Max now because they didn't know about the 4k version of Mad Men, at least not enough to doubling production costs.

  1. It is wild that vinyl, tapes, and CDs were physical artifacts that still had "git branching hell" syndrome. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.

  2. I have a 4k TV and sometimes "4k" really does look better, and other times it doesn't. For a while, I was assuming that some sort of compression algorithm behind YouTube was the culprit. A friend suggests that the 60 FPS versions are what I see as better, not the resolution. I am not an A/V-phile. What's "real" 4k versus not? Do I really get more if its 60 FPS. Are there .... more FPS out there?

Are there .... more FPS out there?

Yes, Ang Lee's last two films were shot at 120 fps.

I haven't seen either, but even watching this clip from the latter (which has been downsampled from 120 to 60 fps), the effect is weird. Somebody in the comments said that in a strange way it makes the movie seem too real by making the artifice inherent to the medium too obvious for the viewer to suspend disbelief, which is kind of what I'm feeling when I watch it. For some reason the high frame rate makes it really obvious that you're looking at a soundstage, in a way that isn't obvious merely from a 4k film shot at 24 fps.

When The Hobbit came out it attracted controversy for being filmed at 48 fps, which many viewers found distracting in the same way. There was a period where it looked like high frame rates might be the future of the cinema, but truthfully I can't remember any movie since Gemini Man touting them as a selling point. This article lists a handful of movies since that one which have been filmed at unusually high frame rates, invariably 48 fps: it's quite a ways from becoming industry standard. Curiously, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was filmed at 48 fps but released as 24 fps. Wonder why they even bothered.

haven't seen either, but even watching this clip from the latter

Whoa! Yeah. I can't exactly put it into words but it's very palpable. I feel like I'm watching something that hasn't been fully mastered or edited yet. There isn't that Cinema "filter" on it that makes my brain go "Oh, cool, movies!"

When you're in the real world looking at things motion will blur as you move your head. When you're watching a movie staring at the screen not moving, this doesn't happen. The upshot is that things that would blur in real life don't blur in the screen, and it looks fake. There are also issues where screen refresh rates are designed to be in multiples of 24 and not 60, which make the frame rate out of sync with the refresh rate and causes a stutter effect.

What's "real" 4k versus not?

People have been complaining about the quality of Netflix's "4K" offerings for a while now. But judging the quality of a video is much more complicated than just looking at the bitrate (1 2).

What's "real" 4k versus not?

I think what @Rov_Scam was getting at is that, if you compare a 240p video and a 1080p video, the difference in quality will be obvious even if they're encoded in a lossy format like MP4. Whereas when comparing 1080p with 4K, the differences are so subtle that the only way you could tell them apart is if you were looking at an uncompressed video file.

The 4K videos being streamed via HBO Max are "real" 4K, in the sense that the image resolution is 3840x2160, but because of the lossy compression used to make them playable over the internet, most viewers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and a 1080p version of the same video file.

You can definitely tell the difference between compressed 4k and 1080p. I just picked a random video on yt: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oqxAJKy0ii4

And the 4k has a lot of details that are too small to be represented in 1080p, and on a big screen you can see them. And I know the youtube 1080p version is gimped with low bitrate, but one thing you can do is watch the video at 4k, then keep the video on 4k but change your screen resolution to 1080p. The details will be gone.

I have no clue about HBO max but at least youtube 4k has enough detail to make 4k mean something.

I believe you, but this is something I'd really like to verify with a double-blind. Some sound engineers claim they can tell the difference between a 192 kHz sample rate and 96 kHz, but I'm honestly sceptical.

Honestly for the casual viewer it's very subtle. But the eye is objectively quite capable of seeing waaay past 1080p. There's a reason that 1080p laptop displays have fallen rapidly out of favor and "retina" class screens are now standard. And why 1080p is the standard for a 5 inch phone screen.

