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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   2833 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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This is probably better for the Friday fun thread, but 1) I can't wait and 2) we can culture war(game) this.

A dude was accused for shooting someone and then driving away.

The plot twist is that he is a quadruple amputee. Legs amputated above the knee, arms just below the elbow but including both hands. He also happens to be a semi-pro cornhole player. Well that's interesting, I guess. It seems kind of far fetched that he'd be shooting anyon---

There's a video of him loading and firing a handgun

It also appears that the victim in the shooting was in the passenger seat of the vehicle that the amputee was driving. And there were two more people in the back who, when asked, refused to help move the victim's body.

Something-something not-the-onion.jpeg

The culture war angle is that people will always find ways to kill each other even when genetics / misfortune has tried to bring one's lethality index to zero. Is it a sign of the times that our most bizarrely handicapped are still stacking bodies?

As a pro-gun person, I'm somewhat confused on how to feel. On the one hand (sorry) I think any non-felonious and non-mentaly-incompetent adult should be able to own whatever firearms they want (drawing a line at crew serviced weapons). On the other hand (okay, it's getting old now) I can't imagine actually selling a gun to this individual because I would be very hard pressed to think "Yes, this individual can responsibly and safely operate a firearm."

That’s good, but I don’t think anything is going to top this one anytime soon. I had tears in my eyes laughing so hard. I wonder if pets will be an inhibition on future owners looking to defend themselves.

I didn't expect "God made Man, Sam Colt made them equal" to go quite that far, but it's a persuasive argument for expansive gun rights IMO. This case sure sounds like a murder, but the less-physically-capable deserve access to lethal force as much as anyone else does.

EDIT: Bonus culture war content. Could you imagine any post including "...before driving off in his Hyundai." No? But once it's a Tesla, then the car's make becomes newsworthy, or something.

Haters gonna hate.

I find the "I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy!" stickers so obnoxious that every time I see one I'm overcome by the urge to make a custom one along the lines of "WE'RE GOING TO MARS!" with a full-color Elon giving a big thumbs up. I'm not even that big a Tesla fanboy; it's just that they make me want to be so I can signal as hard as possible that I'm not as neurotic, credulous, and vain as they are.

However my lifelong personal prohibition on bumper stickers has served me well to this point and I can't see myself deviating after all these years.

From The (In)Effective Altruism Diaries: The Case Of Centi-Millionaire Marxist

You possibly already heard about James Cox Chambers Jr.

He is character that would be laughed at and rejected outright in any creative writing class as crude, primitive and unfunny caricature of leftist written by hate filled right wing bigot.

And he is real.

Descendant of long line of distinguished WASP's. As close to hereditary aristocracy as you can get in today's world. Wikipedia article of your own is now what noble title used to be.

(Yes, pure Anglo Saxon ancestry, no documented Jewish ancestors, if you are looking for this thing, you can be disappointed)

Who is, since early age, dedicated Marxist devoted to fighting for revolutionary cause.

Around age 12, Chambers was introduced to Marxist literature by a teacher, including Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, something which made a lasting impression, although by his account, his focus on political activism has ebbed and flowed throughout his life.

Now, his means are not negligible. 250M hard bourgeois bucks is nothing to sneer at.

Chambers owned a portion of Cox Enterprises until divesting from the company in 2023, resulting in a payout estimated by Rolling Stone of at least $250 million.

Distinguished revolutionaries in the past used cash with great efficiency as weapon to hasten the demise of capitalist world.

Comrade Cox-Chambers is not one of them. In 30 years of struggle, he really achieved nothing much worth showing. The Berkshire Communists, The Berkshire People's Gym, The Butterfly Collective etc. are not up there with The Sealed Train.

Neither are Dakota pipeline protests or Cop City protests.

At least the Georgia commune members had some fun, while it lasted.

Many former commune members recall in a 2024 interview with Rolling Stone that little happened on the commune aside from rampant psychedelic usage and that Chambers pressured commune members to take part in polyamory/free love relationships.

This shows once again weakness of premise of effective altruism and 80,000 hours movement that money alone is sufficient to change the world. It is not specific to communism/leftism, many cases of right wing money wasted in even more pointless way.

Now, if you are inclined to laugh at the outgroup, show how would you do better. Your homework, your hypothetical scenario for today is:

You are given 250M in USD.

Your mission is to promote COMMUNISM. Not some petty bourgeois hippy nonsense, but real, scientific and authentic Marx-Lenin-Stalin thought.

How would you get the greatest bang for the buck, how would you most efficiently use capitalist cash to bring forward glorious communist future?

Show your work. Best entries will be rewarded with eternal revolutionary glory and virtual Stalin Golden Prize.

Now, if you are inclined to laugh at the outgroup, show how would you do better. Your homework, your hypothetical scenario for today is:

Picture this: January 6th but the protestors bring guns and launch a real coup.

$250 M is peanuts in terms of 'marketing campaigns' but it is a lot of guns and ammo. Obviously you'd need to wait for a good time, during some kind of major crisis when govt authority is weakened. But then you drive in with your comrades and do some shooting and see how it goes from there. If opposition is limpwristed, divided and feckless enough maybe you can get away with it.

Marxism-Leninism is an ideology of shooting, not theory. The Vanguard Party and democratic centralism ideas are almost overtly anti-theorycel. Vanguardism means 'we know better than the plebs how the country should be run and we're going to take over forcefully', democratic centralism means 'shut up and obey the Party Line'.

If you let people vote all you get is democratic socialism not ML. Nobody is going to vote to lose their SUVs and WFH lazygirl jobs. You don't give them the chance to vote, not if you want ML. Nobody ever voted in a communist regime that did real communism (collectivization and nationalization communism), bullets are the way to go.

90% of this is 'waiting for the right time' though. Being lucky is also very important.

It cant work! The Master's tools and whatnot!

But more seriously, I don't think it can work. Real communism is too boring and stale at this point for $250 million to be enough to get the movement sparked. Netflix's annual revenue is $45 billion, youtube's is $50 billion. You are talking a drop in the bucket next to a lake when it comes to media influence and the like. That could work if it was something new and compelling that could meme itself into mainstream, like Looksmaxxing or Fursexuality (a hypothetical new thing), but with boring Marxism? Meh.

In any case, all the smart commies already moved on. They realized Facism is better anyways, you get 99% of the control over things that you would have had under socialism/communism, but still get to blame the capitalists when things go wrong.

Pitch: identify male communism influencers and try very hard to boost their sex appeal to insane levels. The rest follows from there.

Details: they need to have real street backgrounds, like be artists or bartenders or woodshop owners and show promise at building a following. Then I would start hosting these conventions/parties that are communist adjacent that are really just a cover to invite these guys to hang out and give minor talks. Very important: ensure these things are like 70% female and plant a few very hot women to be all over the influencers. Leak some photos of them together getting drunk. In the early days the goal is to make these influencers think they're God's gift to women.

Once they're properly motivated and thinking with their dicks + feel the communism flow through them, from there, continue growing the conventions/parties, always maintain the high female to male ratio. Make the parties invitation only but in a hipster kind of way (you need to know it even exists). The parties need some kernel of grassroots appeal to actually take off and not be lame. Has to be something fresh. You can hire women at first to come to these but at some point you need something sensual or cool that brings women out willingly. Things like climate justice or black lives matter are tired. This is probably the hardest part though you can try a bunch of concepts with $250mm to burn through.

Anyway as these grow bigger gradually make the communist male influencers more center-stage, giving keynotes, etc. always ensuring they're surrounded by tons of women and that their high sex appeal is not in question. And start making it easier for wannabe communist guys to come to these and maybe get laid.

I give it 5-10 years before this counter-culture becomes a political movement with real weight.

I would pay the Mondragon people to consult on the creation of a parallel institution in America - basically, run a startup in some field related to national defense. Socialist left-wing SpaceX is a market niche that is begging to be filled: I'm sure that MIC dollars would be poured into a non-chud rocketry program even if it never produced a working rocket. Anyway, the point isn't to make a working rocket, but to spread Communism: and funding it off venture capitalist funding rounds and government subsidies sounds like a great grift to have. If we actually produce something of consequence, bonus!

This grift is already in place in the Linux and Firefox foundations. (All credit to Lunduke.)

This shows once again weakness of premise of effective altruism and 80,000 hours movement that money alone is sufficient to change the world. It is not specific to communism/leftism, many cases of right wing money wasted in even more pointless way.

One of the main premises of effective altruism is that some forms of altruism are vastly more effective than others. Some people wasting vast sums of money ineffectively is very much compatible with that.

Many effective altruists have also specifically been wary of political giving (like Scott's article Beware Systemic Change), especially when it takes the form of picking a side in a mainstream left-vs-right tug-of-war rather than finding niche "pulling the rope sideways" issues that are disproportionately important compared to how much the public cares about them. Yes the controversial issues also matter, but they believe those are generally not where you can most effectively spend a marginal dollar (or even a marginal 250 million dollars).

Most obvious answer is supporting young communists, right? Find the politicians who might make it into the big leagues, give them a helping hand, make introductions.

Internships for young communists that require them to be just communist enough in public that they would have trouble walking it back.

Make educational materials available. Do the boring stuff that other orgs don’t want to do for them. Provide templates for charity constitutions and licenses.

centi-millionaire

hecto-millionaire

centi-millionaire

Sorry, but this is the officially used term.

100M+ net worth put you safely above the rules of classical grammar.

Just wait until you hear about biannual.

On a sidenote, I'm going to start introducing myself as a centimillionaire now, or maybe a microbillionaire.

I still do a double-take everyone time Americans say 'biweekly'.

Biweekly means twice a week, you silly people! We have a perfectly good word, fortnightly, that means 'every two weeks'.

A weird bit of culture that might be CW adjacent: The mainly but not completely female Asians/Whites/browns trying to be white passoids are not doing ok. (I assume some non-whites are also suffering here; but they are not as obvious.)

Part of it is conservative centered, mar a lago face and such, but a lot of it seems to cover the whole right to center left range of the political spectrum (I don't know any true Not Blue leftists with cosmetic surgery, maybe it's too bourgeois for them) but it's hitting the conservativ-ish women from age 21-40 demo like the spanish flu. Not a single female trump voter I know hasn't had a major cosmetic procedure; the type where you are laid up for at least a week, and a majority of the normie democrats are right there with them.

What the fuck is going on there? At least you could make an attempt at having the previous weird looking to me beauty standard through exercise; the current one seems to be "I want to look like a starving Ethiopian on a natgeo cover but with big fat punched in the face lips and cheek bones that have been displaced 2 parallels higher on my face than nature provided".

Does anyone actually like this?

Not a single female trump voter I know hasn't had a major cosmetic procedure

At least one of us is in a bubble then. Not counting teeth-whitening, I don’t know a single female Trump voter who’s had any sort of obvious cosmetic work done.

As far as I understand it this sort of look is a result of runaway intra-female competition. Sure, it starts off with seeing who can become the most attractive to men but after a few years of insular debate and no male input you get this bizarre caricature of what a hot woman looks like.

I sort of feel like the same thing is happening with Clavicular. He looks like what dudes think women find attractive. Do women actually find him particularly attractive? I have no idea.

I put it to the teen daughter, and the response was "Yeah, he's a baddie."

I have absolutely no idea what that means.

"Baddie" is zoomer slang for an attractive person.

Surely there's enough context here for you to sort it out.

She's saying he's hot.

I'm not saying this isn't happening, but I don't think I've seen a single woman in real life who fits this description. It's entirely reserved for elite conservative women in media/media-adjacent positions. All the normie-lib women I know wouldn't be caught dead getting cosmetic surgery (not saying they wouldn't get it, but it's sufficiently stigmatized that it would have to be really subtle), while all the conservative women I know are midwestern housewife types who would find cosmetic surgery to be absurd vanity. Also, regardless of orientation, a lot of them are too fat for that kind of cosmetic surgery to be credible.

(For reference, I live in Maryland and my family is from the Midwest)

Does anyone actually like this?

To me the look you are describing has extremely strong Aging Trophy Wife vibes. My gut says that this is probably the intersection of wealth and vanity. The artifice is the point - anyone can go to the gym and get fit, but not everyone can shell out a small fortune to have a doctor rearrange their face.

Are you counting Botox?

Not a single female trump voter I know hasn't had a major cosmetic procedure

Wow. I thought it was limited to the mar-a-lago types. Didn't realize it was affecting normal people. Do you live in a location at the intersection of performative beauty and polarization ? Miami, Orange County, Hamptons ?

TBF, I don't know any 21-40 yr old Trump voting women in person. I know MAGA men of all ages. I know MAGA women of advanced ages. But no young women.

majority of the normie democrats are right there with them

Could be where you live.

No women I know have had cosmetic work done. Well, not major stuff, maybe some small procedures that wouldn't necessarily be more widely known, I don't really know.

I remember when tattoos, energy drinks, long hair on males, and cosmetic surgery were all regarded as a bit unseemly; now all of them are more or less socially acceptable. I suspect what you're seeing is much higher rates of approval of this stuff.

I see enough lip filler in the UK to fill a swimming pool. God, don't get me started on the jaundice-tier bronzing and fake tans.

Turkey teeth as well?

Since 2016 but really 2022-ish second campaign planning there was a noticeable shift by many MAGA-adjacent conservative women to a kind of Miami Latina inspired look with some Hooters Texas bimbo characteristics. Search ‘Kristi Noem before and after’ for the archetypal example.

The look is a combination between the ‘global Latina belt’ look common from Mexico to Lebanon to arguably in a way even corners of SEA, and which is therefore somewhat racially ambiguous and aspects of drag makeup that were reintroduced to the female population as a result of RPDR. It was probably first popularized in the West by the Kardashians in the very early 2010s, but took another decade to make its way to the conservative influencer circuit (as late as 2019, Fox News blondes still had a very different style).

I think you're right. Fox News just had on some tanned Italian woman. Blondes are woke now.

Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom. This time of year will always remind me of those eerie first couple of weeks of lockdown. The cherry blossom trees, in all their Spring glory, standing lonely in the usually heaving central park at lunch time. Driving down the main motorway in and out of my city and not seeing a single other car at 5pm rush-hour on a weekday. The ease which unfounded terror was spread through the population during those weeks was eye-opening. The unquestioning acquiescence of all my fellow citizens made me realise for the first time just how subject to the whims of authority this society was and just how fragile and precious was my own freedom.

For the first couple of weeks, as the virus’s spread through Europe was meticulously tracked and broadcast, as carefully curated images of overwhelmed hospitals and rows of coffins were plastered across our screens, although I was already vehemently arguing against any imposed restrictions, I still retained some sympathy for the scared and frightened masses. But as the early data coming out of Italy and other places started to emerge and was so evidently at odds with the fearmongering propaganda all around me, my sympathy quickly gave way first to bewilderment and then slowly to anger.

