domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
That's a rather confident assertion that reads mostly as a very broad generalization/insult.
on top of that system. Also, you can "tame the beast" a little bit if you have enough smart rules in place for how capitalism works. And you know? I feel like that's a valid and defensible worldview/proposal, even if you disagree.
A defense of the PMC is essentially a defense of this added layer. You really do become more capitalist in the minds of progs by gutting layers of management and HR that work to offset pure macho entrepreneurialism. Or by undermining NGOs and non-profits, which they'll happily concede are private sector manifestations. Size of the state or public vs. private are not really where the action is anymore. Left vs. right all takes place within a permanent indispensable and inescapable capitalism.
The right that wants to woo the left by going after a portion of the private sector, i.e. engaging political economy on the left's classic terms, can't get any traction, because the left has moved on.
I understand liking the Kamina-centric beginning, but more than the deranged crescendo of stakes in the second half?
Less. Stefferi is from Finland.
She says, after intentionally splashing her naked body on the internet.
There is a difference between streaming and putting a recording up.
At my local swimming lake, some women sunbathe topless. They do not care too much about men oogling their breasts. If a group of assholes were to start discussing the merits of their breasts, they could always cover up and end the show.
But if some jerk walked over and started to take pictures, they would certainly become very upset and hopefully call the cops. While they do not mind a few guys seeing their tits, they do not want to end with a topless picture of them ending up on the internet for eternity.
There were also anti-government snipers in Ukraine, cooperating with the most radical protesters and fired on both the protesters and the government, trying to spark a bloodbath.
Some of the activists were now saying, during the trial that they were shot from behind by unknown people who were in the part of a hotel which was controlled by opposition.
Of course, good people who have been brought up on a steady diet of pro-social propaganda and who have been groomed to be morally invested into a sordid little geopolitical pissing match have to believe that their side would never, ever do anything shady or horrible.
^^@FistfullOfCrows it's all kabuki.
I'm sure we could hash out some set of circumstances where it was not fine. Lets say there's a Married mother of children who does porn without the knowledge of her husband, and not only does this trigger emotional distress for the husband, it can also nuke his reputation and lead to a divorce fight over the kids.
If she is cheating on him to do porn, that would be bad.
All the reputational stuff is indirect, and applies to basically any behavior the public finds offensive, from talking to a black person, being in public with uncovered hair, saying "Guten Morgen" instead of "Heil Hitler", smoking, putting up a Dem/GOP lawn sign, or wearing a bikini at the nudist beach. The question of how much one should conform with expectations for the sake of one's (and one's family's) reputation is a difficult one and not specifically tied to porn.
So say that the wife is camming only (or in an open relationship) and is also blurring out her face (so there is no reputational risk). Or that her husband (in the case of an open relationship) is taking part in a gang bang video while wearing a mask.
I honestly do not see the problem. I mean, if the couple had agreed to a no-sexting-third-parties rules beforehand, that would be a breach of that, obviously. You might argue that in an exclusive relationship, such a clause is generally implied.
If we're going that route, then we have to also have to come to the conclusion that it is utterly fine for men to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women,
Why not?
AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn portraying the aforementioned stuffing of holes and similar levels of degeneracy.
I will grant you that at some point, this will likely affect the ability of a politician to perform his duties as an elected official. My comparison would be smoking. A politician who is chain-smoking and can not function in a government building where smoking is forbidden would be problematic.
On the other hand, I could not care less if the politician was a chain smoker a decade ago, or if he spent half of his waking hours jerking off.
I will also state that I don't think there'll be any harm done by a blanket soft ban on anyone who stars in a professional pornographic film from holding a political position.
Fortunately for you, the Constitution leaves who is allowed to run in elections pretty much to the states (apart from a few protected categories like race, sex and age (over 18)), with the current SCOTUS, you might get away with disenfranchising porn actors.
Let us suppose for the moment that anyone who has ever participated in a porn movie is a terrible human being and any candidate who did not have a porn past would make a better government official, i.e. that your rule would improve things on the object level.