Meanwhile there is no scientific evidence that humans can hear 192 kHz. There are some reasons that someone can pass an ab test though. The transfer function of the equipment could be such that adding or removing ultrasonic sound also affects the audible sound. This would be an artifact of the equipment and not something different in human perception. Alternatively, the human listener could be absorbing and perceiving the ultrasonic energy in a way that's different than typical hearing. It could just be that the vibration is picked up by nerves outside the ears incidentally and therefore allows the listener to distinguish the recording.

I wasn't referring to ultrasonic frequencies (I don't think anyone's arguing that humans can hear literal dog whistles), but rather to the recording sample rate.

The way sample rates work, per the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, is that in order to represent a frequency in a signal we need to sample at twice that frequency. Since humans can hear a maximum of 20k, we would only need 40k to represent that. Accounting for some additional effects that require a bit of headroom, CD samples at 44.1k and DVD at 48k. Those sampling rates weren't chosen arbitrarily, but for the specific purpose of being able to accurately record and reproduce the full spectrum of human hearing. All sampling any higher does is increase the theoretical limit of high frequencies that can be carried on the medium. I say theoretical because microphones aren't designed to record supersonic frequencies and speakers and amplifiers aren't designed to reproduce them. So all 192k recording means is that, assuming you were able to record it, the medium could theoretically encode frequencies up to 96khz, or nearly quintuple the limit of human hearing. Professionals will record at this rate, but that's because when the files are manipulated digitally having headroom prevents certain bad things from happening if they're opened and saved a lot, though I'm not sure of the exact science behind this. Suffice it to say that higher sampling rates offer no benefit to the consumer.

The story is similar with bit depth. CDs are recorded at 16 bit, but modern "Hi Res" formats go up to 24 bit and probably higher if you look for it. All this does is lower the noise floor. There's a certain amount of noise inherent in digital recording due to rounding off the last bit, and it sounds similar to tape hiss. You've probably never heard it because it's at -96db at 16 bit. By comparison, the noise floor in the best analog sources is at -70, and that's only if you're using filters; it's more like -32 db naturally. An unusually dynamic recording is going to have around 20db of dynamic range, a more typical recording will be in the 14db range, and most contemporary loudness war recordings will have less than 10 db. The amount of music that exists that goes between being so quiet you'd struggle to hear anything and as loud as standing next to a freight train is nonexistent, and the technology already allows for that. 24 bit just lowers the noise floor to -144db, which is quieter, but with the noise floor already so low as to be inaudible at normal listening levels, the extra range is completely pointless, although if you needed to record and incredibly quiet sound and a jet engine takeoff on the same recording then hey, go for it.

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Meanwhile there is no scientific evidence that humans can hear 192 kHz.

More specifically, there has not been a single remotely credible test that would even hint at finding anyone who could hear past 20 kHz. Every time that has been claimed, the claimed ability has completely disappeared when intermodulation distortion in the playback path was removed by using a separate amplifier and speaker element for the > 20 kHz part.

Even then, nonlinear acoustics is a legitimate field of study, and you might want to verify no lower intermodulation products are appearing from thin air as it were. But IIRC that's mostly with higher amplitude sounds.

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I don’t know what formats you are using, but if you are streaming there’s a good chance that the service is actually streaming at less than 4K resolution much of the time, even if you have it set to 4K.

It might not be the culprit, but have you disabled "Motion smoothing"? If you're noticing a quality difference on the basis of framerate that setting is an extremely common problem that's often turned on by default to impress old people.

Speaking as an old person, motion smoothing sucks. Old people are the only people who remember why that's called the "soap opera effect".

The effect of 60p is not quite the same. I'm not sure about 24p on a 120p display, never having had one.

Motion smoothing on new TVs is absolutely disgusting

It is wild that vinyl, tapes, and CDs were physical artifacts that still had "git branching hell" syndrome.

In many ways it was worse: in analog, you lose fidelity on the original every time you make a copy. You see this a bit wit accumulating recompression artifacts on images, but professional production pipelines manage to limit this. But on film it has historically made effects shots look "worse" than others (more copies), leading to some unintuitive choices. Kubrick in 2001 in some parts did multiple exposures of the same film to minimize compositing noise (most notably the darks washing out to shades of gray), which is why it looks good even by modern standards.

this lack of control makes things much scarier.