As The Science™ took deeper hold and lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve turned into lockdown for the summer turned into second lockdown turned into third lockdown and still the people clamoured for more restrictions and railed angrily against even the mildest suggestion that maybe we should ease up on the tyranny. Any moment now, I thought, surely any moment now the people will break and rise up against this imprisonment. All their lives they’ve been told that they live in a free democracy and now they’re happy to be essentially locked inside their homes, told they can’t visit friends and family, told they can’t touch or hug their family members, even if they’re dying, while with their own eyes they should be able to see that the virus for which all this suffering is supposed to be in honour of is so much less potent than they were told, while with their own eyes they should be able to see the hypocrisy of being ordered that grandparents are not to hold or even visit their new-born grandchildren while thousands marched shoulder to shoulder in the streets in celebration protest of the death of a criminal in a land 4,000 miles away. But no, the people never rose up. As Orwell, who understood the crowd better than any, once observed “Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock” and so it proved as my cowed peers meekly submitted to every curtailment of their freedom.

I will always remember lying in an empty field, reading a book in the warm sunshine and being buzzed by a police helicopter for being outdoors while not undertaking my mandated single-allotted daily exercise. I will always remember being told by the police to move on while sat in the deserted central park. I will always remember the multiple other times I was interrogated by the police for not cowering at home like a good citizen. I will always remember the fear in the eyes of my brother’s girlfriend as she shied away from anybody who got within two metres of her. I will always remember the depths of persuasion I had to employ to convince two of my friends to come and spend a night in the countryside with me during summer 2020, and the lies they had to tell their mothers to even be allowed out (and back in) their homes. I will always remember my work colleague who got suspended for hugging another colleague. I will always remember being kept apart from my partner in a foreign country due to closed borders. I will always remember being told by my own parents that I was not welcome in their house.

Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom and life has returned to normal. The traffic is heavy and the parks are busy again. The Black Mirror-esque dystopian future that we got a horrifying glimpse of has faded away. Even the predictable economic and public-health consequences of lockdown have somewhat smoothed out. Covid came up in conversation the other day and my dad glibly remarked, “Covid? That’s ancient history now!” The world has moved on but, for me, the memory of Covid lockdowns still dominates my outlook. There is still a deep rage within me at the brutal illustration of the state’s power to strip away my freedom, cheered on wholeheartedly by the electorate. There is still a disbelieving resentment at how readily the populace succumbed to government control and willingly followed directives that just six months previous they would have loudly decried as inhumane. The hypocrisy of lockdown policies was responsible for a violent swing in my own politics, from casual left-wing socialist to hard libertarian, but most of all the lockdowns destroyed my faith in my fellow humans. The stark demonstration of just how easily manufactured-fear convinced the country to follow ridiculous commands replaced my underlying faith & trust in humanity with a smouldering disdain. The betrayal of even my own family, as they chose to follow the orders of tyrants and closed the door on their own child, drove a dagger into my heart.

I remember the lockdowns and I’m still angry.

I remember going back to work during Covid (courts, particularly criminal can't wait forever regardless of what is happening outside). And a female colleague broke down crying about "why we the one's who have to die" (or something similar Its been years at this point). Our boss (a lady, or this would probably not be the funny story it is) poured some whiskey into a disposable coffee cup and offered it to her saying something like "alcohol is a sanitizer" (or again something like that). I started laughing and said I was also sick. Got my own cup. There were only like 5 of us left at the office at the time. It was certainly a time.

General comment on this thread, not a warning for any individual in particular:

Rarely do I see so many reports on posts that are almost entirely "This guy's opinion makes me mad."

The thread is interesting and obviously evokes lots of feelings. What depresses me about it is not any of the discourse about Covid and vaccinations and lockdowns. It's the constant reminder that on a forum where people supposedly value free speech, the average poster still just wants everyone they disagree with to be shut up.

Contemplate that while whining about vaccinations and lockdowns.

Surprised that people are reporting this one. Feel that hardcore lockdown criticism is the norm in hindsight, albeit people uncomfortable with rhetoric on young sacrificing for old and whatnot

I’m surprised that tensions are running so high in this thread (myself included). Meanwhile this forum has unusually civil discussions on many topics that would devolve into nasty flame wars pretty much anywhere else.

I’m not at all surprised. To watch government officials pass draconian restrictions that they refused to abide by themselves; to watch public health officials knowingly and intentionally lie, to see them brag about it on TV, and then to see the world still continue to treat their word as gospel; to be mistreated and maligned for years over an issue on which you were right; to become a victim of the mother of all moral panics; and then to see the perpetrators call for a period of national forgiveness and completely avoid taking responsibility for their actions—all that is enough to radicalize and permanently embitter almost anyone.

But of course the board also has some members who broadly agreed with their government’s approach, making the perfect setup for an acrimonious fight.

I joined TheMotte right around the start of Covid. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people did. It was one of the last places where people could talk freely about things that were radically changing their daily life. There was never anything like Covid before and hopefully never will be again.

That's an interesting perspective. I'm angry not because of the lockdowns, but because of the ignorance, politically-motivated thinking, and the incompetence.

As some choice examples of incompetence, I remember when the CDC and FDA blocked independent PCR tests, requiring that all coronavirus samples be shipped to Atlanta for testing. Then the "public health professionals" and the "medical ethicists" decried individual screening, as people cannot be trusted to interpret test results for themselves.

The CDC argued against testing symptomatic individuals in the general population for "wuhan flu", then declared that there was "no evidence of domestic transmission". The NPR listeners in my circles twisted themselves into knots explaining why private testing for novel diseases of pandemic concern is bad, actually, and also argued that the CDC was being intentionally hobbled by Trump.

Then the CDC required that private tests be validated against their in-house test suite - which contained faulty reagents.

Then the CDC rescued a bunch of Americans from Wuhan, put them together in group quarantine for 2 weeks, and didn't test them for a disease which spreads very well in confined spaces and has a 1-2 week incubation period. If a single person had been infected, they would have infected the whole group, then promptly been discharged into the population. We don't know whether this happened, because they were never tested.

USCIS started implementing epidemiological questionaires for people on planes, but there was no enforcement of quarantines, and the illicit means to walk across the borders were still available. I think the combination of pro-"open borders" with pro-"epidemiological controls" is a type of doublethink, but I'm the outgroup.

Then CDC and "public health experts" insisted that the disease wasn't airborne, despite strong epidemiological studies from other countries demonstrating airborne-only transmission: spread between members of a choir who had been religious about handwashing, examples of people infecting each other by walking past each other on the underground, a Daegu call center and a Daegu restaurant where probability of being infected was highly correllated with air handling direction rather than surfaces touched. Despite this, masks were not recommended.

Probably because the Chinese diaspora had already raided all the available mask supply in the continental U.S. and "public health officials" were afraid of inciting racism. I was friends with a member of the Chinese diaspora working for an American subsidiary of a Chinese manufacturing conglomerate. They spent most of late January to early Feb 2020 procuring masks from U.S. retail and hospital supply chains and shipping them back to China.

Then seemingly in April 2020, NYC hospitals were overflowing with positive cases, so they shifted positive cases into nursing homes. I may remind you that even then we knew that "CoViD-19" primarily killed the elderly.

And of course in May we learned that protesting was a public health risk, unless it was protesting for BLM. And in California restaurants and hair stylists were forced to close, unless you were friends with Gavin Newsom.

A lot of these closures would have been unjustifiable were it possible to track and trace efficiently, but there was a "shortage of qualified nurses" and "lack of budget" to do contact tracing as late as August 2020.

At risk of doxxing myself, I was in Korea at the time. In lieu of lockdowns, the Moon administration implemented effective procedures for figuring out who had been exposed, and effective tests to detect illness. (TBF, there was one short lockdown in Daegu before tests were available.) Instead of taking nurses out of patient care and being short on contact tracers, local government administrators were retasked into disease tracking. (Admittedly, this is a lot easier when there is a universal civil service exam: Local government administrators in Korea all pass some threshold of competence.)

Exposed people were identified by credit card purchase databases and CCTV (which were examined by the above administrators), and those individuals got texts asking them to quarantine at home if they were suspected to have been exposed. Breaking a quarantine order was a crime, but also the local government would leave two weeks of food and supplies outside your door so you didn't go hungry or run out of toilet paper.

Instead of banning private testing, the Korean government encouraged private companies and labs to develop tests. We had effective testing by late February, and by late March PCR testing was widely available enough to be required (for free) if you were showing symptoms. Exposed individuals were tested at the beginning and end of their quarantine period.

All people entering the country from abroad were required to test and quarantine, and this was remarkably effective at delaying the entry of new variants until they had evolved lower lethality, and until old people could be immunized.

The highly effective tracking and tracing revealed events with high chances of superspreading: raves and dance clubs, church choirs, "coin-room" (phone booth) karaoke, drunken gatherings. Events with a history of superspreading were banned, but if you weren't a fan of large or drunken gatherings, life mostly went on as normal. (A friend of mine got married in 2020. There was no reception and the audience was limited to 100 people, but the wedding happened in real life and the happy couple has a bunch of unmasked photos.)

In lieu of allowing the Chinese diaspora to buy and export all the available medical masks, the government requisitioned Samsung to quietly buy a few thousand tons of meltblown fiber, and banned export when it was becoming a problem. Starting in March/April, everyone in the country could visit a pharmacy with their national ID to receive two N95 masks per week. This was actually effective at minimizing transmission on the subway, and hospital staff were able to get their allocation, too.

In late 2020 there was a presidential election, and it was held in well-ventilated outdoor tents with free gloves and masks provided instead of by legalizing mail-in voting and the resultant loss of trust in voting systems.

It wasn't perfect: masks were required in parks / when outside, which is not a time of high transmission. Kids still did school on zoom. Workplaces installed infrared cameras at the entrance, which wasn't very effective. Daily epidemiological questionnaires were required to pass newly installed turnstiles at my workplace, and those access controls have persisted and made visiting old coworkers impossible. The rest of the testing and tracing Orwellian panopticon was only easy to dismantle because it was expensive and time consuming, and I think people were justified in their concerns that it might not be dismantled.

But I guess my point is that the US (and the UK) completely fudged it up when it came to lockdowns. There were demonstrated means available to achieve both disease control and functional life, but the US government is too incompetent, ignorant, and (likely) corrupt.

I feel like I am now probably in the Covid denier anti-vaxx camp. And I believe it’s correct. I have a reasonable basis for believing I am usually smarter than others, but I think the true science says it was rational that I locked in before lock-downs but quit doing anything 2 months later (as an under 40 not fat person). I only got vaccinated once because I had an asymptomatic covid case and the first jab (probably signaling an immune response from having covid) knocked me out for 2 days. Which to me both signaled I had immunity and it’s just stupid to take a shot that puts you in bed.

Locking down did make sense to me as we didn’t have a full understanding of the virus for a few weeks.

Questions I would asks would be why were politicians probably a full week late shutting down. And why did locking down, 5 doses of vaccine (for younger people), wearing a stupid cotton masks became things for so long. Was it:

  1. Politicians are mostly dumber than me
  2. I’m autistic
  3. Changing policy is like turning the Titanic
  4. People just like playing political games. Calling righties a death cult and stupid was far too fun of a game to play that many people were ok suffering a lot themselves personally if they got to play that game.

Covid lockdowns were directly responsible for the end of my dream career, my marriage, and my faith in humanity. Six years later, I share in your anger as I navigate a similar PTSD this time of year.

I can match you 2 for 3 although I did pretty much stop dating as well.

The people didn't rise up, as they were told that these are temporary measures, which they indeed were, stupid as many of them were. The conspiracy theory crowd - insofar as it still remembers Covid and hasn't moved out to other topics - tends to nowadays just take continuous victory laps over how "conspiracy theorists are still 100% correct" whenever some authority admits that some of the measures were less-well-than-thought out or there's news about lab leak possibility being considered or whatever. However, they confidently predicted that the sheeple are wrong about all this being temporary and its just going to be an endless cycle of lockdowns and mandatory vaxx from here to eternity. It wasn't. That probably has a lot to do with why it's been forgotten so quickly (it shouldn't be, it should be pored over in detail for lessons on how to answer similar crises better in the future.)

I think you’re correct that the claims of “temporary measures” was why people didn’t rebel. It’s how most tyrannies begin. No dictator has ever marched to the steps of his Capitol claiming that he’s going to permanently end all civil rights and liberties, it’s always claimed as a temporary measure needed to meet some crisis and of course everyone should go along until the danger is passed. Humans are simply not built for recognizing that first step as the danger it is. I think most of it goes back to our beginning as humans in tribes. A claim of lions in the bushes turns off the rational brain and moves humans back to Stone Age tribes where the strong guy will save us if we do exactly what they say.

It’s one reason I am democracy skeptical. Most humans are better off being a follower and not suited at all to lead or build or invent. We are 90% peasants and a couple of inventors and thinkers and leaders. Why keep asking people to participate if they cannot understand the simple stuff?

Why keep asking people to participate if they cannot understand the simple stuff?

I'm sure the remnants of the Ancien Régime were asking themselves the same question all those years in Austria.

To give you a less quippy answer, I think the most persuasive argument for me is a moral one. People should have a say and a stake in how their lives are run. I'm not confident enough to claim it's a universal, but I think it's not a controversial claim to say the majority of humanity has an instinctual desire to be the masters of their own destiny, whatever compromises they have to make of their autonomy in the current socio-political-economic structure of the world. I mean, freedom is arguably the single most popular ideological concept there's ever been, with all but the most extreme authoritarians and totalitarians at least attempting to appeal to it. I think it's fundamentally a right you deserve, to at least have the modicum of political power your suffrage gives you in modern liberal democracies. I'd prefer much more devolved and local systems, though.

But for those who don't share my moral principles, how about avoiding violent, anti-elite revolutions? Do you really want to go back to killing hundreds of thousands of peasants because it's important to keep a rich, powerful guys club exclusive? Not to mention that, poor short-term electoral incentives to policy aside, democratic regimes tend to have much better long term capacity to self-correct. Whereas if dear leader decides to wage a hopeless, 13-year-long failing war to retain a pointless colonial empire, there's no formal, reliable mechanism to force a change of leadership or even policy. Have you always approved of your mayor, your governor, your president? Have you ever wanted somebody else in charge? And if the answer is yes, are you prepared to plan and execute a revolution or coup of your own, or to participate in or support one?

If not, I would suggest you are either one of the peasants, or you do, in fact, actually like the idea of democracy.

The conspiracy theory crowd - insofar as it still remembers Covid and hasn't moved out to other topics - tends to nowadays just take continuous victory laps over how "conspiracy theorists are still 100% correct" whenever some authority admits that some of the measures were less-well-than-thought out or there's news about lab leak possibility being considered or whatever.

