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Notes -
So some of you may have seen the latest round of pizzagate type posts on twitter revolving around Etsy digital images. It started with someone bringing back the Wayfair cabinets story from 2020, here's a "fact checking" post from the time as a reminder https://twitter.com/mediawise/status/1281711438462177281. Essentially the idea was that Wayfair were selling cabinets with the names of children on missing person lists for very large amounts of money, so really they must have been selling kids. Ergo, in plain sight paedophile ring.
Anyway, the latest round focuses on Etsy. There are a variety of 'digital images' of foods/children that are selling for $1000-$90,000 such as here: https://twitter.com/littleapostate/status/1734207558905106462 or https://twitter.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1734368320441192593/photo/1. It doesn't help that a lot of them are pizza related, so obviously catnip to Pizzagate believers- presumably this isn't coincidental.
So what is going on here? Assuming prima facie that these aren't children being sold via online distributor stores this leaves four main options:
1- The listings were real, you can follow links through to some of them (or see them on webarchive). But that doesn't preclude the possibility that they were made by the people whipping up hysteria or engagement baiting, or just trolling the internet nut jobs. All very possible options
The other options are much more interesting.
Scams
On the face of it, there are a few very funny scamming possibilities:
It could be a scam targeted at pizzagate truthers. They try and buy the $3000 digital pizza. png to see whether they get a child delivered, and in fact get a pizza picture. Scammer makes free money.
It could be a scam targeted at paedophiles! This would be funnier, as above but believe it and want to try and get a child delivered.
It could be some kind of weird automation thing, are there algorithms that buy things on Etsy?
It could just be trying to prey on people whom make a mistake or kids. But you could presumably just get a refund, so seems unlikely.
Only the first option really makes sense of these imo, if even one brainrotted internet person decided to fork out thousands to expose the Etsy paedophile ring you'd be laughing to the bank. Again though, I don't know how refunds work, so maybe they could just embarrassingly claim it back.
Money laundering
Fairly self explanatory- maybe the customer base is just other accounts set up by the same organisation, where the flows/receipts from Etsy can contribute to the image of a legitimate commercial enterprise. It might help evade certain checks, but surely the FBI or whoever would see something like this a mile off if it was genuinely an attempt to launder funds. Is there a possibility it's to do with capital controls from a foreign country?
Other illicit sales
There is also the possibility that they're selling another product, like drugs or weapons or so on. But this doesn't make a lot of sense either- why wouldn't they make the sales using the dark net or offline?
I lean strongest towards it being some kind of trolling/scamming effort by non-Pizzagaters, but the possibility that it is a false flag to whip up engagement is also possible.
People desperately want to believe “elites” are the ones molesting kids when in reality it’s likely (as with all other crime) to be disproportionately underclass men who do so. For every Epstein or Prince Andrew there are thousands of nobodies in trailer parks and ghettoes across the West who mostly never get caught and who cumulatively harm vastly, vastly more people. “The elites are more debauched/degenerate/satanic” is the classic peasant conspiracy; there has never been much evidence for it, and for every Byron or de Sade there were countless unrecorded cases that were only less salacious because the people involved were nobodies.
As regards strangely high eBay or Etsy (etc) prices, this has been a thing for decades and while it’s occasionally a (usually very unsuccessful) attempt at money laundering, it’s often just mentally ill individuals. The same thing is true if you look at weird eBay where people “pay” insane amounts for things - the purchaser is usually challenged in some way and the money never changes hands because they don’t have it. I remember being maybe 10 and asking my father what happens if you win a bid and don’t pay, and him saying the government takes the money from you. Alas, that generally isn’t the case.
Especially in the US there are probably a lot of people who would rather blame lizard people than face the reality that their own ideology is at fault. You can't have complete separation between church and state while the state enforces Christian morality. Much of the American right clings to the constitution and libertarian ideas while wanting society to enforce their morality.
If the state is supposed to be not involved in religion, who says gays can't marry?
