domain:betonit.substack.com
GBRK
17hr ago
The gist of your argument is, "illegal immigration is bad. Receiving the benefits of having a citizen child is good. If we link the latter to the former we are giving people good things for doing bad things. This is unjust." I disagree with the premise (illegal immigration is better than legal immigration because they have to pay taxes but don't get welfare), but admit that it's logically sound. It's also, however, missing the point. Birthright citizenship isn't about the immigrant, it's about the baby. Yes, those children benefit from schools and healthcare-- but so do the children of american citizens. Neither the child by blood nor the child by soil have a "right" to that education or healthcare, but we as a society have pragmatically and compassionately decided to invest in our children in the (well founded) hope that they will one day repay the favor. And in the meantime, we expect our children-- of citizens and noncitizens both-- to earn their rights to vote and run for office, as delimited by the laws that make explicit our social contract.
If you think that education or healthcare are bad investments, you're welcome to argue for that. If you think that illegal immigrants should receive fewer benefits for giving birth to citizen children, you're welcome to argue that too. If you think our social contract asks for too little in return for too much.... well, I'm already pretty sympathetic to that position. But that's all orthogonal to my argument that blood confers no special qualities relative to soil.
We're talking about porn consumption, not masturbation.
- What number would you consider more appropriate?
- Are you familiar with the meme "nut, clean up, close 50 tabs"? And to put it delicately, how familiar?
- The argument doesn't assume people generally consume more than one pill a day, although they certainly could, and some do.
...One of the best porn-related pieces of advice I've ever seen is from The Last Psychiatrist:
You have to approach porn like a bank heist: get in, get out, you got 15 minutes and someone tripped the silent alarm. Leave nothing behind.
...He gives this advice, because he thinks people need it. Why do you suppose he thinks that?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
17hr ago
Are you implying that masturbation (1) feels significantly better than 99% of other experiences, (2) puts you in an incapacitated stupor for 1–3 hours, and (3) can be performed as many times per day as you want, just like a real drug can be taken? If so, I think you're exaggerating a little too much.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
Telling a business to do age verification is equivalent to a ban if that will sufficiently impede their business model. Most of the subscription-based porn sites will likely be fine, but I imagine that the legal sites offering free porn will pull out of Texas, which was probably the intent all along.
I wonder how much this would generalize to other unpopular stuff some people say is corrupting the minds of the youth.
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Reading the motte could certainly be damaging to some minors. I wonder how many people would participate if they had to send a picture of their driving license to the mods first.
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Pictures of guns will turn our kids into school shooters (I could claim). Tell all the gun manufacturers, gun nuts influencers and gun safety people that they need to put in age verification or pixelate any weapons.
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Rainbows and LGBT propaganda brainwash kids into being trans (I could claim). Just let any websites which discuss these topics implement age verification.
I would be more sympathetic to the attempt to make the internet kid-friendly if it was not so obviously doomed from the start. The thing is, the internet has been a cesspit of pornography since even before the web was a thing. Pornhub is only the tip of the iceberg, outlawing them will not change a thing. At the very least you would need a Texas-wide firewall which bans 20% of the international websites (and good luck with keeping the filter list up to date).
Either keep kids on a whitelisted tiny sliver of the web (and pray that they do not outsmart your filter) or teach them why it is a bad idea to search for beheading videos or bestiality porn.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
Suppose we invent a new and improved form of heroin. Unlike normal heroin, you can't overdose on it, it doesn't cause chemical dependency, you won't catch anything from taking it because it comes in pill form. It also costs basically nothing. Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?
The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged. He outlined how he was being abused and exploited by some shitty yet expensive sjw private school yet still groveled to their admin when they vaguely threatened to kick him out for complaining too hard.
it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”
If you don't leave after hearing this, you're the school's bitch and paypig. You should never expect them to listen to or do a single thing for you ever again.
