Comment by pibaker
16 days ago
It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.
Rules for thee, free love for me.
People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off, there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them.
Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.
And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.
> control inflation
I think you are confusing cost inflation with an increase in the money supply. The way the US government funds deficit spending is not by increasing money supply (though it could) but by issuing debt in the form of US Treasury bonds. That is a transfer of money from bond investors to the government. No new money is made. This is distinct from the way that banks issue loans which is by creating new money in the form of credit (but that credit money gets "burned" as loan principal is paid back). So federal taxes do not actually control inflation in the way you are describing. Since federal deficit spending is not financed by increasing the money supply, it can only cause price inflation if it increases aggregate demand over the current productive capacity of the economy. An example would be paying more for healthcare subsidies when there's a shortage of doctors. Or subsidizing demand for housing with more mortgage subsidies when there's a housing shortage. Taxes could also increase inflation if they have the effect of reducing supply of some goods or services (like tariffs do).
Edit: I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from banks (converting the asset into cash reserves). There are various reasons why they do this but overall it's done with their dual mandate in mind: control inflation and minimize unemployment.
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> Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.
1. No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.
2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual transactions between people with "skin in the game" are harder to fake. The extent to which wages are preferred as a subset of income is separate from the wealth-vs-income split.
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It would be so nice of that tax was actually "burned"(similar to proof of stake), instead of being used to fund even greater inflation. This comes in the form of a huge administration, which gets payed for providing, many times, negative value. Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current political party in power.
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With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not that easy to walk it back :-/
> Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands?
Except for the fact that, without first solving the problem you responded to, yours is impossible to solve
This is overly simplistic. Most economic activity is not related to the government at all. Taxation can slow economic growth and inflation, but the government running at a deficit or surplus is neither a cause or a solution for inflation but rather a byproduct of multiple aspects of government policy.
Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.
Those tax dollars just go back to the wealthy in the form of interest payments on government bonds, which they own.
Wealth tax will just create an industry around hiding wealth for the rich
This wouldn't stop the AMA from controlling medicine.
Sure, it’s easy to tax “wealth”. Except most wealth today is of the type where Alice owns 10 million Y and Bob decided to pay $1000 for one Y. Alice cannot possibly sell her Y for near that price, but now she will be taxed on “wealth” of $10 billion.
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Wealthy people own assets, not money. Stealing their assets doesn't reduce the money supply. Elon Musk is "rich" mainly in paper wealth.
Taxes raise inflation as they increase the production costs. If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave, and take their capital away to invest it elsewhere. This as a result will lead to inflation due to lack of available capital for production.
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Since when has raising taxes actually solved any major problem? We have enough taxes, the issue is the corrupt politicians swindling it to themselves and their cronies.
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>People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government.
Hard disagree.
I fully believe that we are collectively responsible for all of our problems because we are a shitfuck tragically tribal species who, in a world of ever expanding tribe sizes, desperately cling onto tribe sizes that our tiny brains can handle, hence becoming tribal about a myriad of trivial and pointless things like sports, racism, which bathroom someone uses or which policy on immigrants one supports. Dunbar's number.
And we're so tied up in these micro tribal problems that we completely ignore the macro tribal problems that affect every single one of us. We're shit out of luck we literally evolved to act like this and there's nothing we can do to stop the behaviour; it's innate.
Global temperatures are still rising and will continue to do so. We can try to stop it but we won't be able to.
I don't even think it's the tribalism. Society used to be racist AF and it worked ok. Heck, you could play a pretty amusing "guess the race/nationality" game with spicy quotes from 1880-1920.
I think the problem is that by making everything objective, systemic, numerically tracked, quantified, etc, etc. we've actively selected for evil people. The people who get ahead in those systems, the groups who's interests get served, are not the good ones. They are the evil ones who have no qualms about exploiting the vulnerabilities and oversights of the system. In our quest to optimized everything, we have optimized for the prioritization of dishonest people and bad causes that attract dishonest people and it shows at every level.
Ted K would probably have something to say about this.
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There is, it's eugenics. We can absolutely select against psychopath traits and select for altruistic, greater good, communal self-sacrificial traits. We have the science.