Given how much effort went into censoring the views they were right about, the victory laps are completely justified, even if you can find some they were wrong about.

Yes its not the being right that makes me angry. Its the continued lying. Nature still won't publish the lab leak evidence. Apparently (according to Matt Ridley) they went from "not enough evidence" to "everybody already knows this no point in publishing it." I'm angry because my government paid to make the common cold MORE contagious, released it on the world, lied about it, made a vaccine that didn't work and was worse than the cold, and lied some more. And told anyone that objected toany of this that they were outre and people should exclude them.

Most conspiracy theorists correctly recognized that the lockdowns were too retarded to be the new equilibrium(and indeed, one merely needed to remember things over the course of several weeks to recognize that). They may have predicted other outcomes from the lockdowns that did not happen, but not 'lockdowns forever'.

The dumbest COVID conspiracy that I widely heard IRL was that Tom Wolf imposed the restrictions because he hated the bar and restaurant industry and wanted to kill it entirely. These same people said he needed to be voted out during the next election and were disappointed when I told them that he was already on his second term, confirming that they had no idea about state politics whatsoever.

Overall it was amusing to witness, there were so many absurdities I'm sure that most will be forgotten, if they aren't already. For me this was the highlight of the whole thing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E2yXwUm5TNs

I personally think that COVID appeared plausibly enough like an apocalyptic bioweapon that Trump should have taken just about any measure necessary, no matter how authoritarian, including martial law and suspension of elections, to minimize its spread. But I also think that if he'd even leaned in that direction, it would simply have been the left rather than the right convinced in the end that it was some kind of tyrannical hoax.

I mean, that's exactly what the Left did, initially. When the idea of Covid effectively being a Chinese-derived flu and talk of ceasing travel/immigration from Asian countries, it was the Left as a whole piling out and going on about hugging a Chinese person today.

Then, when it finally arrived, the Left were the ones driving Lockdown efforts, with the Right being turned into Covid-deniers.

And then BLM happened. And we all know how that turned out. So...

I think that Trump should have take super harsh lockdown measures in like the first two weeks while it still hadn't reached the U.S., or very shortly afterwards, and was possible to contain. Once it reached more than 1 states it was too late. There was 0 chance it wasn't going to go full epidemic eventually, and all any lockdown measures did was "flatten the curve". Which they did do, but with great cost and little benefit. As soon as we lost containment it would have been better to focus on ramping up healthcare readiness and otherwise let people and the economy get on with their lives.

And if Trump was actually a giga genius he would have gone authoritarian just to get the left going anti-lockdown and then let their control of the media make that spread and dominate the manufactured consensus. Sure the right-wing would be mad at the left for spreading disease and killing their grandparents, but that happened anyway and the economy would be in much better shape.

There was 0 chance it wasn't going to go full epidemic eventually,

Plenty of countries where it didn't (Korea, Japan, Taiwan being the clear-cut cases). That no western country managed the pandemic as well as those three was a policy choice.

You know, while COVID was a bad time in India, the sheer poverty of the country saved us from the ridiculously prolonged lockdowns. Sure, we had them for maybe 2 or 3 months in early 2020, and then another one in late 2020 or early 2021 for the delta wave (much worse than the first one). But it quickly became apparent that society and the government itself would collapse if the majority of people weren't allowed to work. Also, it turned out that the revenue from liquor taxes was rather load bearing for the budget, and awkward adjustments were made quite quickly. The average person stopped regularly masking by early 2021, though I still had to wear one (and wanted to) till the middle of the year.

It's unfortunate that I was deemed an essential worker and had to suffer through it all, including work in overloaded Covid ICUs. We literally ran out of oxygen. The crematoria really did melt from overuse. N95s? I got one every month and had to wash it well past the point of usefulness. Caught the damn bug 4 times at the very least, and that's only considering the times I bothered to get tested. I could have used a break.

Anyway, I think it quickly became clear by the middle of 2020, well past reasonable doubt, that blanket lockdowns made little sense, and that only the elderly and sick needed special attention. What a farce.

I remember a friend in the extra-lockdown-loving Australia being told by police to hurry home by curfew. He'd gone out to get some Taco Bell and got a bunch of shit for it.

extra-lockdown-loving Australia

The average Australian spent less time locked down that the average Brit or American - only Melbourne had an extra-long lockdown.

Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID. I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic. The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines or effective antivirals, and there was a real fear of running out of ventilators.

Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly. Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years (and before modern medicine, the only available tool). Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary. And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.

Covid was built on a lie. We knew the hysteria was overblown not in mid 2020, but in March, before the first lockdowns in the western world, with the Diamond Princess. We knew it posed no danger to young, healthy people. We knew it was less contagious than commonly claimed. And the establishment just went and lied, lied, lied to push an agenda.

Wow. Are you incapable of just admitting you were wrong and apologize?

It is honestly incredible how wrong so many you were and how much damage it caused. And instead of any of you ever admitting you were wrong, you just make up nonsense as to why, if you think about it, you weren't really wrong and also even if you were it's totally understandable and also it was probably inevitable anyway and it's not as bad as burning down entire towns with all the people in it in 1348 so stop being a baby.

Not a single thing in this comment is accurate. No, 36 million people didn't die from COVID and if you seriously believe that do you think without the totalitarian response it would have been worse? The diagnosis and testing and classification were knowingly bad and they did it because it gave them horrendously exaggerated numbers which they wanted. And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN. World governments had plans for this exact event which they tossed out the window to launch on worldwide experiments and they all cowardly crowded along since being wrong when everyone is wrong is the least dangerous path. Lockdowns and quarantines are not the same thing. Ventilators were killing people and having fewer of them requiring judicious use would have been far better. We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about. The covid injections cause more harm than it abates. The lockdowns didn't stop after 2 weeks to flatten the curve, they continued long after even the propaganda couldn't convincingly lie about it.

Never take complaints or arguments from covid zealots about human rights or laws seriously because they've already demonstrated the very low bar at which they will toss all that out the window. And they will do it again.

This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.

I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.

Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.

Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.

However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.

I find these 'I'm one of the reasonable ones' posts so tiresome because the status quo will lump you in with other dissidents to discredit you no matter how many times you post comments like these. It doesn't matter how much you ridicule and insult the people further down the "conspiracy nut" totem pole than you. Your only defense is just being correct and telling the truth.

Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease

I think part of this is my shorthand is leading to confusion.

admissions being down

Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were lower in February 2020 through at least April 2020 than previous years. This is findable data which I looked up years ago. You can think it's ridiculous all you like, but you are wrong and that is a true statement.

the dancing nurse/doctor phenomenon makes more sense (and you can just look into the periphery of the videos) when you realize part of the reason is the hospitals were not full, the pop-up tent hospitals were empty, and the hospital ships were empty

or ventilators killing more people

my claim is ventilators were overused and this overuse caused people to die

ventilators are dangerous and should only be used when the downsides of their lack of use are dire

in the early days of the covid hysteria, they were regularly being used on people when they shouldn't have been for various reasons but the result was people who would have lived otherwise fell into the ventilator spiral where they declined and then died

and this is why the protocol for their use w/re COVID19 treatment was significantly changed in the summer of 2020 which substantially reduced their use

vaccines being worse than the disease

have you ever heard of the 1976 flu vaccine which was pulled from use?

well shucks, this cannot be because it has the word "vaccine" in the name!

I get it dude, but these slimy 'I'm one of the reasonable ones!' posts gain you nothing and just make holding dissident beliefs harder and more costly as it reinforces exactly what you're complaining about.

After all: you're the conspiracy nutjob who thinks there was some crazzzzzzzzzzzzed conspiracy at local, state, and federal government and their corresponding institutions and people lied repeatedly about facts and stats on the ground and the known effects of lockdowns! I'm one of the reasonable ones, I don't believe lockdowns are the greatest crimes against humanity outside of war. Please don't lump me in with people like you.

Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits.

This is pretty close to COVID being fake. The costs were deliberately overblown (faked) in order to justify the intervention. It's manufacturing consent, and it's clear if you have eyes to see.

However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on.

This is also deliberate as part of the same manufacturing of consent. This is how the demos is led around. This is how you condition people to hate, by providing approved targets and encouraging marginalization.

no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.

I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.

Believing wrong things about 5G is less nuts than wanting to imprison the entire planet over a spicy cold. Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced. They're wrong but they're better than the other, more dangerously wrong group that actually got to call the shots.

Ventilators were killing people and having fewer of them requiring judicious use would have been far better.

This really stuck with me. As clear as day that the "cure" was worse than the disease. Same with Remdisivir, I think, that also caused a lot of deaths.

We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about.

I'd love to speculate, so I'll start. It was because if there were treatments, the vaccine couldn't be pushed through in an emergency fashion. The vaccine needed to be pushed through, the emergency measures were the only way to do it, and therefore no alternative treatment could ever be allowed.

If you had to guess what happened to the few whistleblowers in late March who claimed the ventilator protocol was killing people, do you think it was 1) they were hailed as heroes for risking their careers and employment to save the lives of their patients or 2) they were fired, informally blacklisted by their state medical board and couldn't get employment elsewhere, and had their licenses threatened?

The protocol was changed shortly afterwards, but that started what would become a pattern: any licensed professional who came out against policies which were killing people would have their lives destroyed by public health institutions, the media, and state licensing boards. Any deviation from the approved message would be severely punished.

It was because if there were treatments, the vaccine couldn't be pushed through in an emergency fashion.

I'm honestly unsure. The powers that be appeared to have a strong interest in doing whatever to continue the emergency. Laws, constitutions, human rights, didn't matter much for multiple years there and courts simply refused to issue holdings restricting executive power w/re public health insanity. I seriously doubt an admission of an effective treatment would have stopped emergency approval/usage of stuff like remdeathivir or the injections many months later.

No, 36 million people didn't die from COVID

Probably true. It was less.

And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN.

Why do you think early admissions were down? Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?

We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about.

The effectiveness of drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine could not be repeated in larger, more rigorous trials. I don't think Ivermectin particularly should've been demonized the way that it was, but it just wasn't what it needed to be.

The covid injections cause more harm than it abates.

I don't think they do. If you have data to the contrary then I will try to look at it.

Why do you think early admissions were down? Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?

That stat may or may not be true, I'd have to look at the data.

Keep in mind that the system can be overwhelmed with admissions dramatically down - entire surgical floors that should be filled with boring wound care and uncomplicated recovery being replaced with 1/4 of that but actually real sick respiratory patients is already enough to fuck everything up.

An increase in ICU level care but no ICU beds? Disaster.

Kill the variety and easy cases and things get fucked real fast.

All kinds of tensions like that caused problems.

because hospitals keep track of this data, local governments collect it, and publish it and you can just go look at the data

one of the reasons all those nurse/doctor dance videos caught on is because hospitals across the country didn't have many people in them and they had nothing else to do

have you looked?

Do you think it might have to do with the fact that people were in their homes quarantining themselves instead of crashing, social drinking, working, fucking, and spreading germs?

you either undermine the need for lockdowns because hospitals are not overrun or you undermine the need for lockdowns by claiming people were staying home anyway

The effectiveness of drugs like Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine could not be repeated in larger, more rigorous trials.

wrong

had that one handy

If you have data to the contrary then I will try to look at it.

not easily at hand, have you looked?

generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up

because hospitals keep track of this data, local governments collect it, and publish it and you can just go look at the data

one of the reasons all those nurse/doctor dance videos caught on is because hospitals across the country didn't have many people in them and they had nothing else to do

have you looked?

you either undermine the need for lockdowns because hospitals are not overrun or you undermine the need for lockdowns by claiming people were staying home anyway

I'm not denying the claim that hospitals had an initial decrease in admissions. I'm granting it. I grant the claim. I'm asking why you think that is. Is it because everyone all of the sudden starting feeling fantastic when covid hit the states, or do you think people (even sick ones) actually quarantined themselves and stayed at home because they were scared of the virus's impact and the potential of being further exposed after seeing the news out of Europe? Do you think that is possible?

wrong

had that one handy

Yes, I had that one handy too. It used to be called ivmmeta. I used it to make the same argument you're making right now. There is no doubt these studies portray a marked improvement when ivermectin is used, but when you scratch past the surface and look at the critiques, the benefit from ivermectin in these studies isn't so clear. Many of these studies had issues with their methodology. There appears some benefit in symptom relief, but in terms of mortality, its observed benefits in symptom management did not significantly influence critical clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients. These outcomes, in comparison to monoclonal antibodies are not significant.

I used it to make the same argument you're making right now.

I have a hard time believing you scratched the surface and dove into the criticism which you found convincing on ivmmeta, e.g., inclusion/exclusion criteria criticism, but you're going to attempt to use that uncorrected meta analysis which includes a study which was retracted half a year before this was posted because its data is obviously fabricated (Elshafie et al.). The removal of this one study changes mortality RR from .91 to approx .73 after correction alone which is statistically significant lower mortality. Whoops.

Or the inclusion of studies with near death patients who are given a single low dosage of ivermectin. There are multiple significant errors just on first glance and each of these errors just so happen to affect the outcome in one direction. It must be complete coincidence.

I'm just way past the point of spending significant time wading through this crap and I'm done pretending these people are anything but dishonest.

The kinds of people who would make that data have long since burned whatever credibility they have left.

That's the biggest part of the problem. Nobody has been hanged over this shit. Hell, nobody has even been shamed, tried, jailed, or punished. Fauci got a blanket pardon on the way out the door!

So while I'm sure your request seems reasonable to you, I hope you understand how I see you, and how you're seen more broadly. It's not reasonable, and it's not worth engaging with because it will ultimately boil down to appeals to authority.

Yes, they destroyed their credibility, but what data do you or others have to counter their data when it comes to vaccines? I'm not coming here to deny that a blanket vaccine mandate, and lockdowns, and the messaging from the public health apparatus were bad, but arguments about the vaccine causing "more harm than it abates" is absurd to me unless you have something to suggest otherwise.

So while I'm sure your request seems reasonable to you, I hope you understand how I see you, and how you're seen more broadly. It's not reasonable, and it's not worth engaging with because it will ultimately boil down to appeals to authority.

Yes, it seems I am only checking most of the boxes in your purity test, and not all of them. A grave sin.

but what data do you or others have to counter their data when it comes to vaccines?

Why would I address data from people with no credibility? I don't have to take their data at face value, since they're fucking liars with no credibility, that's the point. The null hypothesis is fuck off, I don't want any. The experiment is trusting these charlatans ever again.

You don't have to address the data from people who have no credibility. Provide data that refutes the noncredible people.

The Ethical Skeptic has the best charts, if you're into that sort of thing.