This is also a new rule, which always carries a cost on the meta level. It also establishes a precedent. At the moment, the only large group of adult US citizens who do not enjoy the franchise are convicted felons (in some states). Your rule would mean that states could decide to remove any non-protected group from the ballot: perhaps plumbers (after all, a lot of porn actors play plumbers, kinda suspicious). Or employees of oil firms. Or people who have been to a pride parade.
Now, if the current president had run on a campaign promise to fuck a person from every county which had voted for her in the oval office on lifestream during her term and won through the horny vote, then I might agree that the overbearing influence of porn actors is a problem which has to be solved, but in the actual world, it is totally a non-issue.
Some people do not like to be represented by Jews, porn actors, MAGA, SJW, men, women, nonbinaries, plumbers, oil execs, DC elites, Blacks, Hollywood actors, reality TV stars, draft dodgers, veterans and so on. There is a really simple thing you can do to avoid that outcome: don't vote for members of your disfavored group. Sure, sometimes the vote goes the other way and you end up with a president you find terrible, but that is still better than the equilibrium of someone disenfranchising their outgroup.
I am absolutely 100% fine with keeping people like this out of public office.
I do not see the problem with her. Clearly she was wrong believing that a live stream would not be recorded or that the voters were not going to care, but come on, she was fucking her husband. How much more traditional family values can you get?
Apart from the probability of people recording, streaming sex is like leaving the blinds open on your fifth floor apartment with the explicit intent that anyone in the next building who has binoculars could see you fuck. Not my kink, personally, but who am I to judge?
If this is the level of desecration of marriage which you think should prevent someone from holding office, you probably think Bill Clinton or Donald Trump are Satan incarnate.
It was indeed. Garrison gets turned into a parody of Trump, and runs for president with his platform being to "fuck them all [illegal immigrants from Canada] to death".
driven them into the arms of Trump not out of affinity, but existential desperation
And to a smaller degree Lina Khan going after tech companies. Blocking acquisitions and saying they need to be broken up. Not an idle threat when the head of the FTC keeps taking companies to court over it. Amongst other anti-big-tech Biden administration actions.
Then after the election I'm listening to Pod Save America and they are outraged that these same tech companies give a million dollars to the Trump inauguration or Bezos commands the Washington Post to not endorse Kamala. Not that they love Trump, but in desperation trying to avoid more punishments from Democrats.
The human (and nonhuman) will (and horny) bits don't go away, though they do get much more serious and have a lot more character and plot meaning under them. The so-shonen-it-hurts and moron protagonist(s) parts are trying to set up a matter that drives the denouement of episode 8, and doesn't really pay off in spades until 11, but I can understand if that's way too much for whatever that payoff would be, and using slop to eventually criticize the concept is still using slop.
I'm a big fan, but it's definitely got its low points and is a big investment.
But if continues frustrating me to this extent, I'll have to see if Macross or Gundam are any better.
It's definitely not a real robot show, or even more grounded super robot show. 08th MS Team is probably a better bet if that's what you're looking for (or, if you want something that's a light-hearted comedy instead of occasionally going full South Park, Dai-Guard).
they were slinging galaxies and universes as weapons (or is that a different franchise?)
The show only goes up to a single (spare) universe being used as a weapon; the movie significantly more, but yeah, it's this franchise.
I don't know if I'm notable enough to have a mental picture, but curious anyway.
Goatee, hair to shoulders, blue eyes that are animated and charming but hide a darkness behind them. Quick to smile but you suppress it. Given to plaids in winter and minimalist tshirts and jeans when you can get away with it, which is usually. You wear boots and have a weave belt.
Strong is relative. They're holding off Russia for years so clearly they're not too far off from one of our greatest enemies.
Without spoiling anything, the series takes a turn like 12 episodes in and I suspect it is the second half which people remember it for very fondly. I myself bailed not that long after the point you are (episode 6 or 7?), then gave it another shot years later, but still couldn't get into it. If you really want to give it a full try, though, I would say watch that far and see if it changes for you.
