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Friday Fun Thread for September 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anyone know the story I'm thinking of? It was a world where every wall is dominated by porn, and people know nothing but that. People have fleeting memories of life beforehand (just dreams IIRC) but other than that this is all they've ever known.

Hard to google for obvious reasons.

The idea was that some civilization really liked porn, so they'd send somulated versions of themselves in to experience hundreds of years of it, not aware they were basically creating hell.

On a slight tangent. Is anyone else annoyed by conservatives' vilification of porn and video games?

It's not that I don't see the harm of those things. But they are the effect, not the cause. People turn to porn and video games as an escape from a shitty boring life. They can bring forth a shitty boring life in sufficient quantities, but criticizing the effect seems like pure laziness (and borderline grifting). The real cause is an order of magnitude more difficult to address.

At this point, porn has become an applause light for a subset of the online right. Which they extend to many other forms of technology as well (like AI???).

They are both the effect and the cause, as are most things. Those underlying causes have their own underlying causes too; is it thus illegitimate to truly blame anything but the boundary conditions of the universe?

If we legislated that everyone carry around syringes of morphine in their pockets at all times, a lot more people would get addicted to morphine. From a consequentialist standpoint I see no issue with blaming porn, which is actually fairly low-level, e.g. closer to cause and farther from effect than most things we villify.