Because that’s not what marriage was until yesterday. Ask someone in 1890 why gays can’t marry, and he’ll explain that people should be happy on their wedding days- it’s a joyful occasion. Clarify that you mean homosexuals, he’ll probably say ‘oh poor girl, her husband’s proclivities are a bit out of bounds’. Clarify again that you mean two male homosexuals marrying each other, he’ll say that marriage takes a man and a woman, you’re talking about something different.
This is one of the reasons why I have trouble taking social conservatives seriously when they talk about protecting marriage by making sure gays can't get married - they lost the "protecting marriage" fight several decades ago and there's no meaningful reason to oppose gay marriage when you look at what marriage actually is now.
Personally my answer for them would be to create an explicitly opt-in secondary class of marriage that functioned like marriage did in the past. I don't know how long they'd be able to keep it up in the face of regular society, but I imagine it'd be popular enough with islamic immigrants that they'd be able to call any criticism of it racist.
So some sort of privately certified pre-nup?
The problem here — as with every "you can get a traditional marriage if you want one" argument — is enforcement. Indeed, I've seen people try to argue "a properly-written pre-nup is all you need to make your marriage as it would be before no-fault divorce" online — at which point everyone else points out Diosdado v. Diosdado, and they either fall silent or resort to 'well, the Diosdados must have not done it properly; it must be possible somehow' sputtering.
Generally, it looks to me like the sort of "parallel society" thing that only really works for Hasidim and Mennonites.
Thanks for that cite, literally an eye-opener.
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I wonder if an arbitration requirement would play well.
There is also a similar church court system in many paleo-protestant communities.
Sure, but how powerful is the threat of ostracism/expulsion in those communities to provide enforcement of the court's decision, as compared to its effectiveness in maintaining an Amish Ordnung?
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A-ha! Perhaps you can skirt it by not calling it marriage? One the one hand they completely de-sacralize the thing, on the other they want to impose their own rigid interpretation of what marriage should be. I say go all the way and pretend it’s an ordinary commercial contract between economic entities that might as well be corporations. This is not legal advice.
Except, for one, there's the various "common-law marriage" statutes vis-à-vis long-term cohabitation and "if it looks like a marriage." Then there's the sort of things that don't really fit on an "ordinary commercial contract between economic entities" and aren't really enforceable outside family law — most things involving the kids, for example.
Yeah, you're definitely right on that.
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So there has to be a definition of our culture and norms. That is different from having a completely neutral state. By defining WASP culture as the norm, the US would have to either be somewhat religious or somewhat of an ethnostate.
You would either have to say Afghans not welcome because they are in the wrong ethnic/religious group or have to accept that marriage can include polygamy.
I’m more than willing to bite the bullet that polygamist groups aren’t welcome in the US, and historically when it’s been a major issue the general US has too.
–Chief Justice Morrison Waite, in the US Supreme Court's decision in Reynolds v. United States
(Now try to imagine a modern Supreme Court decision making this sort of 'this just isn't done in our culture' argument in a decision.)
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The state because there is no state interest in a homosexual couple. State marriage only exists to manage procreative couplings. That it is not narrowly tailored doesn't matter. Also the state has other strong interests in deterring homosexuality.
But no. "State marriages" have always allowed postmenopausal women, etc. These hypothetical state interests don't align with the actual laws and norms of American or broader Western culture throughout its history. In fact I'm very suspicious that this was invented very recently to dunk on gay people in a way that would never be applied to postmenopausal women or combat veterans whose balls were blown off.
The fertility argument appears so suddenly and arbitrarily. So narrowly tailored to strike at one particular small group.
Allowed is different than cared about and encouraged. Again, just because the state wasn't going out and checking to see every bride to be was still on the rag doesn't mean anything.
If you think babies are not the main state interest in marriage, what do you think it is? Making it hard for two people who shacked up with each other for a long time to financially separate from one another, thus wasting massive amounts of state resources?
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But infertile opposite-sex couples could always get married...?
Such as...?
I have a pet analogy I've been using for over a decade on this point, and I recently encountered a term that helps better encapsulate what said analogy is gesturing toward: "ordered toward"
Consider hand grenades. Then consider a movie prop "grenade" that looks like the real thing, but isn't. The law treats those two things very differently, and for a clear and obvious reason: real grenades explode, fake movie props don't.