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My solution for this is to rate-limit political contributions --- they may only be made in an amount equal to what a minimum-wage worker might reasonably be expected to donate from a week's wages (say 10% of hourly min. wage * 40), as a physically written out check or money order physically signed by hand (at least an "X" mark) and mailed in a first-class envelope with at least a similarly signed cover letter explaining the reason for the donation.
If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.
Most of the money in politics isn't direct contribution to candidates, it's PACs.
PACs are just groups that do advocacy of some sort. Some do things like advise congress people on legislation they'd like passed, some run ads to campaign for positions or candidates, some advocate for movements.
What they're not supposed to be doing is directly coordinating with a candidate, or running ads just for a candidate. But that's a line that has been continually fuzzed.
An example of a good PAC might be something like the HRC (human rights commission) that campaigns for LGBTQ rights.
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This is the central problem with Citizens United. The supreme court tends to be unusually deferential with 1A cases and ruled that infinite money can go into formally unaffiliated PACs. Undoing this would require activist judges or a constitutional amendment.
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PACs and dark money have been a disaster for this country
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These days instead of paying out politicians you just buy social media bots or even the whole platform to push propaganda to the general public so they start agreeing with you.
Private money in politics is one of the counterbalances to the emergence of a totalitarian state. The government gains a huge advantage over the opposition due to the fact that it is the government and receives free media coverage.
What's to prevent them from just ignoring those restrictions?
Bundling would get around that to some extent
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You can't find that because any concentration of power means the corruption forces have only very limited surface to pressure, and all the more that surface is actually easy to swap with one molded for even more corruption convenience.
People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.
In countries like the US and UK with FPTP voting systems, proportional representation would help a lot. As it would make it a lot more viable for candidates outside of the main two parties to stand (and actually have a chance of winning).
(although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)
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It’s easy to solve concentration of power, just distribute it more. Nowadays we can have quite large distributed systems.
It’s nigh impossible to invent a system that truly formalizes collective will with the goal of optimizing for everyone’s best long-term interests, minimizing unhappiness.
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Which is exactly why we need a strong federation, and broad participation in democratic process across the bank. Many people can't even be bothered to vote, much less participate in their local, municipal governments. That must change.
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In capitalism, the rich get powerful; in socialism, the powerful get rich.
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The issue isn't representation, it's division. The party that won is being well represented with respect to the values of their constituents, whereas the opposition views it as a daily nightmare. These two visions of the world cannot be reconciled.
Representation needs to be less about black/white political ideology and more about the specific needs of various people. Farmers need representation, white color workers need representation, small business owners need representation, but their needs are all different, and don’t really boil down to left/right politics. The government isn’t treated as a forum to collaborate on solving problems, but as a playground for the powerful to create boogeymen that get people riled up.
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I agree while also disagreeing. It feels to me like the Democrats seemingly always get their way while in power while Republican presidents with a congressional majority get little to nothing done.
To me they have the classic problem as with non-profits: “If we solve the problem we cease to have a cause to exist.”
Taking a look at what’s been accomplished this past year, it’s a lot of token Executive Orders on renaming things, a token deportation effort, no material change on mass legal immigration, nothing happening on the voter ID front.
It’s just theater until they lose out in the midterms and they to rally their base again in 2028 to “Save America” or “Keep It Great” or whatever hokum.
Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.
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I would say one side is being told that they should believe it a daily nightmare, e.g. people on the right really disliking obamacare but loving the aca.
The problem in America is that more than half the country does not live in a shared factual reality. Like:
* Jan 6 was a fedsurrection, and also simultaneously all innocent people that needed pardoning (Pardoning the feds?)
* World Liberty Financial receiving billions selling out American interests worldwide? Never heard of this but Burisma was worse!
* The Raffensperger call was no big deal there were attorneys on that call. Trump's personal (now disbarred) attorneys, of course, not there to represent America's interests but how's that the big deal?
* Also who's Raffensperger? But did you see those boxes under the table! What do you mean the clip is longer than 6 seconds that's all I saw on the infinity scrolling apps.
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Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.
Power is not the problem, because power exists regardless of who owns it.