More comments

And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN.

This is so absurd in the face of all the news I remember from the early days of the pandemic. Where did you see this information?

The covid injections cause more harm than it abates

Are you saying covid vaccines cause more harm than good? This also goes against all information that I have seen.

I’m no Covid zealot. I have little emotion about the pandemic other than relief that it’s over, and concern that the next one will be far worse, that governments will be too cowardly to enact the measures necessary to deal with it due to the increased number of politically polarised, anti-vaccine conspiracy minded populists.

A lot of the "covid vaccines might be bad, actually" data comes from the military. Infertility claims doubled in the year after vaccination. Women with completely steady cycles (in my entire life I'd never had a late period. as a teen it was every four weeks during chemistry on thursday, that predictable) had their cycles thrown off for months. Young men (again, the military data) had a ridiculous amount of heart complications. The MRNA processes hadn't been tested enough, and MRNA trials since covid have been pulled for having too many side effects. Never taking another MRNA shot again personally.

Hospitals were overwhelmed.... in villages in Italy where the average age was over 80. Some of those images were later recycled and falsely claimed to be hospitals in the US.

Bergamo, where most of the viral images of overwhelmed hospitals came from, is a municipality of 120,000 people with a metro area population of c. 500,000, unless you consider the whole Bergamo area a suburb of Milan. The population within city limits is 25.4% over 65, which is only marginally more geriatric than Italy as a whole.

I don't know why Bergamo was such a mess, although I suspect the answer is "they were the first city other than Wuhan to be hit badly and had no clue what they were doing".

Have you ever looked?

Are you saying covid vaccines cause more harm than good?

Yes. The evidence of it being merely a wash is strongest in those with poor immune responses like the very elderly, but even there it doesn't have a significant positive effect on infection let alone mortality. Anyone under the age of approx. 75, it causes harm on net. It's honestly criminal it was ever approved generally for minors let alone babies where there is just no good argument at all w/re to health.

increased number of politically polarised, anti-vaccine conspiracy minded populists

Hopefully that social capital has been burned for at least a generation.

generally, my policy on discussion boards is to mirror effort so I'm not going to play the "sources?!@" game until I'm convinced the person asking has anted some up

Perhaps you lot should have thought about that before deciding to shut the world down over a virus that was dangerous enough to cancel normal life but not dangerous enough to release a vaccine before it was politically opportune.

Presumably, all the tiktoks and instagram reels nurses were making of hospitals completely empty of anything other than medical staff, occasionally interrupted by liking and reposting that stupid "comic book hereos bowing in respect to the real heroes" one-panel. And the completely unused medical aid ship in New York. If you saw bona fide crowded hospitals, then I can only assume you were watching stock footage, and not actual, real-time footage of hosptial admissions.

Dateline 1348: The vast majority of the Holy Roman Empire towns established flagellant parades, because something had to be done.

Far less damaging, and probably more effective, than lockdowns.

The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines

As a matter of fact, we had vaccine candidates on March 9 (2020), and had confirmed immune response in mice and started testing them in humans by April 23.

As a matter of law, it was simply illegal to give or sell the vaccines that we did have to non-test-subjects before efficacy testing finished, and on top of that it was illegal to recruit test subjects with a plan of "expose healthy volunteers to Covid deliberately and immediately under medical supervision" rather than "wait for six or seven months for a decent sample size to be exposed to Covid incidentally and unexpectedly out in the wild", so efficacy testing wasn't finished and mass manufacturing couldn't even be begun until cumulative world excess mortality was well over a million and rapidly growing.

As a matter of deduction, totalitarianism did not outperform freedom here. It killed millions, and got away with it only because it had already managed to strangle the globe so thoroughly (even in the United States!) that freedom was never tried.

What was stopping a pharma company from declaring their vaccine open to the public, as long as you signed up for their trial*?

*requires a deposit equal to the retail price of the vaccine

Regarding challenge trials, 1Day Sooner came into being as a result of our clear failure here. COVID was a ridiculously good candidate for challenge trials: a disease that spreads quickly, so every day matters, and which is dangerous to one segment of the population but relatively harmless to everyone else. Our global failure here doesn't speak well for our prospects if a genuinely dangerous plague comes along. (Imagine if the disease had a 30% fatality rate to everyone. Challenge trials would be even more important, and a lot harder to justify ethically.)

I guess the most optimistic take is that if a real threat to society comes along (i.e. a plague which doesn't mostly just replace the "cause of death" for unhealthy seniors), we might actually be spurred to take appropriate measures. It's "only" the threat of creeping totalitarianism which we utterly failed at, enthusiastically cheering on lockdowns and unpersoning anybody who said "uh, wait a minute".

20 to 36 million people died of COVID

0.44% of the world? Almost certainly not true; the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship full of old people, had less than that. We get 7.1 million from WHO. Anything more goes down to counting excess deaths, which is both unreliable and also counts excess deaths due to lockdowns.

Diamond Princess had 712 confirmed cases and 14 deaths, a 2% mortality rate, which indeed makes sense for a ship full of old people.

Diamond Princess had 3,711 on board and 14 deaths, a rate of 0.38%. The 0.44% I gave was mortality due to COVID (36 million divided by 8.1 billion), not case fatality.

Yes, it only goes to less than that after adjusting for the Diamond Princess passenger list being unusually old, then consider the counterfactual that matches global population demographics.

Still, there are places that have more official covid deaths (and even more excess mortality) than the Diamond Princess (or any other statistical analysis of age-stratified mortality) should allow. Peru, for one. Back in mid-2021 when I was meticulously keeping track of the relevant stats, Peru had:

  • Worst excess deaths per capita in the world.
  • Worst official deaths per capita in the world. 0.6% of the population are official deaths from covid even though the age-stratified IFR for Peru shouldn't really permit this unless ~100% of the population were infected.
  • One of the most extreme lockdowns in the world, which never actually brought cases down. In 2020, cases only went down after restrictions began to be lifted.

Mainstream reasons offered for this failure are ad-hoc, post-hoc, and treat things that are common to all undeveloped countries as somehow being the cause of Peru's unique poor performance. Something went horribly wrong in Peru. And the best hypothesis standing for what happened is those unusually extreme, early, and lengthy lockdowns.

Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID.

Is this meant to be an argument in favour of the lockdowns that did nothing to stop them dying?

The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done

Nuking ourselves would also have been something to do. Doesn't make it a good idea.

Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly.

Wrong.

  1. The immediate QALY loss of being locked down for more than a few weeks outweighs any possible QALY gains from reduced covid deaths.
  2. Lockdowns didn't reduce deaths anyway.

Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary.

There is absolutely no historical precedent for the totalitarianism of the Covid Lockdowns. None at all, as much as some of those responsible tried to claim as such for legitimacy. And the reason should be pretty obvious, too. A stay at home policy imposed on a subsistence agriculture society would be an omnicidal disruption to the food supply.

And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.

If this justifies lockdown, then I would prefer burning the entire internet to the ground just to remove the justification.

I’m capable of being persuaded that lockdowns were ineffective and other measures would have been better, but you should lead with figures and statistics, not anger over the tyranny of stay-at-home orders. Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.

I spent 6 years leading with figures and statistics. Perhaps those who locked us down could provide theirs first for once. After all, they're the ones who were in charge.

But if you insist...

When you crunch the numbers on age stratified covid mortality compared and remaining life expectancy by age, you find that each covid infection is equivalent to 15 life days being lost. Therefore the absolute best case scenario for lockdowns, going from 100% of the population being infected to 0%, only gives everyone an extra 0.04 QALY per capita. Add in the reality that even lockdown proponents did not suggest this sort of swing in percentage infected would occur, and it's more like 0.02 QALY per capita. This is an incredibly small budget.

For comparison if you do a lockdown that lasts 200 days (about the UK's duration of stay at home policy, but not all restrictions) and make the incredibly generous assumption that lockdowns only reduce quality of life by 5%, that is 0.03 QALY lost per capita.

Nothing about this approach to public health is novel. QALYs is standard public health fare. I am not the only one to make this sort of observation. Caplan has and gets referenced here, and so has Scott

This would have made 10 million Swedes be under stricter lockdown for the three months of so of the first wave. By our calculations above, it might have saved about 2500 lives, but let’s be really generous and extend the confidence interval to 6,000 - ie it might have prevented every single case in Sweden. Here’s what the Guesstimate model says:

10 million people x 3 months = 30 million lockdown months. Between 2500 and 6000 lives saved, by our previous estimates each life is worth about 15 QALYs (by combination of deaths, associated nonfatal cases, and associated long COVID cases), and each QALY contains 12 months, for a total of 720,000 QALMs. So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.

And again

Maybe a more honest version of me would have rewritten the post to focus more on the emotional costs (the part which I made Conclusion 2). It really is a striking result that it's hard to justify the emotional costs of lockdown even given very optimistic assumptions about the number of lives saved / Long COVID cases prevented / etc. This argument is pretty unrelated to most of what people have talked about in the news, which is mostly (completely false) claims that lockdowns cause more suicides, lockdowns devastate businesses, etc. And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar (I realize for some people the emotional damages were deeper than that, but not everyone missed a family member's funeral - I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people). Maybe a more courageous post would have looked more like "Hey, when you add this really simple thing in to the analysis, lockdowns are really obviously bad, right?" But it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about.

Those implementing lockdowns would either be aware of the QALY implications, in which case they were malicious, or not aware, in which case they were incompetent to such a degree that their refusal to immediately resign from their post was malicious.

I made a more realistic model with the final results of the UK's cumulative lockdowns here: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18492

Note this entire exercise depends on the axiom that lockdowns actually reduced covid deaths as advertised. The experience of Sweden would suggest otherwise.

It feels almost too late to bother, but I do hope to one day write this all out in a lengthy blog post that explains every step in excruciating detail. Any omission here is just because I'm not going to write that blog post today.

The point of the lockdowns was to lessen the load on the hospitals so they would not be overloaded and forced to triage. A very real possibility at the time, given just how fast the disease was spreading and the amount of people expressing debilitating or life threatening symptoms. Instead of everyone falling ill during the same short timespan, the course of the pandemic was spread out over a longer period, allowing time to adapt and treat serious cases as they came in. Incidentally, this also bought time to develop a vaccine, resulting in less people becoming sick than would have otherwise been expected.

I will grant you that the lockdowns did not directly save lives compared to risking infections. Covid is not the bubonic plaque that so many make it out to be. To many, it was in fact no worse than the flu. But the effect of overloaded hospitals had the potential to be immense. Tons of people would have been unable to work as important operations were postponed. Healthcare workers would have been worn out and more likely to become sick themselves.

Further, you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals. Modern morals dictate that if there is a path to treat everyone, then we must follow it. Even if it results in lowered quality of life for others.

You can look back now and make a reasonable argument that the lockdowns were a mistake. But at the time, I don't see how the politicians could have really done anything different. They are accountable to the public if nothing else, and most people were watching the situation pretty closely. The numbers of infected were constantly going up, breaking news showed bodies being transported through the streets, and anyone with a connection to healthcare (whether it be as doctor or patient) could see the situation slowly spiraling out of control. The public demanded action. History tells us that the main way to stop infection is to isolate the sick. So everyone had the same question burning on their lips: "If a lockdown can slow this down, then why are we not doing it?"

Without a compelling narrative, your statistics are powerless against such sentiments. And as I outlined above, there were legitimate arguments here. In retrospect, they may not have been sufficient, and we can hope that we will make better decisions in the future. I personally hope for hospitals that have the resources to handle sudden influxes in patients without resorting to triage. But in the end, our leaders were under pressure to act rapidly, and this was the best answer they could come up with at the time.

The point of the lockdowns was to lessen the load on the hospitals so they would not be overloaded and forced to triage.

The UK did lockdowns. Did not overload hospitals. But achieved the same negative outcomes we would have gotten from overloaded hospitals, as they just stopped treating patients instead.

Given the lack of empirical evidence that lockdowns slowed the spread in the UK compared to countries that did not lock down, why even propose this as the "point" of lockdowns? What mechanism is there for lockdowns to achieve this when they don't slow covid? Less traffic accidents to deal with?

Further, you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals.

This is not true.

Firstly because no hospital invests infinite resources in a given patient.

Secondly because NICE specifically prevents certain treatments from being offered in the UK on the basis that they are not cost-effective.

You can look back now and make a reasonable argument that the lockdowns were a mistake. But at the time, I don't see how the politicians could have really done anything different. They are accountable to the public if nothing else, and most people were watching the situation pretty closely.

Well the end result was most of the politicians responsible got booted out by the public as a result of the catastrophic economic and social effects of their lockdowns, even if most voters failed to recognize that lockdowns were the cause.

So everyone had the same question burning on their lips: "If a lockdown can slow this down, then why are we not doing it?"

Who gave them the impression that lockdowns would slow it down?

Without a compelling narrative, your statistics are powerless against such sentiments.

Sweden had no such difficulty in not locking down. They simply chose not to lock down, and wow, lockdowns didn't happen. What a surprise.

What you post was the pravda. The claims that the Very Smart People made to support lockdowns.

They were patent nonsense, and they were always patent nonsense. The hammer and anvil didn't work and could not have, if they disease had followed the models the epidemiologists were using. In fact, it did not, and the epidemiologists continued to use those models (with more and more bizarre parameters, as shown by the Canadian COVID people constantly showing hockey sticks which never materialized). The lockdowns were not a good faith mistake. They were something some people wanted and were willing to manufacture theories and evidence to support, and to stick to long after it was clear none of that was true.

Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.

Your current attitude is holier-than-thou smugness. Not exactly any better. The anti-science vaccine denying populists were right, and their prescriptions were better than listing to 'science.'

Even the appeal to 'science' disgusts me. There is no such this as science! There are people making arguments, and there are people countering there arguments, and there are people shouting down their arguments.

Your current attitude and approach will get you pattern-matched with anti-science, vaccine denying populists and it’s very difficult not to immediately dismiss it.

and in the same vein, repeating debunked propaganda you remember from the covid hysteria will convince no one and just get pattern-matched with other covid zealots who aren't interested in being convinced anyway

But did you see where he said he was like, in a field, around nobody, and that was still not good enough?

COVID lockdowns were a beautiful example of the most important thing in modern democracy, compromise. The lockdowns in many western nations were strong enough to be annoying at best and oppressive at their worst, while also not being nearly good enough to actually contain virus spread much. In fact due to political pressure, governments would run completely hypocritical programs at the same time like the eat out to help out campaign. Government lockdowns hurt restaurants, so the government subsidized not locking down and instead going into restaurants. Genius!

Full lockdowns are obviously successful in controlling spread. Virus particles aren't magic, they don't teleport from person to person. If people avoid interaction and have physical barriers and disinfectant, it will work. Even masks seem to work quite well ... except for the pesky issue that people aren't perfect. They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.