Spoilers ahoy:
If the politicians across both parties are making up national security concerns as a false justification to suppress rival companies or speech, or use them in other negotiations then that also seems like a major issue of a different kind.
That being said it certainly doesn't seem fake, Tiktok is clearly a Chinese owned app with direct access to the eyes of our children.
Really interesting thing said in a recent Reason article which I think is a good jumping off point for a greater discussion. Lawfare as censorship and a weapon. https://reason.com/2025/07/21/trump-who-wants-to-straighten-out-the-press-sues-the-wall-street-journal-over-fake-epstein-letter/
Trump and his companies "have been involved in a mind-boggling 4,000 lawsuits over the last 30 years and sent countless threatening cease-and-desist letters to journalists and critics," Seager reported. "But the GOP presidential nominee and his companies have never won a single speech-related case filed in a public court."
In addition to the lawsuits against Gapp and O'Brien, Seager noted Trump's 2013 lawsuit against comedian Bill Maher. That complaint was prompted by a joke mocking Trump's promotion of the calumnious claim that Barack Obama was not qualified to be president because he was not born in the United States.
One major issue with the law right now is that even the most bullshit allegations cost money and time to fight against, and even doing something like trying to get the costs covered by the one suing you is itself expensive and time consuming, especially when that is rarely given even in cases where the lawsuit is bull. Settlements are common in part because of that.
Even in cases like this
That seemed like a lot until Trump sought 10 times as much—$5 billion—in a 2006 lawsuit against Tim O'Brien, a financial journalist who had dared suggest that Trump was not worth as much as he claimed. Although Trump lost both of those cases, he later told The Washington Post he got what he wanted from his suit against O'Brien. "I did it to make his life miserable," he said, "which I'm happy about."
But this isn't just about Trump and his openly admitted to constant use of the court system to harass his critics in an attempt to silence them. It's not just him after all, it's a pervasive issue in the legal system that we call SLAPP or "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation". 4k is a particularly high amount of abuse, but there's lots of smaller amounts of abuse too.
This is about the court system being able to serve as a weapon to begin with. There will always be bad people who try to exploit a system, and we don't (yet I suppose) have a way to fix those bad people, so it's easier to change the system instead. Unfortunately this isn't just an American issue but pretty common worldwide and historically, so it's probably not perfectly fixable. But still, this is an interesting situation where instead of the government violating free speech on its own, the threat of government is used as a tool by private censors.
Also one interesting thing is that it's not just rich people or corporations filing to harass, but sometimes things like small claims court where a company sending a lawyer to show up and handle things would be more expensive than just giving the person suing you some money to drop the case.
Some solutions:
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Existing Anti-SLAPP laws do seem to have at least some use, as seen by politicians and public figures like Trump or Newsom filing the defamation/libel claims in states that lack them. A federal anti-SLAPP law or at least all states enacting their own would likely be progress then even if not fully sufficient. If someone admits they filed a lawsuit just to harass a person, punish them for abuse of the legal system.
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Scale the costs of suing by how often you sue. A person who sues once or twice in their lifetime is less likely to be abusing it than a person who seems to sue everyone.
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Higher standards for filing a case to begin with, make them present. Current standards for complaints are pretty permissive, so raise them up and make people show they have a stronger case or risk dismissal from the start.
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Make it a criminal offense to abuse the courts. Prank 911 calls can end with jail sentences, so why not lawsuits?
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Another similar option, just ban someone from seeking further redress for a while (forever?) if they're found to be constantly abusing the courts. Tell the boys who cry wolf to go get eaten by one.
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Find a way to lower lawyer costs/ease the burden for defending yourself/speed up court. Maybe AI lawyers/judges will help this a lot in the future. One of the reasons SLAPP suits work is because court is so expensive, and that's because lawyers are expensive and court dockets tend to be packed and take months (if not years) to resolve cases. If court wasn't so miserable to defend yourself in, then people couldn't sue you for that purpose.