We the people actually have a relatively high amount of power in our states and communities. We just don't use it. The real solution is to convince the masses to pay attention, which is harder today than it ever was.
This assumes that govt and individual families are the only players in the game. Now as in other historical periods large corporations hold arguably more power than either of those groups and reining in govt leaves little obstacle to them consolidating even more power and wielding it globally.
Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.
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Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power
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You can't have truly representative government if the people voting don't understand or care that they're not being represented particularly well.
It is apparently not much of a risk to your seat if you don't represent the interests of your people because the people have become tribal and it is only their tribe they vote for with very little effective criticism of the leaders in their tribe. (it's not that complaints are nonexistent, they just don't result in anything)
It's a representative government, it just represents Israel via AIPAC.
That's a lot of work to do. It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged.
Corruption is happening out in the open and there's still so many people shrugging in response. One good push back from everyone all at once would fix a lot of things quickly. But that implies the people are united and not instead driven into manufactured conflict by said interested parties. It's basically enough that we're in a post truth era as of now. I don't know how we come back from that
Anyways, repealing Citizens United would be a good first step.
[warning/apology - this comment regards USpol specifically]
Our media landscape has people focusing on basically everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a whole really thinking about how to solve our very real problems.
China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say, growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.
One of my great fears is that democracy was the right model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won't keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.
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> It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged.
That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average $26.53 million [1]
You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000 salary.
Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you suppose motivates the donors?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
The US should have direct referendums at the national level, just like most of us have at the state level
Most - maybe all - hot button issues have much more moderate takes than any party national committee positions, in the bluest of blue states and reddest of red states the actual individuals have much more consensus on every issue
Whatever the founder’s initial reasoning or lack of inspiration for national referendums for federal law passage doesn’t seem to be relevant today
You either win big enough under the current system, with its system problems, or you never win to improve it.
Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping.
And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept.
The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate.
If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.
The only thing that changes behavior is consequences.
If there is no justice system enforcing the law and its requisite consequences, then there is no justice. I don't think those in power understand the anarchy that their intentional dismantling of the justice system has and will cause, and how the blowback from that anarchy will be visited upon them.
If that were true, people would be unhappy with their representatives. For the most part they seem pleased with them. They think everyone else's representatives are corrupt, but in fact they are also doing what their constituents have told them to do.
The corrupt ones are us, the voters. We hate each other and send our Congresspeople to do as much damage as they can to the others.
Post Citizens United, that’s going to require a Constitutional amendment.
And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.
Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before Citizens United
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What is interesting is that, as demonstrated by mass media and social media’s influences over our politics in the last century we can be motivated, but we have let power become too concentrated in the wrong hands.
China’s qualifications for influencers thing is interesting by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media publishers.
I think this is entirely the wrong way to think about this. While better elected representatives and officials would always be a nice thing, what we need is to ensure that we design systems around them that mitigate their corruption and double standards. We were even (collectively, across humanity) doing better and better at that until not that long ago.
We need regulations on the politicians because, clearly, their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution back.
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>Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off
The US elected a convicted fellon, the corruption is a feature.
Sometimes I wish we’d bring back tarring and feathering. “People should not be afraid of their governments …” and all that
>there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them
The hard part is this has been true going all the way back to the stone age ever since we elevated the first person arbitrarily to chief. There has been no model of government developed since that is immune to this. I really don't know how to get around this and it depresses me that we will always be held back by the slimiest who abuse systems.
> lack of truly representative government.
There is no such thing as (truly) representative government. To the limited extent that groups of people can at all be represented (which is a whole other questions) - governments are generally not about doing that. Yes, many world states have electoral systems where people can vote for one of several (lists of) candidates or parties, but the claim that in the normal and uncorrupted scenario, the elected properly represent the populace/citizenry - does not, I believe, stand scrutiny.
Which is to say, don't try to "find a way in which candidates aren't corrupt and bought off"; that is in the core of democracies in money/capital-based economies. At best, the elected will act according to some balance of influences by different social forces, some being more popular and some being powerful and moneyed elites or individuals. If you want that to change, the change needs to be structural and quite deep, undermining state sovereignty and exchange-based economy.