Full authoritarian enforcement could in theory work, but instead we went with half measures that are the worst of both worlds. We lost time with our families and our friends and our loved ones, while also still spreading the virus around cause there was too many holes in the lockdowns.

Another example of bad results from compromise I always like to use here is bike lanes. There's all sorts of ways to do them and some are way better than others. The common "compromise" solution is the shoulder, bike lane or buffered bike lane methods in that image. But those suck for bikers, they're terrifying to use. The whole time you're scared of a car side swipping you because there's giant machines going 40 mph zooming past your frail human body. I would never use those. Meanwhile when I vacationed in Hilton Head, I rented a bike and was happy to use it to get around to the store and beach near my rental house. At least where I was staying they were seperated from the road and felt safe but those are more expensive and take up a lot more room to do so you either have to be a vacation area like Hilton Head (and even then, the main parts of the city still seemed mostly car centric) or have a strong biker culture. Otherwise you get the shitty compromise solutions at best where drivers lose space and would be bikers still don't feel safe to bike.

Rent control is another example I love to use. City politicians are stuck between the stereotypical NIMBY homeowners who want their property value to go up (but also no property tax increases!!) and no more development, while renters don't want their rent to surge up every year and want stable places to live. The renter class is also typically blind to why rents are going up so while there's political pressure to "do something", it's not necessarily pressure to upzone and allow development. Still at the end of the day it's is impossible to make both happy, but they're still both gonna be voting. So what do many politicians opt for instead? Rent control. You make the current tenants happy while not having to upset the homeowner NIMBYs, and the long term political and economic costs are abstract enough that only the weird policy wanks and nerds will oppose you.

Compromise is often pretty great though and I don't think we should be down on it just because there are flaws. Allowing people to have some wins with peace makes them unlikely to turn violent, and it forcibly moderates the idealogues and extremists to match closer to the center. I prefer our compromise society to any dictatorship. We really do get the best of both worlds in most cases. But sometimes, like with COVID or bike lanes or housing supply, half measures are actually worse than either.

I agree with this. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but travel back to the pandemic itself where government officials had insane levels of pressure coming from every direction. In a pandemic under a democracy, how do you keep:

  • your economy running
  • your health infrastructure from collapsing
  • people from panicking
  • approval ratings from falling
  • your politcal party happy
  • the infected from entering your country without pissing anyone off
  • the infected from leaving your country without pissing anyone off

Add to this the crazy amount of data coming from every which way (including social media stoking the fire) and the constant comparisons to neighbouring nations who were either doing it right or wrong and it's no wonder that such a shit show of half-measures ensued.

Especially important to note that most shutdowns and closures were state/local government decisions to begin with, it wasn't the president deciding things, it was your state legislatures and your local mayor/city council. Heck Biden was even trying to get schools to reopen right after inauguration but it didn't really matter much because school lockdowns are and were mostly a local government decision. Not to mention the staffing shortages, sometimes even schools that had previously reopened had to go back to remote because they just didn't have the people. Some states were even mobilizing their national guard because of staffing issues.

Polling from the early time period also suggest that the lockdowns were widely popular too. Even four years later, public support for closures and mandatory masking in public during the pandemic were popular among the majority of Americans looking back.

So not only do you not have control over the lockdowns from a federal perspective, but you're also dealing with most Americans wanting them at the time to begin with!

The whole time you're scared of a car side swipping you because there's giant machines going 40 mph zooming past your frail human body.

It's unlikely for a driver to do that unless they are malicious, drunk, or distracted. The actual danger is at intersections, which separated bike lanes do nothing to protect.

It's unlikely for a driver to do that unless they are malicious, drunk, or distracted

Drunk or distracted alone is terrifyingly common, but even if the statistics aren't that bad the psychological effect of being right next to cars zooming by you still exists and it's why I would never go out riding like that.

I don't think any authoritarian societies really did better with lockdowns except maybe in projecting the fantasy that they were followed.

I guess what I'm starting to think is, lockdowns don't really work in theory because the amount of social distancing you need to contain a virus is greater than people can actually really sustain. You can maybe sustain some amount over a small period of time. But anything that approaches solitary confinement, which is essentially what is needed for the theory to work, is impossible. It seems to hit up against some kind of soft biological limit because we need to spend time with other people. And in practice people created enough exceptions within the ideal of a lockdown that the virus could never be stopped.

I think with an authoritarian country like e.g. China they could pretend to have more rigorous lockdowns. And their draconian government could even keep the charade going at great cost long after it stopped working. But I'm not sure they actually got any better results.

China actually did succeed pretty well for quite a while, and we can know this by looking at the surge that happened after they ended lockdowns.

I was going to post this. I was in China for basically all of Covid. and they were able to stop the spread, it probably wasn't worth it but they could do it. But they would literally send a city of millions into lockdown over single digit case numbers. The two weeks after they lifted were like a ghost town as everyone got sick with Covid. My local bank had to shutdown because too many employees were sick.

COVID lockdowns were a beautiful example of the most important thing in modern democracy, compromise. The lockdowns in many western nations were strong enough to be annoying at best and oppressive at their worst, while also not being nearly good enough to actually contain virus spread much.

Britain ceased to be a democracy for much of 2020 and 2021 due to a combination of cancelled elections and the executive usurping power in a self-coup via the Coronavirus Act 2020. Britain also saw some of the most strict, severe lockdowns in the world. Stricter than Korea, Japan, and at a national level (though some cities there were worse), China. The list of countries that were stricter than Britain is a mix of other western countries, alongside a few eclectic examples like Peru.

Full lockdowns are obviously successful in controlling spread. Virus particles aren't magic, they don't teleport from person to person. If people avoid interaction and have physical barriers and disinfectant, it will work. Even masks seem to work quite well ... except for the pesky issue that people aren't perfect. They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.

Lockdowns are not the same thing as "people avoid interaction". There is no evidence that full lockdowns would "obviously" control the spread, starting with the problem that the lockdowns we had don't even correlate with reducing it let alone eliminating.

Lockdowns are not the same thing as "people avoid interaction". There is no evidence that full lockdowns would "obviously" control the spread,

The evidence of a full lockdowns is extremely obvious, virus particles are not magic and there must be some level of barrier that if consistently maintained would prevent their spread.

The issue is that going full lockdown is basically impossible.

starting with the problem that the lockdowns we had don't even correlate with reducing it let alone eliminating.

Which is the entire point being made in my comment, there are some things where half measures don't work. Non full lockdowns are a bucket with a hole at the bottom of it, maybe if you have enough bucket bottom you can slow the leak but all the water will get out eventually. So if you want to carry a bunch of water with you (prevent the spread in this analogy), you need the full bucket (full secure uber authoritarian lockdown).

Yes, if we sealed everyone in their own pharoah's tomb the virus would die out pretty quickly. Not least because everybody would die, mostly from other things. We kinda need other people to live. The question is 'can we stop viral spread at a level that's realistic to maintain', to which the answer is 'no'.

The evidence of a full lockdowns is extremely obvious, virus particles are not magic and there must be some level of barrier that if consistently maintained would prevent their spread.

That's a hypothesis, not evidence...

The issue is that going full lockdown is basically impossible.

And that's why. If you can't test something how can you possibly claim to have evidence of what it would do?

I think it is a fair baseline that COVID must follow the laws of physics and therefore spreads through some kind of physical means. And thus if that physical means wasn't possible (either through blocking it enough, distance, or other factors), it would not be able to spread.

That a full lockdown is impractical, comes with severe downsides, and isn't worth the costs doesn't change that.

So onlyfans owner has died of cancer.

OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky dies of cancer at 43 Under his ownership, OnlyFans turned from a platform that once avoided explicit ⁠content into an adults-only phenomenon with more than 300 million users and over $1 billion in annual revenue, powered by erotic performers and celebrity influencers.

Which means that in the next 72 hours we will hear a lot of hot takes about onlyfans. Then it will be Trump all over again.

One of the things I noticed when trawling reddit was absolute lack of sympathy from anyone. The guy may have been the most exposed to culture war dude in the world - some hate him because of onlyfans, some hate him because he is jewish and aipac donor.

For onlyfans - I don't think this is boon for humanity. And I think in a way it is just Sports Betting but for women. Mild to severe ruin of your life for the slim chance to make it big. There could be such things as too many creators, too many influences, too many habibis living in Dubai and Bali.

Society seems to have lost the middle ground options between hating something + banning it and allowing it + enthusiastically supporting it.

I'm generally in favor of more things being legal, but heavily discouraged and frowned upon.

This. Absolutely this. Something can be bad and absolutely none of the government's business. The government is not smart enough or benevolent enough to take up the role of micromanaging society and all of our individual choices.

Society seems to have lost the middle ground options between hating something + banning it and allowing it + enthusiastically supporting it.

It never had it because "legal but we hate it" isn't a stable state of affairs. Sometimes something stays beneath broad notice long enough to remain legal even if those in the know consider it shameful, but if you actively try to position something as legal-but-shameful, society is inevitably going to creep toward one of the poles. Either everyone hates it enough to ban it, or people are indifferent enough that a dedicated fringe movement can work to remove the stigma. I'm not even sure it warrants pointing out the many, many examples of this at play over the last many decades.

Agreed that it is not currently a stable state of affairs, but I think that is a product of the current cultures views on the role of government and how the government chooses to behave (like whether they choose to follow the constitution).

The prohibition movement started in the 1820's, so it took them a century to build enough momentum and then eventually ban alcohol. And then the ban failed in clear ways and they reversed it.

Tobacco has been grandfathered into legality.

There are also many local laws on the books all around the country that ban "sodomy". Certainly enough to make it into a national law, but that was never done.

I think for a long time there was a very steep hill to climb to ban something at the national level, even if it was hated and reviled. You needed more like 70-80% general approval for a ban rather than just 50%+1 for a single election. Nowadays it does feel more like 50%+1 for a single election is enough to get anything banned. And overturning the ban requires something like the 70-80% general support (like Marijuana legalization).

It is reasonable and rational for any vested interests in a product/activity to get very worried when approval levels for their thing dip below 55%.

Normally rich people never get any more than a very very minor amount of sympathy when they die, not just on Reddit but anywhere, unless they are entertainers (including athletes). There are rare exceptions, for example extremely beloved politicians.

But by and large, the public simply will not have sympathy for a rich non-entertainer who dies young. This is not just a Reddit thing, it's almost universal, and not just in the US, but across the world.

So the lack of sympathy for this particular man, I think, doesn't necessarily mean much.

As for OnlyFans, it is to porn what Uber is to taxis. It cuts out the previous middleman and replaces it with a computerized middleman.

I think it's probably a good thing overall for wannabe porn actresses to be able to make porn in their bedrooms without needing pimps or producers. The people who are losing out are the pimps and producers, but I imagine that their reputation for being amoral is likely deserved, so I figure that the benefit to the girls probably outweighs the loss to the pimps and producers.

You're forgetting the margin here. Making something easier incentivizes more of it. It's not like there's some fixed percentage of women whose class is who are destined to sell porn no matter what and are either going to be treated well or poorly. There's a large demographic of mostly normal women who go to college and get jobs and, in the absence of OnlyFans, would never become porn actresses because that's kind of a big deal and that's now what they want to do with their life. But if you make it easy, if you advertise it and show them a bunch of young women like themselves getting millions of dollars, they might download the app and start selling nudes for a few hundred bucks to get some extra spending money or pay some bills.

I argue that this is bad for them. The reputational damage, especially considering the possibility of these nudes showing up and damaging their relationships, careers, or children several decades in the future, is not worth the few hundred bucks most of them make doing this. 90%+ of OnlyFans creators would be better off if the app never existed, because they never would have become porn actresses in the first place. I don't think the value gained by the career porn actresses gaining more control over their career is worth the value lost by everyone else.

It's not like there's some fixed percentage of women whose class is who are destined to sell porn no matter what

Sadly there is a correlation with women that were sexually abused as children and teens and those engaging in sex work.

That category of women is luckily not a "fixed" percentage. But I do feel that maybe it changes the calculus a bit.

I can never particularly get worked up over OF. With the proliferation of AI image and video gen, there's already a race to the bottom and drastically reduced profits (and costs). There's also a massive skew towards the top few performers raking in most of the money, and the average creator makes a trivial sum.

Not that I'd care much either way, if a woman has an OF, I would consider that a red flag that significantly reduces or eliminates my desire for a longterm relationship, but I respect their right to do it anyway. God knows nobody is likely to pay much for pictures of my bussy, and I'm not sure how much of that is attractiveness or the sheer abundance of free options. I can say I have never, ever, in a quadrillion years been tempted to pay for the stuff, most of the time the free alternatives are fine or leaks are easily available.

God knows nobody is likely to pay much for pictures of my bussy

Aren't they into that kind of thing over on rdrama?

You're telling me I could have been getting paid this whole time? BRB, I need to renegotiate for more Drama Coins. Or start a union.

I'll pay you 10000 marseycoins right now for a dick pic.

You didn't specify if it had to be my dick, so I'll point you to Google and donate the proceeds to charity. Probably a charity for autism, that's the right call.

Rare case I directly disagree with you, even though I sort of accept:

I respect their right to do it anyway.

I can't help but think that they're not really giving 'informed consent' to the activity if they can't really grasp the real odds involved (they overestimate their chances of success, nobody dissuades them of this) and the first order harmful effects, much less the second order ones, that can result.

I would never hold a gun to a woman's head to prevent her from prostituting herself (although, if it were my own daughter, I might take several less drastic but still severe measures), but I think the legality of the choice doesn't really absolve the morality of it.

Its one of a pretty long laundry list of things that I expect many women will enthusiastically hop into if enticed, yet come to regret later and be very angry that someone didn't dissuade them at the time.

I can't help but think that they're not really giving 'informed consent' to the activity if they can't really grasp the real odds involved (they overestimate their chances of success, nobody dissuades them of this) and the first order harmful effects, much less the second order ones, that can result.

This is perilously close to an argument against liberalism for the general public.

Personal liberty is always awesome until the bill comes due. It's not a philosophical abstraction, it's a real concrete phenomenon. Everyone will always tell you they love the idea, except for the moments where they really have to live with it. And then of course a decade out after the event, someone will come along and tell you "the game is rigged," because new regulations prevent retail investors from exercising their full autonomy on the platform to engage in high risk trades. So then regulations get relaxed, a dozen more people shoot themselves in the head and you're back to square one again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I'll bite that bullet.

However, I'm a professor of the benefits of localism, so I'd be arguing against liberalism in the particular social order I would prefer to exist in, not strictly speaking saying it shouldn't be applied anywhere.

be very angry that someone didn't dissuade them at the time

And let them be. If you make stupid decision as an adult against all advice, then you suffer consequences. That's how you grow and become mature. And if the consequences are severe enough, there's then a tiny chance that you'll be a warning for a younger generation contemplating their own version of OF-level stupidity.

