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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4225 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm doing another low-stakes/small scale conspiracy theory thread(I think I'll probably start doing these once a quarter or so in the SSQ thread). What are your minor conspiracy theories? Not things that dramatically change how the world works(eg "the davos group is behind the simultaneous rise in both house prices and interest rates in the United States to eliminate home ownership"), nor that would be too interesting and sexy not to be common knowledge if they were both true and had sufficient evidence(eg "Bush was behind 9/11"). What are your boring, small scale schizo posting?

Bullets from me:

  • General health advice about salt is knowably false to most well-informed people. I think the same thing is probably true about cholesterol, but with the added motivation of public health advisors taking bribes from eg Kellogg and Coca-Cola to understate the effects of sugar, so they blame cholesterol instead.
  • The effects of Freon(R-22) on the atmosphere were drastically overstated to keep dupont's control over the provision of refrigerant at around the time the patent on R-22 was expiring.
  • School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.
  • The world population is probably massively overstated because officials in corrupt countries routinely inflate population figures in their areas of responsibility to try to seek budget increases/international aid.

The spike in the production of incest-themed porn (stepbrother, stepdad etc.) over the last decade or so is not driven by consumer demand. Some entity (probably a state: candidates include China, Israel or Saudi Arabia) bought huge shares in MindGeek and other porn companies and are using their stakeholder leverage to encourage them to produce incest-themed porn at great volumes. The goal is to promote/normalise incest in the West, thereby increasing the rate of dysgenic reproduction and marginally lowering average Western IQs, making the West less economically competitive.

I'm skeptical that this would or could work. It also seems like it would be hard to keep secret.

I'm with you. Given the general lack of success of media companies to manipulate the audience into having preferred beliefs through putting out content pushing preferred messages, and the likely fact that in porn, if anything, the audience tends to be more motivated by pure id than with media in general, flooding sites with this just doesn't seem likely to work at all. Like, I've heard people talk a lot about incest porn and also "extreme" porn involving choking women and such taking over porn in recent years, but as a pretty regular consumer consoomer coomer who doesn't enjoy such things, I barely ever run into such things by accident, and even less when I'm looking for something specific. In fact, I don't think I've seen a single porn video of a woman being choked. Incest and pseudo-incest porn, it's easier to accidentally encounter, but also very easy to just find a near-equivalent video without it. It's just not that hard to avoid porn you're not into.

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