Implement campaign spending limits, regulate or ban PAC's, and commit to an ongoing effort to stomp whatever new methods big-money comes up with to influence politics.
We do most of this in Canada and our leaders seem to be less influenced by big money. (Nevermind that we recently elected a billionaire PM...) The vast expense of running a U.S. style election campaign virtually guarantees that U.S. politicians are all bought and paid for.
Carney isn't a billionaire, right? He's been a bureaucrat, not a plutocrat.
Bring back sortition, within elected parties.
Colossally awful take. Corruption is an intractable problem in human history. Power is a magnet for the worst people, and every system we invent can be exploited in innumerable ways. The only variable is how long the people of any individual society can remain free and prosperous before their decline. Temporary recoveries have only happened by lopping off massive chunks of empire, implementing extreme monetary reforms, and/or a switch to full autocracy. Every other outcome is terminal decline.
Term limits for congress.
Same for the Supreme Court. 20 years. A lifetime appointment is no different than a king.
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And age limits for congress.
No, our problems are much bigger in that we have a populace easily led by tribal sensibilities. Theses scumbags aren’t coming from nowhere, we’re electing them to these positions.
Sortation.
Sortition?
It’s not irony. It’s by design. Politics is for controlling people. Rules don’t apply to rulers. No one cares about children or anything. Even manipulating the public opinion is outdated. Technology helps them to control. Freedom is an illusion today. We are not free anymore.
Politics is simply how a society governs itself. Whether or not a society values the rules being enforce to rulers is itself politics. Dismissing politics like this is how we end up with exactly the problem of rules not applying to rulers.
Get involved with politics. Be part of politics. That is how freedom is earned & maintained.
Technology might be one half, but the other half is demographics.
40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.
Nowadays, our societies are old on average (especially the politically powerful).
Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.
> 40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.
The government generated most of those too. As technology became more capable they utilized it more but that doesn't mean they were standing around with their hands in their pockets prior to that.
> Nowadays, our societies are old on average
Do they have an unfair access to technology? If not then does this actually have any impact?
> Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.
In your experience perhaps. I doubt the reliability of this logic.
The gates have already been closed at the pasture's edge.
Moo.
What do you mean day by day.
We have known this to be the case, for quite some time, yet majority of the public still thought that a convicted felon was good enough to be president.
I think that's the exact irony that the parent is eluding to.
It's all about the kids, unless, idk, you're rich enough?
Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth[1] lies squarely in the center of the foundational belief that those who've acquired such means have done so because they reflect "the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished."
It takes only a brief glimpse of the real world and its most wealthy to recognize that an abundance of virtue is not what's reflected in reality. In fact, the benevolence Carnegie describes, serves as a smoke screen for cruelty, degenerate acts, and the slaughterhouse of the soul. We've sold out every moral for a bait and switch and it's well past time to reneg on the social contract.
1. https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/
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It's all about the kids when you need a certain segment of the population to vote a certain way.
It's never about kids. If they cared about kids, they would have school lunch and wouldn't starve.
It's about control and monitoring of civilians. And creating a dragnet to ensnare any new politicians and business leaders.
Freedom of speech is insufficient. We need freedom of privacy and from monitoring and tracking.
Only 22% of the public voted for Trump.
This is a completely useless statistic, and I'm not even close to being a Trump fan.
Way more people didn't vote, and not voting against Trump is just as bad as voting for him.
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That is the uncharitable interpretation. I think it is at least as likely that voters consistently get to chose between a turd sandwich and a giant douche, so it will always be possible to accuse them of preferring a terrible candidate.
Also, nitpick: it was neither a majority of the public, or a majority of the eligible voting population, or even a majority of the people who voted.
I think a really good first step, at least in the US, towards making our candidate selection better would be to mandate open primaries.
I think your interpretation is uncharitable. One of the options is a fraud and a pedophile and the other wasn’t. They absolutely were not equally bad.
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>a turd sandwich and a giant douche
Ah yes, the famous conservative talking point of "well yeah, my side is bad, but your side is just as bad".