Bingo, got it in one. A LOT of human behavior makes a lot more sense when you frame it as "wanting to be in control". Including believing things that imply control is possible. Add in some "fundamental attribution bias" and boom, you've explained a great deal of weirdness in our pyschology.

Most "low information" consumers know production is inauthentic. They are not bothered by this while they enjoy the 31st season of The Bachelor. Another segment of somewhat higher information consumers knows and considers the production (inauthenticity) doesn't end with the 31st season of The Bachelor. Production reaches into their TikTok feeds and their least favorite political party's national convention. It merges with and invades their hobbies, interests, and relationships. It reaches out and touches them when as their crush posts a new cute Instagram story dancing to some music.

"What is real?" used to be understood as an appropriate question for smoke filled dorm rooms and entertainment. It has never ~been felt more appropriate to ask this question than while facing a screen. We happen to do that a lot. The philosophy major with bloodshot eyes might not be able to understand, but for this segment of consumers this an uncomfortable question with uncertain answers. Production -- theatrics, marketing, controversy -- has taken over the commons. This may not be unprecedented experience, but it is probably unprecedented at scale and presence.

Discernment takes a lot of energy and time. Ain't nobody got time for that. An inaccurate, but simple categorization system is more useful than uncertain consideration. The hack the nerds don't want you to know is to develop and tune heuristics. Fine, when and by how much? Who do I trust to tune if not the cool dudes who see what I can see and are like me? What is a heuristic anyway? If we feel mean we might dub this a Midwit Consumer Demographic. We don't feel mean though, so we say the path of least resistance is the most natural thing in the world. Better to be guarded by overzealous "fake" categorization than to feel duped like some jabroni. Even the most normie consumers share this perspective at times, perhaps as they read the latest Instagram story debunking junk that bamboozled unwitting others.

I don't know if the epistemic rot is worse on an individual level than a hundred years ago, but if a person wanted to host an everything is fake brainworm they've never been more able to find vindication. The algorithm, its production and theatrics, is always on The Feed. We should probably be more concerned if this segment of people didn't increase after growing distrust of institutions and the evolution of brainhacks-- institutions that do frequently earn a degraded reputation. They fuck up, spectacularly so, and it's prudent to be suspicious of actors that profit off of a fuck-up.

I'm sufficiently conditioned to tolerate a fake mistake technique or the ol' "accidental" release of a trailer. Leveraging an unplanned mistake is the role of PR, so you can't blame them for that. The same types of people, if not the very same ones, do often enough somehow, someway, end up in yet another racist race swap controversy discourse for the latest Disney publicity campaign. While there is a "look in the mirror" defense of these kinds of tactics I don't find them convincing. It's not conspiracy, it's incentives all the way down-- "accident" or not. I'll still cover my bases: the schizos are always right.

The original "fake flub" was the infamous Janet Jackson boob slip at the superbowl.

  1. Timberlake very clearly is on a cue to reach-over-and-pull. There's no other action (he wasn't turning to, like, dip her or something).
  2. She had on nipple jewelry so that it wasn't too much as literally millions of children would be watching.

"Wardrobe malfunction" I believe was the winkwink nudge term. That anyone could be expected to buy that beggars belief. It's one of the many things wrong with us all. Just say "We're sorry we did that on purpose." Or "It's a show, relax" or whatever, instead of deflection so everyone can feel everyone else is fine.

Also commonplace in Japan. Anything to preserve the 和 or wa.

(Note the very first rule of preserving wa is the same as that of Fight Club.)

I loved The Onion's take on this: "U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV".

Don't forget that Timberlake's lyric accompanying the action was "gonna have you naked by the end of this song."

My steelman explanation is that there was supposed to be something underneath the top that would stay in place and cover her up after he ripped it off, but the wardrobe... malfunctioned, and it got accidentally ripped away with the top, thus exposing her.

