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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?
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 infertile opposite-sex couples could always get married...?
Such as...?
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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