He directly says that the main benefit of his abusive provate school is that it lacks undesirables in the student body. Dude bussing is over just move to a better district using the savings from not paying insane tuition.
Then when his shitty private school was going through some changes, he wanted out, and could only say there were no good options and was thinking of staying anyways. Dude your kids are less than 10 just go to normal school.
Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”.
What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!
One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling
Going to a "normal" school with "mid" teachers is sooooooo bad. Instead I'm gonna take my kids to travel the world.
Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation.
Apparently having his kids growing up in a school where a few of the best teachers quit is "stagnation". Just going to a normal school must be absolutely ruinous to all of the victims who don't have insane parents like the author.
CPS should be going after people like this for child abuse if anyone.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
It's more that people advocating for certain rule changes often do so based on the presumption that they will only be used against other people. OP thinks that it's fine to deport native-born citizens with non-native parents, confident in the belief that he's protected. In reality, he probably can't meet the standards he imposes on other people, and even if he can, the vast majority of people can't. If we were to take this idea to its logical conclusion we'd end up with an America that looks vastly different than the one we have now. I don't think the OP sees the end result of this being that a second-generation Mexican and a naturalized Bangladeshi have a much easier road ahead than someone whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years.
GBRK
17hr ago
It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.
I think you believe that citizenship is an entitlement that belongs to the parent, rather than the child, and that they distribute it according to their will. In that model, it would make sense to say that, mechanically, "giving a child citizenship" is equivalent to "giving their parent the right to make their children citizens." Consequently, you perceive birthright citizenship as a reward to illegal immigrant parents.
Is that accurate?
GBRK
18hr ago
It's deeply physical.
Implying that dirt isn't? Implied that a people aren't tied together by living together in the same place? This entire argument is 100% special pleading.
ChickenOverlord
18hr ago
Abbott districts in New Jersey are one of the best sources of data for this. They're funded at (or higher than) the wealthiest districts in the state but still have dismal outcomes:
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
18hr ago
It is a privacy violation with the purpose of deterring adults pretending to be an age verification law. "Think of the children" is as usual nothing more than a cover story. As Kagan notes, if it were just an "age verification law" and the impact on adults was as minimal as possible while still achieving the goal of deterring youths then the law would survive strict scrutiny and the majority wouldn't have had to twist itself to support lower scrutiny.
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
I would argue that while presenting unsolicited sexual material to either adults or minors can indeed be harmful (to some degree -- I remember seeing porn ads when I was downloading cracks for games at age 12 or 14, and mostly went eeeewww and got on with my life, but it did not traumatize me. Getting DMed a dick pick would certainly be worse, though), things are often different when users actively search for such content.
Sure, there are things which are likely harmful to the person searching for it, a 10-yo searching for rape or beheading videos is probably better off not finding any. But I do not think that any person of any age or gender who is searching for "naked woman" is likely to be harmed by pictures or videos of naked women, even if they are sexually suggestive.
Quite frankly, I believe that sexual content consumed by minors is too influential to leave it to chance and adult entertainment companies targeting an adult audience. The sooner we accept that the effect of age verification laws is not that horny teenagers will not view sinful material, but at best that they will learn how to connect to a VPN service, the sooner we can start producing more age-appropriate porn for minors.
I do not think that viewing PIV sex on video after searching for it is intrinsically harmful. The stuff which is harmful is all the stuff where porn differs from what one would recommend as sex acts for beginners. A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control? Nada (except for BDSM porn, which typically discusses boundaries explicitly on camera). She implicitly consents to everything, has no boundaries and is solely responsible for contraception. Getting her off? She just gets off being used by you, man, no need to learn anything about female anatomy or psychology. Pillow talk? Just call her a dirty whore.
Then you have all the kinks which are mainstream in porn. Incest? Super hot. Unhealthy power dynamics? "I would do anything to get a passing grade in your class ..." Spying on women? When caught, they are flattered and will have sex with you. Respecting your partner? Nah, they like to be degraded. Now, there are plenty of kinks which are fine between consenting adults who are into them. But the context "this is a thing which most women are not into" is generally missing in porn.