As someone who believes that Biden was elected legitimately in 2020 and that Trump was elected legitimately in 2024, I find this intensely concerning.

Agreed. While the election denial from the left has not infected the upper echelons of the dems as much as it has infected the GOP, I am still disappointed with a lot of people from the tribe I feel less alienated from claiming that Trump and Musk had somehow 'rigged' the election. Like, come on. Not every tactic is worth stealing from your enemy. Should I mentally prepare for president Newsom to bomb shipwrecked sailors, lead trade wars, deport illegals to foreign megaprisons, and accept fantasy prizes from corrupt sports officials, or can the SJ crow perhaps take a principled stand that some things are both bad if Trump does them and if they are doing them?

People will scoff at me and tell me that our brains didn't evolve to seek the truth but rather to help us survive and propagate and so it's silly to get so worked up about biases and motivated reasoning when these things are the water we fish swim in. But I don't care: I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to hold two beliefs at the same time which on their face seem mutually exclusive and contradictory.

That is not my main problem. The truth is the one asymmetric weapon which humanity has. Once you give up the notion that both sides should be able to form agreements about at least some observations in the world, you are conceding victory to whatever side has the fewest truth-related scruples, or which gets favored by random chance. I am not saying that this will inevitably lead to one side slaughtering the other after convincing their followers that their enemies are not really people (though that is definitely a possible equilibrium), but our ability to collaboratively form complex, useful models of nature to our shared benefit is one of the things which sets us apart from the other apes.

As a toy model, assume that every person has a cynicism slider in their brain. At zero, they behave like a person who is not aware that people sometimes lie, believing everything, at one, they totally discount the possibility that someone could try to cooperate them to improve their world model. Obviously neither extreme is a stable equilibrium for society.

But you can have societies where most people agree that most people lie most of the time, and societies where most people agree that most people are honest most of the time. And the latter kind will be much better at collaborating in collective truth-seeking than the former.

So whenever someone conspires to get the public to buy a simpler version of events than what really happened or knowingly pushes a false conspiracy narrative, they will (in expected value, at least), move people's cynicism to a higher value, which seems bad.

This is a good comment, with one qualification:

While the election denial from the left has not infected the upper echelons of the dems as much as it has infected the GOP

Uhhh... Russiagate?

Russiagate wasn't election denial - the leading Democrats and Deep Staters pushing it didn't deny that Trump in 2016 had won a plurality of the popular vote in states representing an majority of the Electoral College, or that Trump was the lawfully elected President. (There were some more fringy figures like Jill Stein who tried to overturn the 2016 election, which goes back to @quiet_NaN's point that "not spamming frivolous allegations of election fraud" is somewhere where the pro-establishment left is better than either the anti-establishment left or the right).

This is just not true. People like Clinton claimed Trump did not legitimately win. See https://www.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html

See also Stacey Abrams.

Nowhere in the article you link does Hilary claim either of the things I said she didn't claim. I agree she is throwing shade on the election in a way which is irresponsible, but she carefully doesn't say that the votes were tabulated incorrectly or that the law was violated.

Your claim was nonsense. You claim there was no election denialism. Yet Hillary made points about downstream votes making you scratch your head? What do you think that is? What do you think she meant when she said he wasn’t the legitimate president? Of course she is claiming the election was not on the up and up. Just because you have a specific definition doesn’t make your claim reasonable.

Hell Trump admitted that Biden was the lawful president. See he didn’t deny the election.

There is an important practical difference between "My opponent won using dirty tricks" and "My opponent won by breaking the law and/or tampering with ballots" which is that, given the laws and traditions of western democracy, one is a sore loser whining and the other is an implicit call to overturn the result. And frequently an explicit one - see 2000 in Florida (everyone), 2004 in Ohio (left-wing Democrats), 2016 (Jill Stein and a few fringe left-wing Democrats), or 2020 (Trump).

