The ability to selectively enforce prohibition gives you ample opportunity to profit from the gaps in the system.

It’s like 12 at night for me so this might be a little bit rambly and stupid, be prepared:

Yeah, that’s pretty true, but I also mentioned that to some extent in my OP, that selective enforcement is the case with basically every law that has ever existed. I’m not really a stranger to the institutional fuckery that happens in the illegal market either, gary webb and allat, but also the classic uncontrollable mexican government drug cartel shenaniganery. I just also think, maybe to the core of what I’m getting at, that people shouldn’t also be like, immediately snap judgement in terms of condemning illegal action on the basis of it’s illegality necessarily. The black panthers collapsed and all the other civil rights organizations that were around at the time. MLK probably got assassinated by the feds, Fred Hampton definitely did, I think Malcolm X probably also did, but those organizations, or so I am told, didn’t dissolve immediately, they just began a long process of ostracization and alienation and probably atomization as suburban poverty increases more recently, until they basically just became normal gangs, as they were engaging in illegal activity before, and selling drugs, or illegal property, is a quick way to make cash to fund ventures. I dunno I still need to find a good place to watch “the bastards of the party”, I think that documentary has something to say about that. Also never heard of boardwalk empire

I was being hyperbolic, but, a famous part of the prohibition was the organized crime which was both kind of naturally occurring at the time and was created specifically to traffic booze. Illegal material can’t be protected by legal means, obviously, and so in order to trade it, you basically have to create your own police force, your own privatized military. a gang, a mob. That’s how we got nascar and shit, the rumrunners. If you made porn illegal, I’d imagine it would just be added as kind of another form of valuable property which would be traded around by gangs which would see increased power and are kind of inherently anti-institutional. So, turning to black market cartels is a form of resisting policing, it’s a form of anti-institutional action, I’d say, as it gives more economic power to anti-institutional organizations.

I’d also say, you know, I mean, the hippies did go to wall street in 2008, so that’s something. We had the big liberal feminist pussy hat shit sometime after that, which I’m not as familiar with. More recently we had BLM which was possibly the highest level of street marching we’ve seen basically ever, and then we’ve seen like two riots to try and overturn elections, one of which was successful. We’ve seen more recent campus protests which are still constantly ongoing despite a lack of media attention. I don’t think it’s as absurd as you think, that something kind of stupid like porn getting banned might be the tipping point, especially considering the pretty steady upward trend that we’ve seen with political action concerning other somewhat disconnected issues.

If that legitimately happens and makes it into law in a broadly enforceable way rather than a “this person who I don’t like was caught checks notes watching porn! book em!”, which is definitely what it would be like basically every law that came before it, I guarantee that the government would collapse within about three weeks if less. Which I think is maybe a good rule of thumb, that if your law would collapse society if it were enforced equally, it should not be a law.

Do not underestimate the power of the gooners when they are kept from the goon.

You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.

Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

Not to sound like a ancap idiot or whatever, but I’d imagine that has to do with the fact that streaming services don’t actually compete with one another. Exclusivity deals mean they don’t actually compete in terms of user experience, features, ease of use, higher video or audio quality than their competition, improved bitrate, whatever. Instead, they just compete based on who can snap up what IPs for the cheapest, which is just a game of whoever has the most money, whoever can outbid their competitors. Then, you’re not going to netflix or hulu or disney+ because of the features of the platform, you’re going to them because they have some IP that the other platforms just straight up don’t, and if you want to watch both IPs you gotta pay for both. So, it’s not really competition, in the conventional sense.

The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won’t be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam’s been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.

It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It’s like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.

I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.

I’m gonna be honest most times when I write a response I’m taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said

I mean I just don’t think it’s so much a calculated effort by the ruling class as kind of a natural evolution of the market taking hold of and exploiting the human mind to the nth possible degree, such as they have always done.

What’s the pod?

i’m fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.

It’s more stupid than that. The idea is that 140 characters is a lower barrier of entry for a reader, compared to reading a series of paragraphs that might be able to at least talk about something, or attempt to summarize an issue. It’s why accounts like wint can pop off, and become so prolific.

I second most of these other recommendations, but since I haven’t seen them said yet, The Magnetic Fields. Somehow manages to be funny while also being very geniune and touching, which I think is kind of what I look for in a band.

“What do you know about bionicles lore?”

yeah that was it for sure

If you don’t think you act irrationally you’ve already fallen into a catch-22 cause that is in fact irrational.

Didn’t really get that from the rest of what you said, though. How is that a catch-22? Cause everyone will just be irrational eventually? No, not me, I am the one without sin, only I can cast stones.

Also find it kind of funny because the catch-22 itself, referencing the book, is an example of the paradox of how the only people who would want to fight in war are probably insane, but also that insanity is a way to get dismissed from service. The scenario itself references a paradox which, in wartime, is unsolvable. If you’re sort of assuming that, for rational people, the default state of them is to assume they’re irrational, and also that, for the irrational, the default state of them is to assume they’re rational, I dunno if that really, uhh, works.

Okay, I’m assuming I’m irrational. Yakka foob mog, grug pubbaqup zink watoom gazork. Chumble spuzz.

We’re probably operating on different ideas of what “rationality” and “irrationality” means, here. I don’t actually disagree with any of what you said, I’m just pushing your buttons.

Think you have it in you to write at least one paragraph where you don’t contradict yourself?

No, probably not. That would be too easily agreed with, and uncritically accepted.

Why is caring if people are hypocritical a moral stance? I can just find it annoying, it doesn’t have to be a moral issue. There doesn’t have to be something morally “wrong” with it for me to find it grating.