That's how you grow and become mature.

Only if the errors are recoverable from.

This has always been my approach. I've always drawn a funny contrast between freedom and freedumb. Only in a society with total personal responsibility can you have complete freedom. Anything else is freedumb. We'll never reach the state of the former though, that's why freedom will always be a joke. It's privileges people care most about. Not their personal autonomy to eat the consequences of their own actions.

yet come to regret later and be very angry that someone didn't dissuade them at the time

Ah, the famed equality between sexes in action.

Look, I think that a society that only allows people to make good choices is tyrannical, even if it's benevolent tyranny. I am not maximally libertarian, but someone selling pictures of them riding a dildo does not rise to the level of harm where I will tolerate (if not endorse) governmental intervention.

I think you have every right to personally disapprove. I do and would disapprove too, if my daughter contemplated something like that, I'd be immensely disappointed, assuming that society and cultural mores around sex stayed much the same as it currently is today. But if it was entirely normalized? I wouldn't forbid her, even if my own upbringing made me queasy. In a similar vein, I don't think there's anything wrong with working as a janitor, but I don't want my kids to become janitors.

If we apply the standard that people who aren't maximally rational and numerate can't do certain risky things, then we would very quickly find ourselves in a situation where the average person can't drink, gamble or smoke or drive large SUVs. I don't drink (much), gamble (at all) or smoke (barring vapes, which are far less harmful) but I am also opposed to a blanket ban. If they're old enough to vote and not obviously retarded, they can do what they want with their own bodies. I don't see it as my business or that of the state.

If I could sell pictures of my body for monetary gain and without repercussion?

self_made_human_nudes_uncensored_gone_wild.jpg

If hot women lined up to fuck me for money? Brother, I'd do it for free.

I already sell my body in a very real sense, since my mind is attached to it and so are my hands. That is what working for a wage means. I don't see anything qualitatively or morally wrong about sex work in a vacuum, the problem is the lack of vacuum. The kind of woman who is willing to prostitute herself is highly likely to be immensely unsuitable for me. That's just basic priors IMO. But history has no end of examples of respected courtesans or temple priestesses who were gussied up prostitutes. And society was fine with it, at the time.

Besides, I do occasionally watch porn, and I'm not a hypocrite to the degree that I would try to ban pornstars while jerking off to them.

I hope it is clear that I am willing to tolerate, if not endorse, many things that I disagree with or disapprove of. I ask only for the same charity in return. If OF caused giga-AIDs and the imminent extinction of the human race, I'd look the other way. It's not that bad.

Besides, I do occasionally watch porn, and I'm not a hypocrite to the degree that I would try to ban pornstars while jerking off to them.

I suspect that much of the incandescent rage against pornstresses in fact comes from men who are addicted to porn, and are filled with rage against the women who hold the reins on their addiction.

Luckily for them, AI is already freeing them from the tyranny of human providers!

Quite possibly, but I pride myself on being an internally coherent and consistent person, and I definitely can't empathize with such... hypocrisy? Incoherence? I don't know.

Sure, I can understand it in an intellectual manner, but it's like intentionally seeking out fentanyl without external pressure and then shooting your dealer for selling to you. Sure, it's a bad idea, but this hypothetical (and hopefully fictional) person is being a bit silly. The dealer, at least here, didn't force them to buy it. If you hate pornstars, not jerking off is an option, and if that doesn't work, we can give your SSRIs for hypersexuality.

Look, I think that a society that only allows people to make good choices is tyrannical, even if it's benevolent tyranny. I am not maximally libertarian, but someone selling pictures of them riding a dildo does not rise to the level of harm where I will tolerate (if not endorse) governmental intervention.

Maybe I'm not someone who's hung up on labels as much as another person is but frankly, I don't give a damn whether it's a black cat or a white cat so long as it catches mice. Call it tyrannical, call it freedom, call it whatever the hell you want; I really don't care. What matters is whether you end up a better society or not. That's the real test. Not whether the government is right.

People who are incapable of understanding harm until after it's already happened to them are the ones most susceptible to being harmed and being negatively impacted. The best way to avoid getting cancer is to not lead lifestyles that are conducive to fostering it. There's nothing prejudicial about saying to someone "look if you don't want to die of lung cancer, don't smoke." If you're someone that truly wants to make good decisions and stay out of harm's way, then the first thing to 'not' do is smoke. Whatever else someone's predisposition may be. "No raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood." A societal attitude that says "I'm not personally for this choice, but I respect someone's right to pursue it," makes an implicit demand upon themselves and others that even if they don't partake of the activities that lead to bad outcomes, one should be obligated to permanently live at risk being surrounded by those bad influences. You're still a part of the problem. The fact that you aren't the source of it doesn't mean you aren't a contributor.

You don't need to be "maximally rational" to perform a basic risk to reward calculus. As an individual, sure, you can do whatever you want. But the state has to concern itself with the collective health and welfare of the society as a whole. And you can be as crazy and stupid as you want, but that doesn't mean you need to receive state assistance for doing so. You can collect your Darwin award for that. I've done innumerable ignorant things in my life. Never once have I done something stupid.

State lotteries directly promote vice. Can we start with ending those? How much are people supposed to tolerate transparent hypocrisy? I know, I know, hypocrisy is not the worst thing. But you don't have to make it official and ludicrously overt.

I don't get why we can't make lotteries a reward for savings (replacing half the interest or something). "Want to play the lottery? Start sticking $50 a week into this account and every so often you get a ticket. Good luck!" Mandate the interest rate at more than 1/3 of fed funds; payout ratio needs to total 1/3 of fed funds, and let entrepreneurs figure out how to pool together to get headline prizes out there.

Everyone "wins" because all the losers have their whole savings and interest after the drawings and because of that they'll get more chances next year.

Personally I have no problem banning it. It’s not like lotteries are some kind of alternative investment vehicle.

I don't give a damn whether it's a black cat or a white cat so long as it catches mice.

This position works because the government of the person who said it is not democratic. It actually does matter in America if the masses think the government is right or legitimate in what it does.

If the illusion of democracy is good enough for you then you will of course be satisfied with that answer.

Countries do what they believe makes sense in their circumstance. And if it produces the outcomes that are agreeable to the people there, who are you to tell them they're wrong (by that standard)? It's a very western centric attitude that leads people to say something like that. But man judges everything in relation to himself, so it's not uncommon. And as the US loses power overtime as all empires do, you'll see it being lowered into the grave and people will be saying "but... we're... free! This isn't supposed to be happening..." And they won't be able to come to grips with where they went wrong in their thinking.

You misunderstand. I don't care that the Chinese have a different system, I may even admire parts of it. I'm saying that the democratic/American system cannot be blase about this in the same way. Americans are very puritanical about their liberty, if nothing else.

Countries don't do things, people do. The question is whether the American people will tolerate that argument baldly put. I think there's obvious financial incentives in destroying the last guardrails of the old world, but the arguments about freedom that license it find far more purchase than they did in the past and that's because of the people.

It's self-evident to me that Islam Is Right About Women Gambling. But "this is simply a net loss for society and you're fooling yourself if you think we need to run this experiment again - humans are still as weak and stupid as they ever were" probably would have failed on many, many people and that matters.

Xi doesn't have to care. Small d-democrats do.

Americans are very puritanical about their liberty, if nothing else.

If by puritanical you mean have our head up our own ass, then I’d agree. Americans tend to fetishize the concept. We proudly go around thinking we’re the freest and most open society on Earth. And in some ways that’s accurate. But in reality America is an open society with a closed mind. Americans tend not to listen to the rest of the world.

Countries don't do things, people do.

And people are what make up countries. Families make up nations. Nations make up state’s.

Xi doesn't have to care. Small d-democrats do.

And democrats only have to pretend to care. To me bread and circuses are insufficient to have a functional democracy.

I don't particularly endorse the State subsidizing bad behavior, at least the kind that imposes significant negative externalities. At least not till the world becomes so ridiculously rich that even the US of A today looks like a ghetto, which I do think is a very real possibility.

At the same time, I am very leery of States attempting to ban or onerously restrict the activities of consenting, sane and intelligent people. I am okay with safeguards for those who do not meet that cut, children shouldn't be kicked out of home at the age of six and told to fend for themselves.

The problem with setting your metric as whatever produces a "better" society is that there is far from perfect consensus on what counts as better. There are idiots who looks at nuclear power and cheap energy with enormous material abundance and think nah, ban that shit. This is not a retreat into complete epistemic uncertainty or helplessness, most people do agree that a society that is richer, healthier and smarter is generally good. Yet I am concerned by the sheer number of people who disapprove of the idea of turning Mercury into a Dyson Swarm/Matrioshka Brain. It's free cheap real estate and a lot of negentropy for the taking. Or the idea that we should become biological immortal or genetically enhance our cognition and eliminate all disease.

The benefit of strongly valuing personal liberty is that it allows the free market for ideas to flourish. People and societies that make smart decisions win in the end, most of the time.

At least not till the world becomes so ridiculously rich that even the US of A today looks like a ghetto, which I do think is a very real possibility.

Don't know what you're talking about here. There are plenty of places in the US that resemble third world countries. I grew up in the hood myself.

The whole notion of "two consenting adults" was always a fallacy because the world itself is more than two consenting adults. What two consenting adults do on the moon is irrelevant to everyone else because there's nobody else to have an opinion about it. So only on Gilligan's island do arguments like that have any real merit.

The problem with setting your metric as whatever produces a "better" society is that there is far from perfect consensus on what counts as better. There are idiots who looks at nuclear power and cheap energy with enormous material abundance and think nah, ban that shit. This is not a retreat into complete epistemic uncertainty or helplessness, most people do agree that a society that is richer, healthier and smarter is generally good. Yet I am concerned by the sheer number of people who disapprove of the idea of turning Mercury into a Dyson Swarm/Matrioshka Brain. It's free cheap real estate and a lot of negentropy for the taking. Or the idea that we should become biological immortal or genetically enhance our cognition and eliminate all disease.

Unfortunately that doesn't absolve any society on Earth from having to take a stance on the matter. All I can tell you as one individual is what kind of society I feel most at home in and would like to live in. Compromises have to be made on all sides and nobody is going to get 100% of what they want. But if you want to take things item by item, you can always ask yourself which parties benefit and which ones lose by restricting or banning certain activities? I've never been one of those people who accepts the prevailing western ethic that says "do whatever you want, your happiness is all that matters." The notion that stress is to be avoided at all costs or that something is "bad" if it inhibits your right sacrifice the good for what makes you happy in the moment is an ethic that needs to be taken out to pasture and shot.

The benefit of strongly valuing personal liberty is that it allows the free market for ideas to flourish. People and societies that make smart decisions win in the end, most of the time.

Even among some of the most restrictive societies on Earth are not entirely against personal liberty. They just don't conceive of it the same way others do. Why don't I care about the opinion or personal choice of some rando on the other side of the world? Because he literally has 'zero' ability to affect or impact me. Why do I care about the opinion or personal choice of my community? Because I have to live here with the rest of them.

Even among some of the most restrictive societies on Earth are not entirely against personal liberty. They just don't conceive of it the same way others do.

"You think personal liberty is you doing what you want. I am not against personal liberty, I merely have a different conception of it. My conception is very similar, it is you doing what I want" -- Kim Jong Un, probably

Even among some of the most restrictive societies on Earth are not entirely against personal liberty.

— Tretiak, probably

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I think you have every right to personally disapprove. I do and would disapprove too, if my daughter contemplated something like that, I'd be immensely disappointed, assuming that society and cultural mores around sex stayed much the same as it currently is today. But if it was entirely normalized? I wouldn't forbid her, even if my own upbringing made me queasy.

There's gotta be a line somewhere though, right?

If your child is reaching towards boiling water on the hot stovetop, you'd probably grab their hand to stop them, even though they might not be too badly burned, its not something you want them to risk, and a bad injury will very likely vastly diminish their quality of life in ways they can't easily predict.

So if you see your freshly 18-year-old daughter reaching towards the high-quality webcam and setting up an Amazon wishlist, especially if you notice a skeevy dude with tattoos and a pornstache whispering in her ear, you might feel some obligation to snatch her metaphorical hand away before she takes a step that is likely to diminish her quality of life in ways she can't easily predict.

SEE ALSO: STUDENT LOAN DEBT

If we apply the standard that people who aren't maximally rational and numerate can't do certain risky things, then we would very quickly find ourselves in a situation where the average person can't drink, gamble or smoke or drive large SUVs.

I'm coming around to a social order that's like this. Ties into my musings on 'age of consent' discourse.

I don't think we need to prevent all harms everywhere. But if we're not going to go full Darwinian and let God sort things out, then the guardrails we do set up could be contoured much more wisely than they currently are, ESPECIALLY if we want to try and optimize around humanity's long term survival and (a value I have) expansion into space.

I hope it is clear that I am willing to tolerate, if not endorse, many things that I disagree with or disapprove of.

Same.

I just have lived long enough now to see that certain decisions people make can cause irreversible harm, and it would genuinely be a net good to divert them from those decisions long enough for them to actually become productive and self-assured before they actually accept the full risk of the behavior.

And I'm a radical individualist and anti-federalist! I'm not asking for there to be some big central bureau intervening in everyone's individual decisions! That has its own major problems.

Just a system that insures against the fat-tailed harms as best we can.

IF NOTHING ELSE, we need to be internalizing the externalities so the costs fall specifically on those who create the harms or indulge the vices, rather than the rest of us. Cue my other favorite rant.

So if you see your freshly 18-year-old daughter reaching towards the high-quality webcam and setting up an Amazon wishlist, especially if you notice a skeevy dude with tattoos and a pornstache whispering in her ear, you might feel some obligation to snatch her metaphorical hand away before she takes a step that is likely to diminish her quality of life in ways she can't easily predict.

But is that the role of the state? It's the role of her parents, sure. But the state and the parents are different creatures with different relationships to the individual.

I don't think so, but under current laws and norms, if the parents intervene, particularly in a physical way, to try to reign in their daughter THEY will be punished for restricting her autonomy. One one side you can say the state's role is to protect her autonomy. But to the extent she's susceptible to influence of others, on the other side, the state's role is to protect a malign influence from her parents.

The maximum irony is that a guy who spends months 'grooming' a young girl (as long as he doesn't actually solicit sex or touch her) then helps her set up an Onlyfans and publish explicit content the very day she turns 18 is legally protected from any kind of reprisal from the family if they find out. He has done nothing that the law can punish, and if he doesn't care about social judgment, he escapes Scott-free.