From a pure performance standard across economy and quality of life, its pretty clear that Democratic policies always end up as net positive, while conservative policies may seem good in the short term but allways end up bad long term. But to see this you have to understand politics, and understand the effects aren't always immediate. However, the situation this time around is way simpler.
Basically in 2016, you could be excused for voting for Trump. Things were going well enough that mattered, Hilary was not the best candidate, and maybe a little mix up needed to happen. In 2020, if you voted for Trump, you are absolutely clueless about politics and have no idea what is actually good for the country, but at least its all political reasons.
In 2024, it wasn't about politics - it was a choice between either allowing a convicted felon who tried to overthrow US government (with Supreme Courts saying he did nothing wrong mind you) back into a position of power, or not. As it turns out 7/10 people who either voted for trump or didn't vote are ok with the rich and elite getting away with what they want.
So generally when people act surprised about anything that happens in regards to Einstein or any other things that Trump will do, like interfere with elections and possibly go for third term, just remember that those people don't actually care. This is what they want.
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This is the most uncharitable take and common of the people who try to play the middle or wave away their decision to vote for Trump.
The decision was quite literally between a known criminal and already even at the time known to be likely pedophile (and now it's basically a fact) and someone who is none of that.
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It is kind of obvious that once someone reaches such a power they should be monitored all the time.
Criminality among the rich and the politically connected is off the charts. It’s way beyond any group of immigrants for example that these same people are trying to demonize.
Chat control? Every single politician should have that on their phone.
I think politicians should be the least privileged people in a society except those in prison. Any protections or exceptions for them alone are unconstitutional.
An idea I like to bounce around is that everyone at the highest offices of power (not going to define that here) should be forced to live in monastic conditions during the term in which they hold power.
You are fed, clothed, and housed by the state. You have no luxurious amenities, no exercise of personal wealth, no contact with anyone other than for official business.
If you honorably discharge your duties to the completion of your term of office, you will be compensated for life to such a degree that you will never have to work again.
There's a lot of nuance that I'm glossing over, but the gist is that holding powerful positions ought to require severe personal sacrifice, but you will be handsomely rewarded after-the-fact if you bear that burden with dignity.
> handsomely rewarded after-the-fact
The other more important effect is that it neuters any kind of quid pro quo type of corruption, if paired with a big enough stick. It's hard to bribe someone if they will get to live in luxury for the rest of their life anyway, and where discovery of the deal would land them in prison for life.
They will have that exception on their phones.
These are literally _the same people_.
Musk was hanging out with child sex trafficker and is allowing kids to create porn with grok on X.
He is allowing a lot worse version. Allowing adults to create child porn with grok on X.
Did Musk really hang out with Epstein? I only saw email conversations between the two.
By contrast, Bill Gates and Reid Hofmann hung out with Epstein A LOT.
And Hofmann was Epstein's primary connection into the Silicon Valley scene.
Funny how all of you guys focus on Musk but no mention of Reid Hoffman anywhere who was far more involved with Epstein.
He sucks too. Not everyone is working backwards from their team sports fandoms.
Indeed, _so_ strange that a lot of attention goes out to the wealthiest individual in the world.
Didn't know that Reid Hoffman knowingly released a CP generator on a platform with hundreds of millions of users either.
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Look, I would really like to mention everyone every time, but it is so tiresome to be honest, all of these guys are awful and all of them are connected if not through epstein, then through some other private club.
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> Rules for thee, free love for me.
No, only one rule - kill internet pseudo anonymity because it’s dangerous in the same way as large gatherings are. The age circus is just convenient pretext / collateral damage depending on perspective
When the Gen Z protests happened and internet was cut…wasn’t to protect innocent from porn
Discord aren't the good guys here. There are no good guys here.
> It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.
They are hypocrites. In the UK there are hundreds of thousands of girls who have been raped between the 1990s and now (17 000 cases of sexual exploitation in the UK in the year 2024 alone). At least one UK politician refer to the girls who've been raped as "white trash" and recently people are shocked because many are implying that these girls, who are typically mass-raped, have been considered to be consenting.
It's known for a fact they tried to bury the story once it's been revealed. Turns out the same method is used by these grooming gangs in countless cities nearly all across the UK.