Hilary's explicit claim is "Russia hacked and wikileaked the Podesta e-mails with the intention of helping Trump beat me" (almost certainly true) and that this meaningfully affected the results (almost certainly false). It is the same type of claim as "Twitter and the Deep State tried to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and this meaningfully affected the result in 2020" (false, because the suppression did not succeed, but this was not for want of trying), not "Dominion, Smartmatic and GOPe election officials conspired to report results that didn't match the votes cast"

Being a modestly talented politician, Hilary is able to make the less explosive claim while darkly hinting to her crazier supporters that she secretly believes the more explosive one (that Russia hacked voting machines or otherwise corrupted the tabulation of the election). But she carefully avoids making it.

Here is the quote from the article:

“There was a widespread understanding that this election was not on the level. We still don’t know what really happened. There’s just a lot that u think will be revealed. History will discover. But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on about come away with an idea like, ‘Who’s, somethings not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.”

That’s fucking clear as day election denialism. Care to recant?

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I mean, it's all about the definition of "legitimate". Democrat anti-legitimacy arguments were, as I understand, grounded in the theory that a foreign country allegedly deliberately manipulating the timing of media events (and/or Comey's actions) will mislead gullible Americans and thus decrease the "fairness" of the vote. That is, it's "illegitimate" in the sense that a counter-factual vote without intervention would have had a different outcome. I've always thought this was pretty darn weak, but I also think it's important to describe it accurately. It's a "illegitimacy" born of bitterness, even to people who use the word, not an "illegitimacy" as a factual debate. In popular parlance these are different meanings. I don't think that's slimy wordsmithing, it's just how people use the words, in a descriptivist sense.

Now, is claiming "illegitimacy" (in the two meanings) the same as "election denial"? No, mostly? Election denial, I feel like, is a meaningless phrase, even if I've used it once in a while as a sort of general gesture at a concept. Some people use it as "I would have won", an ego-saver among other things, while others use it as "I did win", and the two must be separated. Plainly both can be considered "denialism"! But both do not mean the same thing. I chalk this up partially to word-confusion. As I said, there are two separate concepts going on that are distinct, that our words aren't capturing very well, so I view this argument as silly (and the upvotes/downvotes as tribalism)

Stacey Abrams is a different issue, with a different debate about "voter suppression" that is much closer to the Trump case, and doesn't to me seem to be the same thing as Clinton-style denial.

But you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, ‘Whoa, something’s not right here.’ That was a deep sense of unease.”

Why do you think Clinton talked about 3m votes? What another other shenanigans? It’s quite clear she is strongly hinting without saying that she did in fact win.

Also, keep in mind Clinton knew the Russia shit was bullshit that her own campaigned came up with and that she signed off on.

Russia gate was, to be clear, mostly lies, but it wasn’t election denial.

Should I mentally prepare for president Newsom to bomb shipwrecked sailors, lead trade wars, deport illegals to foreign megaprisons, and accept fantasy prizes from corrupt sports officials

Absolutely. In fact, past Democratic presidents already bombed weddings, initiated many trade and kinetic wars, deported illegals and accepted various funky prizes. There's absolutely zero reason to assume Newsom - which has already demonstrated he is at the very best no better than an average politician - wouldn't do it, if only it would seem necessary to him. And I am sure, that when it happens, you will find for yourself and excellent explanation why this time it's completely different.

And I'm concerned about what this trend implies for political sense-making.

What's true loses to what's viral. I think the implications downstream of this are not widely discussed or understood anywhere near enough by the general public.

How can you, when you are fighting "being engaged" and the only real solution is apathy?

Regarding the specific Mad Men example. A possible explanation that springs to mind is that while the original on-set recording may have been done in a higher resolution format, broadcast was still at 1080p and as a result the original VFX where the vomit hose technician would have been painted out were done at 1080p and the failure to re-do the paint out at a higher resolution was a product of negligence, laziness, or penny pinching on the part of the parent company.