If I were to point out, though, how hypocrisy might be wrong under most moral stances which don’t explicitly allow it, probably sort of along a “this is a principle to which all other principles must bow and are devoid” sort of thing. I’d probably go something along the lines of, if it’s actual hypocrisy, then it’s contradictory to the internally consistent moral principles at work, so from within the moral framework of whoever’s being hypocritical, the hypocrisy is wrong, they’re failing to live up to their own moral principles. That’s sort of a defining trait of hypocrisy.

For clarity, if I had to define my own actual moral position, it’s that I think morals are kind of more arbitrary than people would seem to believe. Or maybe less self-evident, is a better way of putting it. People tend to assume that everyone else is beholden to their own moral standards, or that someone else’s hypocrisy is just a case of cognitive dissonance or something, rather than being internally consistent within the worldview. People can still be wrong, but most of the time, people don’t actually know why someone else is wrong, they just kind of, assume that they are, mostly in bad faith. It’s sort of like the classic example of, ahh, those evil conservatives, they are going to ban abortion for it being murder, but then also want capital punishment, what hypocrites! I mean, they’re right in that the discrete positions which they’ve taken are probably correct, but their reasoning for getting there was wrong, so they’re basically just correct by dumb luck of their circumstances drawing them to a “correct” conclusion. Every individual claim or position you evaluate has to be kind of evaulated as it’s own thing, and everything as it exists within a particular worldview, it’s dumb to assume those aren’t well-justified. It’s like when people assume that everyone in the middle ages was just like, extremely stupid, and not human, and didn’t have real perspectives or live real lives. It flattens other people to cardboard cutouts. I’m struggling to come up with actual examples right now of people like accusing their political oppositions of hypocrisy when in reality their opposition just belongs to a totally different worldview and set of principles, but that’s probably cause I’ve switched to decaf, so if you call me out on it then I’ll come up with more solid examples later when my subconscious has had time to cook on it.

Anyways, this guy torturing this wolf, he was probably not just crazy and insane, he probably is just some stupid guy. I personally think it’s probably a better idea to examine that guy and his set of principles than just kind of offhandedly condemning him because of what I view as basically a deterministic action. It’s unproductive to just condemn him, it’s more productive to examine that behavior in order to put a stop to it at some future point, or even just to pursue understanding for it’s own sake. Maybe I’m just assuming the socrates moral position, or whatever the guy is that believes knowledge is the greatest good, except I also believe “behold, a man” is also a pretty good burn, so maybe not. I also think it’s kind of dumb to use this particular guy as an example. Potentially he’s interesting because, as people have discussed in the thread, he’s kind of a weird off example of something you usually don’t see headlined in the news or called out, which is the regularity of animal cruelty and the nutso behavior that a lot of hunters engage in, which could be examined well, but I dunno if this is the best example of that, because this is pretty extreme.

Mostlyl, though, the post I made is a vent against the fact that I see people on social media all the time engaging in these kinds of vent-y behaviors, which is something I acknowledge to be dumb, because I am engaging in the same problem about which I am complaining.

I also don’t understand, what about my post is rubbing you the wrong way, here? You seem like you’ve probably gotten the gist of it, what part of it are you drawing ire with, other than my incoherent rambling shitpost style of typing where I contradict myself and attempt to hold no clear positions of my own? I thought it was pretty self-evidently in jest when I said “but still, I must chastize you for it, because when I do it, it’s morally justified and cool.”. That’s definitely an unironic statement, that when I call for death threats, it’s a cool thing to do. Everyone else is wrong, only I am correct, that’s unironic for sure, for sure.

Yeah no I hate songs in books. Most of the time it’s pretty hard to figure out what the actual tune of the song is supposed to be sung like, unless the author’s pretty good at it, and most aren’t.

I dunno, I’m sure there’s a more complicated and interconnected series of events which lead to them truly being popular, not least of which was the movies, but in terms of how they’re structured, it kind of makes sense to me why they were a successful fiction. The various different houses, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable from one another internal to the books, give kids something to identify with and self-categorize into, which is something that teenagers kind of love doing in a struggle for identity. They’re also part of the hidden world subgenre, which means it’s even easier for tweens to self-insert into.

Then, I think it also helps that they’re kind of poorly written, weirdly enough. Every character isn’t usually a real, fleshed out individual, they’re just an archetype, and a shorthand, a common trope. I think this is probably desirable for a tween audience, and I think probably also a simple to follow plot and set of plot elements is also more desirable. There’s no lore to keep up with, it’s just like you’ve taken a bunch of other tropes from other, better works and compressed them into an easily digestible series of books full of melodrama. It’s not super hard to understand. Those other books, they’re like the various PDAs and shit you’d see floating around in the 90’s, they’re explicit works of art constructed for a singular purpose. Harry potter is like an ipod touch, or an iphone, or something, it’s just engineered to have more mass appeal at the expense of complexity and possibly quality.

I mean having beliefs that are beneficial at the moment and then changing it whenever it suits you is a great short term option if you want to have moral beliefs, sure, but it’s not great in the long term, societally or personally. So I wouldn’t really call it the smartest attitude to have. I also don’t think that not having morals would necessarily prevent me from caring if people are hypocritical, or thinking that other people are morally repugnant. I’m just thinking that they’re morally repugnant by some external set of morals which aren’t my own, obviously, some morals which I haven’t internalized, and which aren’t mine, probably.

Anyways, I gotta get back to shitposting online, and eating babies, or whatever it is that people with no morals do.

nope, no morals whatsoever