And I'd suggest that current technology makes the groomer's job way easier than the parent trying to keep the daughter out of sex work.

Everyone gets that its absolutely creepy and predatory behavior but the law as written will make it impossible to actually do anything to prevent it other than try your best to monitor the kid's comms.

And I'm a radical individualist and anti-federalist! I'm not asking for there to be some big central bureau intervening in everyone's individual decisions! That has its own major problems.

But that's not the dilemma. Either you believe the state has a serious role to play in harm reduction, or it doesn't. All societies solve this problem differently and these things exist in some balance. A lot of people engage in high risk activity because 1) they don't think it'll happen to them or 2) someone else will foot the cost of their bad decisions. Adults especially are fully aware of consequences when they forecast their bad decisions. When the COVID lockdowns were in effect, I remember getting into a conversation with a guy who didn't want to take the jab. But he of course was perfectly fine with going to the hospital for whatever else he needed to get checked. Now on an individual level, if someone doesn't want to get the vaccine, that's perfectly fine with me. But you do have to die out on the street when you get sick.

Either you believe the state has a serious role to play in harm reduction, or it doesn't.

Through direct intervention, I think it doesn't.

Through maintaining general social order, perhaps it might.

See, neither of us disagree that there is scope for guard-rails or restrictions, we just disagree on where to put them. If we lived in a more enlightened and intelligent society, I would let my inner libertarian flag fly, and say that yes, society should allow every free sophont to own personal nuclear bombs or sell themselves into slavery.

Sadly, we live in a deeply imperfect world, with a lot of stupid people around who would not only screw themselves over (hey, it's their prerogative) but also impose substantial externalities. I don't mind second hand or indoor smoking being banned, but I do oppose a ban on cigarettes even if I don't use them. I am mostly okay with cigarettes being heavily taxed, which compensates for the externalities and has had meaningful and substantial reductions in popularity, at least in the UK.

The issue with the toddler analogy is that well, they're a toddler. I'm not sure even Von Neumann or Einstein were operating at the level of the average adult at 2 years old. Safeguards in place make sense. Adults/parents being able to override their autonomy is desirable.

But my 18 year old daughter? I would impose as much punishment as is legal, say threatening to cut her off from college funds or leave her life. But I wouldn't ask the government to make sex work illegal, that is going too far. At least some people, like Aella, do it while being far from stupid or poorly informed. Good for them, even if I don't particularly approve. I would sleep with Aella, I absolutely wouldn't marry her. But there are people willing to marry her (Bay Area autists for the most part), so it's not ruining her life. I don't want to ruin her life. I will sigh and look the other way.

See, neither of us disagree that there is scope for guard-rails or restrictions, we just disagree on where to put them.

Yep.

But my 18 year old daughter? I would impose as much punishment as is legal, say threatening to cut her off from college funds or leave her life. But I wouldn't ask the government to make sex work illegal, that is going too far.

Right.

But should it be legal to, e.g. physically fight off the male interlopers who are pulling her into porn? Online grooming/blackmail gangs are a real thing. (That link is quite SFW but the implications are stomach-churning, fair warning) Maybe you can physically detain her for a period of time so she can't hang with the porno guys. That has legal precedent, after all. Maybe require her to wear a tracking bracelet outside the house. Of course, I'm told that's basically what parents do with their phones anyway.

I just find it interesting that you happily suggest using incentives to nudge her behavior around, but might balk at the idea of using even basic physical intervention. I am in agreement that creating a law that reins her in is too far.

Overall, I'm okay with "do your best to train your kid to use all common sense and restraint and to do the better thing, then let them go their own way."

I'm just not sold on the idea that 18 years of age is the correct checkpoint for many kids, and if we say its okay to use certain tactics to control their behavior before age 18, it runs into the same issue, why is it suddenly impermissible after they're 18? Your interest in their wellbeing hasn't shifted!

And no, I'm not limiting this to females. It might be useful to also prevent dudes from doing reckless and stupid stuff too. Its just that physically restraining a fully grown guy from doing a thing is a riskier proposition, for obvious reasons.

If there's an online grooming gang involved (and is it even grooming when we're talking about a legal adult?), then I would call the cops and ask them to take care of it, presuming that the activity was illegal.

I think physical restraint is, usually, a drastic escalation and violation of autonomy. My friends and family can pull me out of the way of a truck, but I'd yell at them if they stopped me from going out on a date with someone they don't like.

If my daughter told me she was going to attempt suicide, or do fentanyl, then I think I would do quite a few things that are clearly illegal, and damn the consequences. Starting an OF or doing sex work is not ideal, but not nearly as bad.

I have done plenty of things that my parents didn't approve of at that age. Some of those things went well for me, others... the opposite. A part of becoming an adult is realizing that the typical parent (mine and hopefully yours) is actually quite wise and knows what's good for you, even if they aren't omniscient.

I have my own issues with using age as the (primary) standard for capacity. I know 15 year old I'd trust to run a business, and 35 year olds who shouldn't operate a lemonade stand. I am too tired to go into exhaustive detail regarding the specifics of my views, but you can imagine something like a citizenship/adulthood/competence exam that anyone is allowed to try at any age. Nothing overly onerous, but enough to eliminate the idiots. You can pass it at 16 and legally emancipate yourself, or you might not make it till you're dying of old age if you're legitimately stupid. Then perhaps more demanding and specific tests for things that are quite clearly bad for you. Think Yudkowsky's Shop That Sells Banned Products.

You want to get surgery done by someone who isn't a licensed professional? Sure, pass this test of literacy and demonstrate an understanding of the principles of the Scientific Method and why med school is a good idea (you don't have to agree, you just have to understand), sign a few waivers, wait a week, and you're good to go. That includes waiving liability or the ability to seek compensation from the State.

If you break your spine while driving drunk, or lose your dick while fucking a blender, then I don't see why society should have to foot the bill. Maybe drug addicts who are violent, criminally inclined and disruptive and entirely unwilling to accept help shouldn't be eligible for housing or most welfare. If they're doing coke on weekends and making a million dollars a year as a quant, why the hell should I care?

Incredibly enjoying this discussion since its one of the few times I'm seeing major daylight between our respective positions, despite coming from almost identical premises, it seems.

If you break your spine while driving drunk, or lose your dick while fucking a blender, then I don't see why society should have to foot the bill. Maybe drug addicts who are violent, criminally inclined and disruptive and entirely unwilling to accept help shouldn't be eligible for housing or most welfare. If they're doing coke on weekends and making a million dollars a year as a quant, why the hell should I care?

I'm gathering that you're ultimately fine with full on Social and Natural Darwinism for deciding punishments and outcomes for risky behavior... but there's a certain amount of nuance when it comes to your own progeny.

If my daughter told me she was going to attempt suicide, or do fentanyl, then I think I would do quite a few things that are clearly illegal, and damn the consequences. Starting an OF or doing sex work is not ideal, but not nearly as bad.

Well let me drill down on that a bit. If you believed that her doing sex work was more likely than not (i.e. 51%) to make it so that she'd be unable to marry a reliable, respectable, supportive husband and thus grievously impact her financial future, her odds of being a mother, her overall mental health, are you still going to stand on the 'autonomy' position, even if she's getting some malicious actor whispering in her ear (but, importantly NOT coercing her)? Yes, I would hope she'd listen to her loving father over the Casanova trying to pimp her out, but if she slips up this one time that might be all it takes.

The position I'm arguing is that there are things that can create lifelong misery and consequences that are nonetheless NOT as serious as death or dismemberment, but have outsized negative impact compared to their benefits. Yes, people should be able to pursue such things. But if your own child, in their youthful indiscretion, is about to go jump off a metaphorical cliff into the water below,

Wouldn't you be willing to take some serious measures to avert that?

but I'd yell at them if they stopped me from going out on a date with someone they don't like.

I mean, depends a bit on what "they don't like" actually means. "This woman is riddled with STDs and has a history of violent outbursts" might justify trying to stop you. But yes, that's a fair distinction.

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IMO OnlyFans is to women what video game lootboxes / sportsbetting are to men. Deep in male nature is the desire to seek fortune through competition / warring, and deep in female nature is the desire to present themselves for sex and obtain resources from the wealthy. These are primitive drives, millions of years old, predating modern human evolution. In both instances it triggers an urge that can overpower rational risk-reward calculation in many people. These things should be banned just like cocaine is banned. They are physiologically the same as cocaine. Cocaine is an endogenous dopamine hack, OF / gambling are exogenous dopamine hacks.

One of the things I noticed when trawling reddit was absolute lack of sympathy from anyone. The guy may have been the most exposed to culture war dude in the world…

It’s hard to have sympathy for anyone involved in these industries. It’s something that generalizes. When the MGM cyberattack happened a number of years ago and they got extorted out of millions, I don’t remember seeing a single person shed a tear for the casinos. People were cheering on the criminals.

Women also have loot boxes these days. Blind boxes for general fashion/labubuesque merch have conquered all fields of consumerism

It's an unfair comparison. <1% of America's women have Onlyfans. Pre-Onlyfans, ChatGPT (high thinking) estimates that around 0.4% of women were engaged in sex-adjacent work (prostitutes, bikini models, strippers, porn).

Today, the number remains inside that 0.1-1% order of magnitude.

deep in female nature is the desire to present themselves for sex

Evidence points to a <1% base rate of type of woman. That's still ~3 million American women, a large absolute number.

For comparison, around 50% of American men played computer games as a primary hobby at some point in their life. (controlled for those born after the 90s because computers games weren't accessible before then). Among U.S. teens today, 97% of boys say they play video games, and about 6 in 10 teen boys play daily.

Very different numbers.

That “only” a small percentage of women are on OnlyFans does not mean that the behavior is not rooted in a biological drive. Only a small amount of men become addicted to lootbox gambling, and yet addiction to gambling is a 100% real thing that is a result of both genetic factors and biology generally. The women not on OnlyFans may simply be raised well, have higher intelligence, are more cautious related to privacy, or are married or in a relationship. Yet OnlyFans is still exploiting the biology of some genetically at-risk women, just as lootbox gambling exploits the biology of at-risk men. (Similarly, some people are predisposed to alcoholism; my 23andme says I likely drink a lot of coffee, and it is right.)

Regarding the numbers, a 2024 filing showed 4.6 million creator accounts, of which a majority are naturally women, and nearly all of these women will be 18-30. This does not tell us how many had created an account and then deleted it; it is unlikely that the average creators sticks around very long. And this is not among American women only. So the percent of women 18-30 on OnlyFans is not certain.

I am very confident that most women on OnlyFans are not motivated to be there by instinct any more than an office worker is motivated by instinct to go to the office in the morning.

How on earth are these anywhere close to the same thing?

For lootboxes and sports betting, the money is coming from desperate men.

For onlyfans, the money is also coming from desperate men!

I am this close to nominating you for an AAQC.

It's like The Room, so bad it's actually approaching good from the other side.

You are tearing me apart Lisa!

On the reward circuitry level there is no difference between obtaining cash from variable posting of nudity and obtaining in-game rewards (often tradeable to cash) from variable shooting of an opponent or clicking of a treasure chest

I kinda agree with you, but I like the upcummies too much, pwning noobs and taking names assess

I don’t think that’s a great comparison. Lootboxes hit on the neural correlates for in the moment quick fixes and feed on addiction. Women aren’t addicted to taking their clothes off, whores are. The only takeaway from that is to come to understand that either there are millions of the latter, or we waste hundreds of millions of dollars every year on the department of education since educating people out of stupid decisions is effectively burning money. In any event, one should thank the lot of them for the permanent sacrifices to their worth and reputation for the satisfaction of millions of young men everywhere.

OnlyFans is structured to hit on those same neural correlates, as likes and payments and praise come immediately after a sexual display or act. Women may truly be “addicted” within this specific context which minimizes reputational checks and where they receive compliments and coins concomitant to the primitive sexual display behavioral loop. Mainstream social media use among young women parallels this addictive loop, because they receive points and adulation for dancing and less overt displays of their body like the wearing of revealing clothes.

as likes and payments and praise come immediately after a sexual display or act

I’m pretty sure they come immediately during the act. At least based on a few ripped videos I’ve seen where the (literal) cash machine sounds start going wild when the action gets hot.

Do you think most Onlyfans women are recognized in real life for the sacrifices to their worth and reputation to apply?

Would they get recognized on the street, no. Would it make a sufficient impact on long-term relationship formation to present consequences, yeah probably

I thought the danger was to more concrete issues, such as not being hired for a job or accepted to a college or being allowed to lease an apartment. If the only danger is in later not being able to attract a high-quality male for marriage and procreation, I think that ship's already sailed. Many men, for better or worse, are sketchy about committing to a woman with a body count in the dozens or hundreds, which is most young women if you believe the usual sources of information (reddit, X, etc.).

Who knows. But at the very least they’re willing to risk it. It’s a poor decision either way, unless done out of necessity.

I find that the poorness of the risk is directly related to the likelihood of suffering reputational damage.

I mean, the 'issue' is that many people can use cocaine and not be addicted, not have it screw up their life, and treat it like a party drug when they're out having fun.

Likewise with sex. I honestly believe there's some subset of women who can be 'happy whores' and generally enjoy promiscuity without it dragging other aspects of their life down. A small subset.

So you have some that aren't debilitated by the 'mere' availability of the vice, and arguably their life is enhanced by using it on occasion for fun.

And then you have a larger group that would be debilitated but if there's enough friction to obtain their vice, they won't bother.

But the dishonesty is usually downplaying the impact the vice has on the second group and emphasizing the interests of the first group to promote universal availability, and at the very least enable various workarounds for the second group even if we DO try to regulate it.

My personal preference is "the vice is available but there's lots of friction/a high cost associated with obtaining it."

In practice, everything seems to trend towards universal availability UNLESS you ban and aggressively enforce rules against the vice.

Likewise with sex. I honestly believe there's some subset of women who can be 'happy whores' and generally enjoy promiscuity without it dragging other aspects of their life down. A small subset.

Women tend to age out of it, in my experience. The majority of women with high body counts usually end up snagging a man at some point, and mostly seem content to be monogamous. Look at my first ex from med school, she was well known to be... promiscuous (I don't know if she ever cheated on me, but there were rumors). She slept around with a concerning number of men (by Indian standards) and had a kink for East Asian-looking dudes (Nepali, Assamese etc, India is diverse). Yet my Instagram feed was cursed by images of her recent engagement to another doctor. I chortled at how butt ugly he is, and how much weight she's gained, but hey, he's a surgical resident and seems wealthy enough. I'm most surprised by the fact that she didn't marry someone who looks like her type.

(Her mom was a gyno, and had a reputation of her own)

In general, the costs of early promiscuity in women are overrated. It's quite easy to hide or suppress body counts, unless you're on record as a prostitute or pornstar. And even then, there are men who are desperate enough to marry you, though they might be a little far from ideal.