As for the rest, I've always kind of hated the rhetoric surround the alleged "sense-making crisis" because if anything I feel like politics and culture of today are more legible to the average citizen than they have been at anytime in living memory. I don't think that the average citizen has suddenly become more savvy, so much as the pretenses have been dropped. The legacy media was never unbiased or impartial but there was a time when they cared enough about the appearance of impartiality to give someone like Billy Graham the chance to make his case. That is not the world we live in today, and a lot of the alleged "crisis" is not a crisis so much as a failure by affluent liberals to adapt to the new paradigm. They still haven't accepted the fact that they live in a low trust society.

My mind goes to The Sparrow. A novel that popped up in my "you might be interested in..." feed and that I recently finished reading. The plot is a classic golden-age of sci-fi style first contact story in the same vein as Rendezvous with Rama or The Mote in God's Eye. I enjoyed the read, and I don't want to give any spoilers but things do not end well. I do not know if this was the author's intent, but my personal takeaway from the story was that things would have played out a lot better for everyone involved, humans and aliens alike, if the people running the first contact mission had been a bit less Ivory Tower idealist and a bit more military or working class. That is to say a bit more cynical, and a bit more paranoid about things like disease and establishing a proper permitter around your camp.

I've read The Sparrow a few years back. If I recall correctly things go poorly because everyone beings acting like an idiot the moment they touch down. It's hard to believe that they would teach someone how to pilot a plane but not that you need to keep the grass trimmend on a runway you plan to use, for example. I didn't like it.

My read was not that everyone suddenly began acting like idiots once they touched down, it's that the Cardinal was an idiot from the start but was insulated from the consequences of his idiocy by a combination of luck and people who where more careful than he was. Two resources that ran out quickly once he was on his own.

A possible explanation that springs to mind is that while the original on-set recording may have been done in a higher resolution format, broadcast was still at 1080p and as a result the original VFX where the vomit hose technician would have been painted out were done at 1080p and the failure to re-do the paint out at a higher resolution was a product of negligence, laziness, or penny pinching on the part of the parent company.

If this is the case (and it sounds plausible), then presumably the VFX layers in which the crew are painted out are transparent 1080p video files. Sounds like it would be trivial to upscale them to 4k and drop them into the timeline on top of your upscaled 4k live-action footage.

Perhaps, but it still has to be someone's job to do that for it to get done. I think Charlie is probably correct that whoever was managing the remaster didn't know or simply forgot that this was a thing that was needed, nobody got the job, and nobody at that level took the time to QA the final product.

I think it's pretty clear what happened...

Their normal production methods preserved the editing sheets, I can't remember the official term but they keep a map that codes frames in the final cut to individual film negatives.

So they farmed out rescanning the necessary film negatives and gave the sheets, new scans, and orginal hd versions to some shop who had software to automatically match the color timing and spit out a new final episode.

No one putting this process together remembered that Mad Men had occasional digital post processing to remove things like crew members at the edge of some shots.

So it wasn't in the budget and it was no one's responsibility.

The companies they hired underbid and had tight deadlines, so they just figured it wasn't their problem.

There have been worse screw ups than this before. There was a release of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in widescreen where they not only didn't remove crew at the edge of shots, they also forgot to darken the night scenes and tint them blue.

Things like this always happen when upper management tries to split up projects and keep costs down without anyone clearly in control of he final product.

There was a release of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in widescreen where they not only didn't remove crew at the edge of shots, they also forgot to darken the night scenes and tint them blue.

I had completely forgotten about the "Day Walker Edition" of BtVS when I wrote my own post, but yes. I would wager that this is exactly what happened.

...and I find it almost impossible to imagine how such a thing could be the result of an honest mistake...

If it was intentional - and these are not what you'd call healthy companies, I would not rule out a disgruntled employee - then it's to habituate you to the idea that all entertainment is fake to varying degrees. This is to prep you for accepting more AI generated content. It will cost a fraction to produce and they think they'll be able to charge around the same prices. In the industry we call them profit margins.

As always, one of my allegorical tales provides an illustration of the root cause: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TSiF2niMGpI


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