Just hire some 20yo porn actors and make them act out healthy sex scenes (where the actors play a couple (or actually are a couple), discuss boundaries, contraception and all that), put them on the web in 4k (or even better, find popular but healthy sex tapes produced (semi-)commercially and just buy the rights) and tell the minors in sex ed "it is actually normal and healthy to be interested in how sex works, if you are interested here are some videos which are more realistic than what you find on pornhub.
Sure, some will still prefer to watch gangbangs in 480x320, and for a few unlucky ones the good porn might actually be a gateway to the mainstream stuff, but by and large this will do much more to prevent minors from getting wrong ideas about sex (or see seriously disturbing stuff because they were curious how sex looks) than Texas just making the big US porn vendors do age verification and pretend that this will prevent any horny teen from watching porn.
But my suspicion is that the Texas move was never about protecting minors in the first place, it was about getting the filth off the Texan internet by pretending to care about minors seeing boobs and dicks.
thejdizzler
18hr ago
I'm immediately skeptical of this whole thing because they are using DUOLINGO of all things for language learning. You're much better off doing something like dreaming Spanish + Anki and/or paying a talented SL teacher to do comprehensible input for younger kids then add in YouTube/Graded readers. Duolingo is okay I guess for the really basic stages of language learning, but it quickly veers off into territory that is IMO not useful (way too many reps of vocabulary that undermines the spaced repetition, forced translation, early output). I've learned far more Spanish (and even Italian) through reading+Anki then I ever learned doing Dutch Duolingo.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
18hr ago
Who was he?
you are objecting to laws being broken to try to get the illegal immigrants out. The law was very definitely broken to let the illegals in; either you objected to this, or you did not. If you did not object to it, why object now? If you did object to it, then you observed that your objections were ignored then, why would you expect your objections to carry weight now?
If you do believe that the law should not be broken here, but you offer no remedy to the law being broken before, then is that not accepting violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in? If you say you do not accept it, what does "not accepting it" mean in concrete terms?
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
I think high spending high performance blue states throw the correlation into something too crazy to be a correlation.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18hr ago
public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.
Is that true across public schools? I've often wondered if the extra funding thrown at Title 1 schools that typically underperform actually makes the correlation negative, but I've never found an actual dataset.
FistfullOfCrows
18hr ago
The whole point of PP is to provide abortions, everything else is a smoke screen.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
18hr ago
I think the article describes that Ms. Zito is not a "Normal person" any longer and has gone "crunchy." Crunchy women get into charting for all sorts of health reasons, including mental health awareness, productivity boosting, meal planning and exercising, etc. There are lots of books out there that recommend women do X task on one part of their cycle, eat a specific way on another part, etc.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
18hr ago
Oh man, looking at the pictures I can totally see what they were going for but… it’s still so painfully ugly. I wonder if that’s one of those cases where if you stare at something long enough and tweak it in minor ways enough times you become blind to the overall impact it has on someone seeing it for the first time.
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
But then again, we have sealed food order bags for the delivery apps for 'peace of mind', so its likely that this type of thing is common, even for low value goods.
I suspect tamper proofing is less about drivers stealing and more about liability for the order coming through wrong.
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
Pathetic, disgusting. Using your child as a shield and making them do bad things. I have heard that some places like SF dont have felony charges unless you dont strike a threshold amount, meaning that you can legally send kids to steal a lot of stuff regularly and not face any consequences legally either.
The use of minors to commit crimes is quite common; the main reason in the US that dads don't do this more often is that the criminal class are, uh, not very involved fathers. They do like to befriend fatherless adolescents(even ghetto mommas don't like their kids kids hanging around criminals much) to recruit them into being patsies though.
You could do far worse than Terry Pratchett, IMO.
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