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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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