But, one might argue, some subset of "real" grenades are "duds": due to manufacturing defects, the effects of time, or whatever, don't explode when you release the spoon. But the law makes no effort to carefully identify and separate out the duds, to be classed with the movie props as "non-explosive" — instead, it classifies them with the fully-functional grenades. Therefore, the law can't actually be about "explosive vs. non-explosive," and the line drawn between real and movie-prop grenades is illegitimate and should be removed.
Of course, most people would likely reject this argument. The key is precisely the phrase I spoke of before: ordered toward. A real grenade is ordered toward exploding — even if, thanks to our living in an imperfect, entropic universe, some subset fall short of that purpose — while a movie prop is not ordered toward exploding. For a "dud" grenade, the "non-explosiveness" is incidental, accidental. For the look-alike movie prop, the non-explosiveness is inherent.
In short, this is an argument that teleology can constitute a valid "joint" upon which reality may be "cleaved," particularly when it comes to law.
(It continues to dismay me how many secular people firmly accept the creationist philosophical principle that "purpose" requires a conscious purpose-giver, when an important element of the theory of evolution by natural selection is that it provides an explanation of how an undirected, atelic process can produced directed, telic entities. The usual rejoinder people make, when I argue this, is to conflate the process of natural selection with the products of natural selection; which, as I like to say, is like confusing tennis shoes with a tennis shoe factory.)
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Testing for fertility would be an extremely invasive process that is also rather error-prone, both points being especially damaging when applied at scale to the entire population. Continuing to not condone same-sex marriage implicates none of this, as the state can simply look at the 'sex' field in the government-issued documents that the government already has, which is not at all invasive in light of what is already required of marriage applicants. This 'gotcha' was never anything more than an ill-thought-out 'gotcha'.
It's especially silly wrong when one considers that there are actually situations where, believe it or not, the state requires individuals to show that they're infertile in order to get married. That is, in many states, close relatives are allowed to get married if they can show that they are infertile (they would otherwise be prohibited from marrying). This reasoning follows pretty simply from the idea that the state is using marriage policy to encourage responsible procreation as well as the dual objective, discourage irresponsible procreation. The state acknowledges that there are strong liberty and privacy reasons why they cannot simply ban sex between close relatives, but thinks that such activity leads to irresponsible and dangerous procreation. Perhaps one might think that it is enough of a deterrent to simply remove the stamp of 'marriage' from such couples (though on your theory, one can't imagine what the grounds of such a move would be in the first place), but it has actually long been recognized that the state can go even further, using marriage policy to incentivize such couples to perhaps even pursue sterility by artificial means. Obviously, such a goal does not exist for homosexual couples; they seem to be just irrelevant for the purposes of marriage policy. There is no plausible way to argue that since the state uses marriage policy to encourage close relatives to sterilize themselves rather than procreate irresponsibly that they must somehow also incentivize homosexual relationships for no apparent reason.
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That the law was over broad for its purpose is not a killer argument. Many laws are over broad for their intended purpose. Also for much of history this wouldn't be a worthwhile inquiry for the state.
Disease control. Encouraging procreative coupling.
I don't particularly care what the interests of the state are, in terms of whether or not I'm for or against something. Hell, in plenty of situations, like privacy or free speech, the interests of the collective state and that of its individual citizens are diametrically opposed. So much the worse for the state, is/ought distinction etc.
That being said, the Spartan state encouraged homosexuality as a male bonding exercise, so it's hardly unheard of.
What it is, is irrelevant, from the perspective of whether citizens should tolerate it.
Same. I oppose homosexuality for my own private reasons which are non-religious, but are mildly aligned with the state's interests.
You might well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.
There is some evidence they encouraged some forms of M-M sodomy, but not obligate homosexuality as encouraged by the majority of gay advocacy groups in the current day, and certainly it would be a practice entirely orthogonal to a marriage between men, which would run afoul of even the Spartans IMO twisted position.
Well, we are talking about the state issuing marriage licenses. This sort of comment is like saying, "whether the secretary of state refuses to give blind people driving licenses is irrelevant to whether citizens should support blind people driving!"