Are there any doctors involved here? I mean there are lots of things that could be causing this and not all of them are her trying to stay slim. Maybe she has a form of sensory issue that makes eating unfamiliar food unpleasant. She might have some sort of digestive issues. She might have a blockage somewhere that makes eating a lot of food unpleasant. If there are mental blocks, she needs a professional of some sort so she can sort out her feelings about her weight.
Weird.
But the material rewards are what makes the difference between a slut and a whore.
There is an argument to be had about whether women are getting sluttier. (Survey evidence suggests they are not, but is not exactly reliable). But I'm pretty confident that they are not getting more whoreish.
Regarding Steam, I think it is fair to say that PC gaming is probably the least restrictive as far as content policing goes.
Yeah, it's very hard to beat the PC when it comes to running arbitrary code, without going to something like Linux. Steam, in turn, has been one of the (though not the most) less restrictive marketplaces.
The Microsoft App Store is pretty restrictive, and a large part of what has driven Steam toward Linux support in recent years has been concerns about that becoming a more central part of the next Windows operating system, but MS has thankfully not stepped any further toward that since Win8 first came out.
By contrast, Apple has been pushing code signing for a decade now, and have made it increasingly difficult to run unsigned code, and has revoked code signatures before. Their App Store is also a little more heavily integrated, though like Windows it isn't mandatory either.
Android varies heavily on implementation. By default you can run unsigned code, but it's possible to block third-party APKs. I think some Amazon tablets come like that?
"Windows Defender has prevented the execution of Holocaust Simulator 3000.exe because it violates the PC content policy" is not a thing that happens.
... mostly. SmartScreen's actually a bit complicated: you can submit software to Microsoft for free, or buy a license to sign a file, or wait til enough people use a specific application for it to get through their algorithm. Officially, they're not supposed to be looking at anything but the malware analysis. For solo small-audience devs, I can speak (for both adult game and non-adult-game stuff) that options 1 and 3 don't really work in any plausible timeframe.
While I do not own any gaming consoles or iThings, I imagine that Sony, Nintendo, Apple and MS/XBox are likely much more restrictive in what content they will allow than Steam was.
Yes, largely. Sony actually had a consumer-friendly dev console back in the PS1 era that could run unsigned code, but it was very expensive and intentionally limited to only run smaller programs. Most of the others don't allow third-party unlicensed software, or only allow developers to run things locally, or only are available through hacks.
In theory, this could be solved with creating/enforcing a standard for real-time cashless money transfer, but the very entities which would have to push this are the governments who like to has this additional power without any judicial oversight.
Even if it could be solved without government assistance, there are a lot of regulations that would get involved for a privately-produced easy real-time cashless money transfer tool. That sorta know-your-customer and anti-laundering stuff (along with technical issues) is charitably part of why coins haven't really been able to engage with that outside of darknet markets.
I started watching Gurren Lagann a few days back, and it was nothing like what I'd expected.
I knew very little about it. It had mechs, presumably some very big ones, and I think I'd read that by the end, they were slinging galaxies and universes as weapons (or is that a different franchise?).
Well..
Episode 5 had the main character being anally fisted by a toddler. A sentence I didn't expect to ever write, but here I am.
I thought the series would be relatively serious. Far from it. This is quintessential shonen slop. It does the opposite of taking itself seriously.
So many annoying tropes:
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Powering up with the sheer human will
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Nobody fights seriously, it's all half-assed
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Simon, one of the main characters, is literally retarded. He is congenitally incapable of making good decisions.
Not quite as annoying is the sheer amount of fan-service. This is a profoundly horny show, and distactingly so. I'm a red-blooded young man, but I'm going through a dry spell of several months, the longest in over a decade, and it's hard to focus when there are voluptuous tits out on display. Nice tits though, very tasteful. Alas, I prefer sex to have some kind of resolution, the way typical anime does it is akin to paying for a strip show. Who wants to get a boner while being unable to do anything about it?