It's not just that the richest and most powerful do frequent child sex trafficker: it's that many politicians and judges all over the west are totally fine closing their eyes on the mass raping of girls (some boys are victims of rapes too but it's mostly girls).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal
> Rules for thee, free love for me.
Rules for thee, free love for me and for my voters base.
And, further, that all the child rape was coordinated, for the most part, in the clear over fucking Gmail.
But we have to decrypt everything to protect the kids.
> that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker.
In most cases a lot more than simply "hanging out".
I'm fine with the free love and debauchery, but just really keep it to adults and be safe.
'I'm fine with extreme indulgence, but just really keep it restrained and be safe.'
By definition, debauchery with durable constraints can't be normalized, as its appeal is the overstepping of norms.
There's also an argument to be made that normalizing debauchery invites scope creep.
I'm just going to go ahead and say that "free love" is a terribly inappropriate way to refer to sex trafficking, regardless of the age of the victims, unless you're being facetious (e.g., The Onion's "Penis Goofin'" allegations against Epstein).
I’m going to suggest re-reading the top level comment and the GP’s response. I don’t see anyone suggesting non-facetiously that free love and sex trafficking are synonymous nor that sex trafficking of adults is acceptable. I think the top level poster is being facetious; such a view is how these creeps might think. I think the respondent is, intentionally or mistakenly, ignoring that context and using the term at face value.
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I hope this time it really sinks in that law and rules are only for the little man. Time to think about the system from scratch.
What makes you think next time will be different?
Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place.
The problem is not them. The problem is us.
> Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place.
The optimistic take is that this phenomenon is a characteristic of the _emergence_ of an information age (through the agricultural and industrial ages), and will no longer be true of the internet-connected human.
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The media has a big hand in steering the vast majority of people away from critical thinking and proper outrage to useless, powerless disaffection that leads to impulse buying and binge-watching.
Do you also not wash your laundry?
Gross
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It's far easier to control and prosecute communication when an identity is attached.
If you look at almost all "protect the kids" initiatives, they are targeting mostly to deter free speech or cover other shenanigans. Same people who "want to protect kids" have no problem exploiting kids.
General public should be more intelligent and look a bit deeper than a cool title, but I really can't realistically expect that.
To be fair, the people in that group were literally writing articles about how meetoo went too far and sponsored lawsuits against feminists exposing the stuff.
So like, their ideal vision of the world was "every man can treat women and kids this way, they belong to kitchen anyway".
Peter Mandelson was pushing very hard for digital ID cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
A good implementation of digital ID can do things like verify age while respecting privacy.
the "protect da kids" narrative is just a veil to make us give up more privacy and freedom for "security"
You're really pulling your punches there.
do as we say, not as we do
it has never been about children.
I think it's wild you would make that connection for this topic
i am trying to understand why discord is doing this. Is it because of the charlie kirk killer using discord?
The extremely cynical take: All of this is by design for well-connected billionaire pedophile rings to kill competition from millionaire pedophile rings.
The less cynical take: Billionaire pedophilia is just a really dramatic consequence of us building a society that cannot make billionaires accountable for their crimes. There's not much connection between that and the government overreach being done in an attempt to put regular pedophiles to justice.
Discord is overcompensating for their extremely lax child safety record. It's not terribly difficult to find servers full of child groomers on Discord that are rarely banned. Same thing with Roblox. The business model of social media presumes that the average user is going to require almost no attention from the moderation team. That's why, for example, removing CDA 230 safe harbor provisions in US law would be so catastrophic to online discourse. The only way any company can justify the risk of publishing Someone Else's Speech is if that risk is literally zero.
The same calculus means that when we start requiring social media companies care about children on their platform, they immediately reach for the solutions that are trivially automated: ID and face scans. These companies are shoestring operations for their size, so everything has to "scale" on day one.
> The only way any company can justify the risk of publishing Someone Else's Speech is if that risk is literally zero.
Or, you know, employing customer service agents. The non-employing of such also allowed them to become billionaires so it seems kind of fair.
It's useful to point out hypocrisy, but are you suggesting we shouldn't try to protect kids because of Jeffrey Epstein?
