activism, politics, social, digital

"a little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you're in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you cant possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you're being radicalized, and not in the good way.

if the solution to your problems sounds like "we need a blank slate" its a lie. there are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is "burn it all down and let god/fate/history sort it out"

thats not problem solving. its barely catharsis, in practice. it doesnt just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

put the apocalypse down, and back aways slowly.

real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to "us good, them evil; kill them."

Let's talk about porn quickly, it's time for milquetoast takes with Nucleo hour!

Our seeming inability to create any real solutions to pornography other than the false dichotomy of "ban that shit" and "wild west" is a product of our deeply sexually repressed country.

In a society where people are unwilling to talk about sexual material behind baseline acknowledgements of its existence, real solutions for navigating its intricacies can never be reached.

This, of course, has catastrophic downstream effects. As many know, there's been a push to treat sexuality and (especially) gender minorities as "inherently sexual," forcing them to contend against the pornophobic box of "that which should be banned without exception."

Even looking beyond this conflict, there are issues to be discussed with real pornography as well! The pornography industry is infamous for intentionally exploiting both its consumers and creators, and this has gone largely unchecked due to the unwillingness to get involved with such an uncomfortable topic. This shit ruins lives, but we can't talk about pornstars being exploited by the industry without people awkwardly shying away. There's literally an active scientific debate going on right now about whether or not the addiction model can/should be used for discussing pornography, but the only time this seems to come up is weird chuds advocating for NoFap, instead of *actual* harm reduction.

These issues can't be solved in a way that isn't totalizing if you're unwilling to have conversations about them, friends. Talk about pornography reform.

It's another one of those issues where there are real, legitimate problems to be discussed, but those discussions can't happen because bad faith actors are constantly trying to sanitize society as much as possible, and the conversation instead has to shift toward telling those people to fuck off.

(While my posts are usually written with an American audience in mind, no shortage of them (this one included) apply to most other countries as well)