I'm not sure the series has any redeeming qualities, but I'm not quite ready to give up on it yet. But if continues frustrating me to this extent, I'll have to see if Macross or Gundam are any better.
Ah, FC, FC. I believe it's been a little while since we last spoke.
During our earliest one-on-one conversations, I had us pegged as being very similar types of minds. Although in every conversation since then I've gathered more and more evidence to the contrary. That's not a bad thing, not at all; it just is what it is. Either way, you continue to make a surprisingly excellent sounding board for different arguments and ideas, perhaps because of your enviable generalized easygoing nature. And so I'm going to babble incoherently at you for a bit about the topic at hand, in the hopes that at least one person reading this will find that the words contained herein bring clarity to some aspect of their own experience. @IGI-111 will possibly be interested in this as well.
To be perfectly frank, I find most of the typically stated "rational" reasons for the animus against pornography -- "it makes sex workers feel bad", "it's too addictive", "it distracts men from finding a real partner" -- to be, essentially, distractions. They don't really strike me as psychologically realistic, they don't smell vigorous, y'know? They give the impression that something is still being concealed. "Sex is special and pornography is somehow a violation of what makes it special" -- ok, getting closer, but say more, special how? There are lots of "special" things in the world, but they don't all draw this level of persistent sustained ire.
Roughly, my thinking is that there are two principle psychological causes of the general unease that many people feel with pornography:
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Either the animus springs from the same unconscious mythopoetic wellspring as the prohibition against graven images of God, or:
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There is a primal fear of its sheer destructive potential that cannot be reduced to any "rational" factor; although the line between this point and the former is blurry, and they may very well be the same thing. For what could be more frightful than the wrath of God, the wrath that God very nearly visited upon the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf.
Don't for a second think that there is no relationship between God and sexuality. An image of sex is very nearly an image of God, it is reasonable to confuse them, there is a very real risk that people might start worshiping the image as an idol. Lacan thoroughly explores the indissociable link between the two in Seminar 20 (humorously enough, the very same seminar that features the infamous dictum "the sexual relationship does not exist"):
"It seems clear to me that the Other -- put forward at the time of 'The Instance of the Letter' as the locus of speech -- was a way, I can't say of laicizing, but of exorcising the good old God. After all, there are even people who complimented me for having been able to posit in one of my last seminars that God doesn't exist. Obviously, they hear -- they hear, but alas, they understand, and what they understand is a bit precipitate.
So today, I am instead going to show you in what sense the good old God exists. The way in which he exists will not necessarily please everyone, especially not the theologians, who are, as I have been saying for a long time, far more capable than I am of doing without his existence. I, unfortunately, am not entirely in the same position, because I deal with the Other. This Other -- assuming there is but one all alone -- must have some relationship with what appears of the other sex. [...]
There is a little connection when you read certain serious authors, like women, as if by chance. I will give you a reference here to an author... [...] I don't use the word 'mystic' as Péguy did. Mysticism isn't everything that isn't politics. It is something serious, about which several people inform us -- most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when one is male, to situate oneself on the side of [the phallic function]. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women. It happens. And who also feel just fine about it. Despite -- I won't say their phallus -- despite what encumbers them that goes by that name, they get the idea or sense that there must be a jouissance [enjoyment] that is beyond. Those are the ones we call mystics.
[...] For the Hadewijch in question, it's like for Saint Teresa -- you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she's coming. There's no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.
[...]Thanks to which, naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra, as long as you put a screen in front of this 'extra' until I have been able to properly explain it. What was attempted at the end of the last century, in Freud's time, what all sorts of decent souls around Charcot and others were trying to do, was to reduce mysticism to questions of cum. If you look closely, that's not it at all. Doesn't this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?
[...] [The Other] is barred by us, of course. That doesn't mean that it suffices to bar it for nothing to exist thereof. If by [the signifier of the barred Other] I designate nothing other than woman's jouissance, it is assuredly because it is with that that I am indicating that God has not yet made his exit."