You might point out how this will protect children and what the trade offs are. You might also address the point that the same people who keep trying to do these "protect the children" attacks on privacy seem to be one or two steps away from people like Epstein. They didn't need to decrypt anyone's communications because they were the recipients - what did they do about it?
It seems many of them continued to "hang out" with him.
I am not a native English speaker, I may be missing a cultural nuance, but I wouldn't call any of what they did love. That word enters nowhere in a sickening child abuse island.
it's just sarcasm.
and they keep protecting the pedos from prosecution. lol.
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I don't recall the Bible saying much about who to vote for, given that democracy wasn't much of a thing in the ancient middle east.
The Bible tells us how to pick godly leaders. It also gives many examples of those doing right and wrong. For both, leaders exist today with similar worldviews. So, it's directly applicable.
Thomas Jefferson took inspiration for our system from Jethro's advice to Moses:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2018%3A1...
Here's the elder requirements under Christ. Notice that teaching and character are the main focus.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy%203...
Which character traits in the baove passages do you think lead to good leaders? Which do you reject as wicked? I think, and have seen, that they all lead to good outcomes.
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So you're saying people talking about some particular god are highly moral and not involved in crimes, including crimes on children?
God's Word says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That we have choices but all choose evil. We keep choosing evil at times out entire lives. So, all people are to face justice for their evil.
But, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life. Christ took God's jistice upon Himself, serving our sentence for us, to give us a second chance. If people repent and follow Him (God), then He forgives our sins as a gift. Then, begins a process of transforming us from inside out to glorify His name on Earth. Which includes good works He does through us.
People can still choose to sin. We're evil, after all. Yet, we have an Advocate, Jesus Christ the Righteous, who intercedes for us. He cleans us from all unrighteousness as we confess with true remorse. If we ask, He turns a heart of stone into a heart of flesh. It's a gift He offers out of grace we don't deserve. But, He does discipline unrepentant sin and it does cost us in the long run.
It's a question of scale. Neither crime is less serious but far more children are groomed and abused over Discord than flown in via some super rich sicko's private jet for a 'costume party'.
Making everyone "teens by default" fixes none of that, though. Roblox spaces aren't exactly 18+
This is no worse than Discord just banning NSFW content wholesale throughout the platform (which they would be entirely within their rights to do). It's a big fat nothingburger.
They have a right to ask for my passport and SSN. And I have a right to say "hell no" and delete my account in response.
I'm sure the owners of Tumblr thought the same.
The owners of Tumblr thought being banned from the app store was certain death, but losing the nsfw content was only possible death.
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It would be in their rights to do it.
Its users who value their privacy will be in their rights to leave and we will.
It's not a nothingburger; it's a massive collection of personally identifying information.
Especially by the company already involved in a leak of a massive trove of pictures, personal details (including IDs), etc: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
What could possibly go wrong this time...
Except it is scarily easy to find servers which openly have minors selling NSFW content. Or BDSM servers targeted at "14-28 year olds".
Just like how you learn that all black men are criminals when you see a few of them committing crimes!
he was convicted of soliciting prostitution (not of minors), right?
why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?
This article was on the front page recently: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9534
So at least some lay people easily realized he wasn't worth getting involved with.
good call! hadn't read that.
He was arrested for sex trafficking minors and convicted procuring a child for prostitution.
He ran a sex-trafficking ring that involved hundreds of girls and women. Possibly over a thousand. He wasn't keeping it all to himself.
> not of minors, right?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481...
"The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old at the time they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein... Epstein intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18, including because, in some instances, minor victims expressly told him their age."
> why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?
Some of them were emailing long, long after his conviction.
that's a grand jury charge, not what he actually pled to, right?
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He pled to Procuring Person under 18 for Prostitution.
I could be wrong and would be happy to be so but it seems like this to me:
If someone did a few months of house arrest for "pleading guilty to solicitation of prostitution involving a minor" it would be incredibly easy for that person to say - whoops, she said she was 25 and then they threw the book at me." And not terribly unreasonable for someone to take him at his word on that.
The real crime is that the prosecutors massively under charged him for doing an insane gigantic awful pedophile recruitment ring. No one really knew that til a long time later.