Well the crux of the issue is whether the existence of gay marriage is causing "harm" to the majority of the other citizens. That's certainly false for the strict standard of harm my libertarian side espouses.
If they aren't bussy-blasting you, hypothetical (and the odd real ones around here) person who disapproves, suck it up. Err.. Not quite that way, but I applaud your spirit!
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Sure. The argument was about "why should the state care?"
It's consistent to say that the state should advance one set of values that serves their interests, while private citizens are free to hold other values that have nothing to do with state interests. E.g. the state has an interest in having a strong military and may choose to valorize soldiers with medals and memorials and holidays. Meanwhile private citizens may choose to adopt different values that don't glamorize dying in war.
I gave you an example of a state advancing homosexuality for what can be described as the sake of the state.
Idk about you, but I expect, being the citizen of a representative democracy, and likely to become a citizen of another one, that the state does its level best to align itself with the desires of the majority of its citizenry.
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Determining whether a couple is infertile in general is much harder than determining whether a couple is gay. It is entirely reasonable for the state to not want any marriages which do not produce children, but to allow the ones that it can't trivially detect.
The state can go fuck itself, frankly, if I ever get married or have kids it won't be to shore up the state. One wonders what's even the point of a state that places its own nebulously defined interest above that of its subjects.
Would that the pro-gay-marriage camp shared your disdain for state sanction. As it stands, forcing everyone else, including the state, to recognize gay "marriage" was an explicit goal. Partly, this was because state sanction included some obvious benefits, such as end-of-life care decisions, intestate succession, tax status, etc.
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Right, I think the argument that sterile couplings in general are socially bad is weak - it's very hard to see how a widowed man and woman marrying in their 60s hurts society.
The core objection to gay marriage - whether admitted or not - is that homosexuality specifically is bad, and I think attempts to abstract away from this are disingenuous.
My own view of the issue is that homosexuality is a disability. I don't think less of anyone for being disabled, and I don't begrudge them finding their own way to best live with their disability. But it seems perverse to me to celebrate disability. People advancing pro-LGBTQ stuff feels similar to me to the deaf people who want their kids to be deaf too. And to the extent that sort of thinking takes over society as a whole, it's bad because it means we've lost the ability to see that having a properly functioning body and brain is a good thing. We're becoming disconnected from what should be obvious reality.
So I come down on the side that the best outcome is for society to tolerate homosexuality (whose practitioners are mostly unable to change their own desires) but not to celebrate it (whether through marriage recognition or rainbow flags or propagandistic representation in popular media or whatever). People should be allowed to be weird, but being gay should be seen as weird.
So you support the modern Russian and Hungarian policy towards homosexuality? Nobody has managed to thread the needle on ‘freedom for gays, but not celebrating and promoting it’ yet. The closest is probably the eastern euro countries where public homosexuality has legal restrictions(eg no pride parades, can’t be out to minors) but there are no sodomy laws.
The closest in my opinion is Japan, in which public homosexuality is tolerated to the extent that it conforms to longstanding dramatic/performance norms (eg okage). Private homosexuality is permitted but not encouraged and generally considered shameful. The vibe as I understand it is "be gay if you have to, but keep it to yourself".
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That seems to be the position of most of the "conservative" sorts I know IRL. As one crudely but pithily summarized it: "I don't care if you're gay, just don't be a fag about it."
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Well, they could always be made to adopt orphans, and at least some gay or lesbian couples go through the trouble of surrogacy.
The orphans aren't already in enough trouble?
I find most of the assisted reproduction creepy.
I'd rather have a 50% of being sexually abused as a child than counterfactually not exist, frankly. I think most people, if they were honest, would agree. This makes banning gays from having assisted-reproduction children ... extremely stupid, imo, and the morality that leads you to believe it must be prevented extremely suspect. (Its' still fine to think gays are evil or whatever, that can coexist)
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No to both, not that I can particularly comment on what you consider creepy.
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If you've never been here; Why comment?
Fault for what? Pedophilia?
Are you saying that it's christian morality that is saying pedos are bad?
Do you actually know anyone on the American right? Lumping evangelical conservatives with libertarians is like calling Bill Clinton a marxist.
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