So, essentially, pornography is evil because it gets too close to recording the truth. It risks making a graven image out of this "extra" jouissance ("jouissance" being the French word for "enjoyment", but the specific connotation here is that it's an enjoyment built out of pain, an enjoyment that you can never actually possess for it would simply be the immolation of the subject, it is the "enjoyment" of Exodus 33:20: "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live"). That's not the sort of thing you can just put in a picture and go passing around willy nilly! God jealously guards his (her?) secrets.
Whenever I ask people why they think Steam should be allowed to suddenly and arbitrarily delist pornographic games, thus endangering the income of many small artists and game developers ( @gattsuru feel free to consider this a reply to your top level post as well), I am always hoping, begging that they say "because God said so". Because then I at least know they're being honest! They're attuned with themselves. I let them go in peace, I have nothing more to say. It is the sort of thing that God might plausibly say, after all. Maybe he did say that. Who am I to doubt?
Maybe people are just increasingly embarrassed now to say that it's because God said so? Or it could just be a result of where I tend to hang out. I should just go down to my local lower middle class church, because y'know the more salt-of-the-earth people, the ones who haven't had their minds poisoned by so many books and foreign cartoons, their "defense mechanisms" often aren't as developed, if we're going to use psychoanalytic language. They'll give it to me straight. If I ask them what they think of porn they'll say "the fuck's the matter with you? Don't you know anything? Haven't you read the Bible?" And that's really just the answer I was hoping for all along.
Some days I really just feel like I'm done with the whole "argument and debate" thing. Arguments are yesterday's news. What I'm interested in are the mythopoetic symbols that govern your psychic economy. That's where the real shit is. But how to get people to share? They're so often embarrassed to share, or they don't even know themselves. I suppose I could offer a trade -- my symbols for yours. I'm always willing to lay myself bare as far as my powers of introspection will allow me. This could be the next big evolution of internet discourse, huh? It's like "let's talk about our feelings" but on steroids. This idea really has some legs. Just you wait and see.
FWIW, the opposite extreme ideology is easily dismantled as well: that the West in perfectly meritocratic and there is no need to study or even acknowledge power structures that affect and influence socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I could call this "right-wokism" and attack it as a strawman.
I know you said it is a straw man, but does anyone on the right actually believe approximately this? I feel like it would be more common on the other side to believe that the West was meritocratic, and should be meritocratic, but that overt and covert affirmative action is distorting things and making it harder for truly meritorious people to rise to their rightful place at the top.
My personal take, before anyone tries to paint me as a believer of a specific ideology, is not necessarily that government needs to play the role of dismantler of those power structures, but that it definitely should not continue to enable them to fester as open wounds in the social fabric of our society. E.g. don't test nuclear bombs near the indigenous peoples, but maybe also don't shoehorn social justice concepts into every bit of middle school curricula (just read a link from the Freddie de Boer post linked downthread).
I actually think that United States has already hitched itself to an economic system (capitalism) and a political system (classical liberalism) that by their nature tear down power just by existing.
In a truly free market capitalist system, a tiny start up can eventually topple a huge, established company. Competition and firms going out of business makes the system as a whole resilient, but at the cost of the fragility of individual firms. Just look at what the discovery of FM radio technology did to the AM radio giants of old.
That's incredibly upsetting if you're at the top, and don't want to eventually have your firm go out of business. This is why so many firms try to kick down the ladder, and eliminate fair competition through regulations and laws that make it harder for a new competitor to enter the fray and take them down.
I think that the hard part is getting all strata of society to embrace the creative destruction of capitalism. Most people are economically illiterate, and easy targets for bad economic thinking.
I notice you’re leaving out another solution- loser pays. Yes this means personal injury attorneys will get more selective about cases they take but that’s probably not a bad thing.
There is an existing process for doing this against repeat filers of frivolous lawsuits. It mostly gets used against incarcerated individuals who file dozens if not hundreds of bizarre lawsuits, but it exists.
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