Dated a girl when I first moved to my current town who made money on the side as a professional domme.

Showed me her website and everything.

I immediately determined that I wouldn't be marrying her, but being new in town and her being fun to hang out with meant I kept having her around. She also was a REALLY talented singer. Had a hilarious 'date' where I took her to a Country Karaoke bar, and she couldn't resist getting up there and belting out some classic show tunes, to the audience's confusion.

She moved away about a year later, then did end up marrying a dude. Then they divorced about 2-3 years ago. It appeared amicable.

From what I know of her I think she's genuinely enjoying life, and the traditional path was never going to play out for her anyway.

I think the impacts of promiscuity are unfortunately hard to predict, and will depend on exactly how 'traumatic' some of the experiences are, and each one is basically rolling the dice on sustaining permanent emotional damage. Just like how some people can be moderate smokers their whole lives and never really suffer, and others get throat cancer in their 40's.

So from the side of the male suitor, having knowledge of a woman's body count requires you to accept some level of unavoidable risk if you keep her around.

Pretty much what I argued in May last year, expanded to my second-most popular post on Substack. There are a small subset of women for whom sexual promiscuity and a career in pornography will be a net-positive to their quality of life. For the majority, it will be net-negative.

Interesting. Just followed you on SS.

Yep. And there's probably a way to filter for the women for whom its a minimally harmful diversion/hobby so that they're mainly the ones getting into the sex trades while actively dissuading any other women.

One of the most controversial ideas I've ever had is to hire genetic researchers to identify the 'slut genes' that predict, e.g. hypersexuality, high openness to new experiences, low disgust, and whatever particular brain chemistry it is that makes a woman achieve maximum bliss when she's violating social norms, so we get a profile we can use to identify these women quickly.

And once you've identified that, scour the population for such women then shuttle them away to a particular planned community with very, VERY different norms than your average town (think the exact inverse of an intentional religious community). Then charge men THROUGH THE NOSE to buy property/move there.

Wait, is that just Las Vegas?

I don't think genetic profiling is necessary: these women tend to make themselves known via dyed hair and tattoos.

Nah, too easy to fake or mistake that signal.

I've known more than a handful of women who are UTTERLY NORMAL LOOKING (or maybe just small, discreet signals), and hold down professional careers... and are ridiculously down to clown in some fairly depraved ways when the social context is right. Then clean themselves up and get back to work the next day.

I know there's more of them amongst us who probably haven't been given the opportunity to act out and would leap at it given the chance. But you can't just go around asking them at random, can you. Dating apps might have made it more efficient for them to find outlets, if nothing else.

One sign that does pop up a lot... dead dads. But I think that only interacts with genetic effects.

Do you have their phone numbers?

Yes.

Wait - so that the community would have lots of free sex, or so that all the social-norms-violating women would be reverse psychologized into becoming tradwives?

I'd expect it would be a lot of free sex, swinging, actual harems, and probably some dudes getting killed by other dudes over romantic beefs.

But its either going to succeed on its own merits and help quarantine the hypersexuals from the larger population, or it becomes a helpful cautionary tale you can point out to the 'normal' women.

Imagine taking freshly graduated 18 year old girls on a guided safari through the streets of Orgyville (in an armored bus, mind) to 'scare them straight' about the realities of unrestrained male and female sexuality before sending them off to college.

And for those girls who find the experience appealing, have them spit in a cup and after the test results come back, send them their invite in the mail 2 weeks later.

Yes, I'm proposing recreating the towns of Soddom and Gommorah from the classic Biblical cautionary tale "God smites the sin-riddled towns of Soddom and Gommorah."

I don't know about God, but I could think of a whole bunch of men who would want to smite this town, for pricing them out of happy whores they could have otherwise dated organically.

You could have a lottery to move in, then a whole range of premuim passes to stuff into lootboxes for those who want to purchase extra chances. If you're exploiting primal drives, might as well exploit them to the max.

You know, sure. Why NOT add in a gambling addiction as a requirement to enter.

Likewise, airdrop pallets of uncut cocaine in on a weekly basis.

Then once a year have a 'purge night' which is broadcast to the rest of the country on PPV.

This'll help clear space for more dudes to move in.

My personal preference is "the vice is available but there's lots of friction/a high cost associated with obtaining it."

But isn't this "friction" what causes the vice to be be debilitating in the first place? There would be nothing problematic about widespread promiscuity and sex work (certainly not about cyberpornography with zero risk of STDs etc.) if it carried no social stigma that makes it more difficult to settle down later in life or get a good job, etc. It's not the actual sex that directly ruins women's lives in the way that doing too much cocaine will physically kill you, it's the very same negative consequences which, yes, also serve the prosocial function of warning most away from that lifestyle.

if it carried no social stigma that makes it more difficult to settle down later in life or get a good job, etc.

I disagree. I think the stigma is the effect, not the cause, and the cause is biological, not social, in nature.

The stigma exists for a reason, it didn't just emerge from the ether.

There would be nothing problematic about widespread promiscuity and sex work (certainly not about cyberpornography with zero risk of STDs etc.) if it carried no social stigma

Hard disagree. Most men (most "male people", if we're still doing the trans-inclusive thing) see a boost to their self-esteem the morning after a one-night stand, while most women see a decrease to theirs. Claim that this is purely the result of social stigma, internalised misogyny, internalised slut-shaming etc. all you like: from an evolutionary perspective, I don't think it's hard to understand why the sex which does the impregnating would feel good after carrying out the act which is a reliable evolutionary proxy for impregnating, while the sex getting impregnated would feel bad after doing that act without extracting commitment from the impregnater.

But we're not talking about one-night stands; we're talking about nude pics and camgirls. Even taking the innateness of the feeling you describe for granted it's nonobvious that the evo-psych dynamic would translate to that kind of thing - indeed someone upthread argued the opposite, that being camgirls makes women feel good about themselves for atavistic reasons because it activates the "I am successfully wooing high-status males" circuits rather than the "I've just had sex" circuits.

Well we're talking about two different things which are loosely correlated, and I'm basically just summarising an argument I made elsewhere.

When it comes to promiscuity, I think the proportion of women for whom it is a net-positive is very small. Most women will feel sad the morning after a one-night stand. Stigma and internalised slut-shaming may play some role in this, but I'd hazard a guess the same is true even in free love communes.

When it comes to pornography, among circles of friends, it's generally seen as poor form for a woman to directly tell one of her female friends that she isn't very good-looking: deranged yasslighting seems to be the rule rather than the exception. As a consequence of this, many women end up with an inflated perception of how physically attractive they are, and some decide to open an OnlyFans account on that basis: after all, if you're a 10/10 bad bitch, you're sure to make bank. But they're in for a rude awakening when, after a few months, their account is pulling down somewhere near the median of the OnlyFans income distribution, thousands of dollars below the US minimum wage, and potentially for far more hours worked. No matter how much we end the "social stigma" associated with sex work, if a woman joins a platform in which her expected revenue is heavily correlated with her physical attractiveness, and then she doesn't end up making much money, that's bound to be a disheartening experience. (I think this is what @coffee_enjoyer's comment upthread was arguing: that OnlyFans sells woman a fantasy of being able to use their sex appeal to extract money from wealthy men, but most of these women, by virtue of being insufficiently attractive, are being sold a bill of goods.) It will be an even more disheartening experience if the only way she can make ends meet is by appealing to the fetishes of perverts: I can't imagine anyone feels that good about themselves after a long hard day of producing golden shower videos. And we can talk about "ending the stigma" til the cows come home, but short of a nudist colony, every employer will look a little askance at someone (male or female) if they Google their name and the first result is a photo of their rectum.

I mean more directly. If you can't just order up drugs from an app for immediate delivery, but have to go to a sketchy part of town, with cash, know the right passphrases and handshakes, and STILL risk getting ripped off on occasion. If you can only find prostitutes in the red light district, where its highly shameful to go... these are things that will divert or discourage the average person.

The friction on the back end, that makes it hard to leave the vice, yes, that's also a factor. But we've successfully made it almost frictionless for people to indulge vices, whilst all the standard difficulties of leaving the hole once you've dug it remain, which is probably why things seem sharply WORSE than in previous years.

Same for betting. Getting onto a PPH back in the day required some modicum of effort/connections, plus way more friction with the cash.

I remember when OF became a 'thing' right around Covid times when even the sex workers had to figure out how to work from home.

I recall that there was a brief-ish period where the benefit was that Onlyfans WASN'T a sex worker site, so there was just enough plausible deniability that a woman could create one without admitting she was going to post nudes. And they would start with standard racy photos before getting the hardcore stuff.

Hell, I can recall that VERY brief period where a certain type of guy could 'get away' with pushing a girl to 'start an Onlyfans' because 'you can make so much money' and pretend to hide behind nonprurient interest.

The thing I do wonder is about a few counterfactuals:

A) Covid lockdowns don't happen (big one, I know), do we see a noticeable rise in online prostitution at all?

B) If Onlyfans cracked down early, or was cracked down on early, does that function get replaced by a different site, or do things stay mostly decentralized and small. There were still sites for online whores, of course, but they were mostly sketchy and disparate and didn't have a fig leaf of respectability.

Instagram was still used for thirst-trapping, but monetizing that was more challenging, I think.

C) What if OF still arose for this purpose but we didn't have certain creators hit it huge (Amouranth and a few others I recall being the biggest profiteers early on), thus creating the illusion that huge wealth was up for grabs if you were willing to sacrifice your dignity. Does it draw in as many young women? I think a particular strain of female streamer becoming popular was a prerequisite to OF rising.

D) And thus, in all of this, do we possibly never gain a central 'attractor' for women to dip their toe into sex work, and perhaps as a side effect less blatant and wanton online simping, since it would remain more relegated to the shady side of the internet.

In a sense I think the rise of a site LIKE OF was inevitable. We had feminists doing SlutWalks and pushing "Sex work is work!" well before then, and paywalled content was an established trend by then through Patreon et al., NSFW artists were already doing quite well.

So it seems unavoidable that some site would navigate the cultural, economic, and regulatory labyrinth to become the first 'mainstream' online whore store. And this one managed to hide behind the "its empowering the women, they get to choose exactly how and what they post, its really good for them" shield long enough to get entrenched.

On the other, a lot of surprising stuff happened in the last 10 years that was probably a coin flip at best towards going 'the other way' (Trump 1, for sure) so who knows.

B) is the most surprising, in my opinion. I guess they pulled it off by buying out an established SFW business, switching it over to NSFW, then hoping that they could become "too big to fail" before the credit card companies and app stores caught on. They did eventually get banned from app stores, but amazingly they still apparently use Stripe for credit card processing.

What's crazy is that for YEARS they kept up the facade of "any popular figure can be on here for completely innocuous reasons, with completely normal fans giving them money!"

As if people were genuinely signing up in droves to watch cooking videos put out by a B-list football player or some wannabe pop singer talking while she put on makeup. As if there wasn't literally ONE and ONLY ONE thing that a guy would immediately plunk down money to get from an attractive woman on the internet.

I guess they HAD to keep that up so they could let their payment processors keep looking the other way.

And in a way, the payment processors might prefer that OF be the central spot they have to deal with, rather than playing increasingly elaborate games with smaller companies ('Modeling' agencies, Cam sites, various file upload sites, for instance).

Another possible factor in all this was Backpage dissolving circa 2018.

Given how heavy the scrutiny against Craigslist and Backpage actually was, it IS rather amazing that OF has avoided serious inquiry, since it enables functionally the exact same practices.

As somebody working in online gambling at the time there was a roughly 3x volume spike from the COVID lockdown era, and it managed to trigger a bunch of shifts like getting the broader public into cryptocurrency and causing a changing of the guard in the biggest operators partly due to crypto + differences in media consumption.

Wouldn't shock me if Onlyfans had a similar impact on pornography.

One prereq for the gambling rise was SCOTUS striking down the Federal Ban in 2018.

Might have been easier to keep a lid on it otherwise.

Not sure what the comparable prereq was for online prostitution, although I mentioned in my other comment that backpage was shut down around the same time, 2018.

One of the things I noticed when trawling reddit was absolute lack of sympathy from anyone.

Not even from his native Ukraine? Which he donated large sums to during the war?

Either way, I think any modern society is well-advised to at least try drawing lines in the sand and establish clear rules regarding all the gooners, simps, e-thots, porners, "incels" and whores in its midst. We can all go on pretending that these seismic social changes have not actually happened, but what good does that do us? We need to acknowledge a bunch of unpleasant facts: enormous segments of both men and women will never marry and never breed. Calhoun's mice/rat utopia experiment has been put into practice in the human world. Not only is the Christian patriarchy dead; anyone who has ever had even indirect social experience of it is already dead. Should it ever return, it will definitely not be Christian. We need to decide what our attitudes should be towards women whose sole aim in life is to whore themselves out, and towards the faceless mass of males financing them.

Umm. His net worth was sub 5b. He couldn't donate large sums even if he wanted to. Relative to what Ukraine needs.

For the rest of post - we may stumble into unpleasantly Puritan era or we summon Slaanesh. No middle road.

Not even from his native Ukraine? Which he donated large sums to during the war?

Even Greg Scarpa was nice to his mother. Whatever else he may have done, he’s also contributed massively to the ruination of society. The fact that he donated money to Ukraine doesn’t make him moral IMO. Just makes life full of irony.

Not surprising at all. The guy embodies a whole bunch of negative stereotypes - a Jewish pornographer and AIPAC donor who became a multi-billionaire thanks to somehow maintaining access to mainstream credit card processors. Then there's all the ongoing issues with alleged minors on OF, or teens doing releases on their 18th birthday... It's like a perfect storm of Zionism, porn, and finance. Maybe he could have had a Bill Gates style redemption arc if he had lived another 30 years and donated a bunch of money to charity, but it would have taken a long time and a lot of work to rehabilitate his image.

Bill gates is still very unpopular, economically illiterate pop socialists hate him for being rich, generic populists hate him for going to a certain island, conservatives hate him for being a liberal who supports population control, pro-business democrats like him but there’s not very many of them.

because he is jewish and aipac donor

You forgot a degenerate pornographer luring young women into sex work. And jewish. And the single biggest AIPAC donor in 2024.

Because of course he was.

ETA: Vaxxed? Turbocancer claims another 40-something.

You forgot a degenerate pornographer luring young women into sex work.

Progressives don't like the idea of any law that might get in the way of the liberation of women, or their sexuality, or their freedom to show their pussies for money. When the downstream consequences of their choices happen, they'll shift the blame toward the Radvinsky types because it allows them to maintain their absurd power to accountability ratio. All the benefits are claimed, all the blame is outsourced.


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