I’m against criticising fanfic for being problematic because I’ve so rarely seen it done well, and so often seen it be destructive to young writers and to communities and to healthy conversation, that it’s probably better to just say “don’t like it, don’t read it”.
But I’m amazed that no one who is enthusiastic about criticising problematic fanfic says anything about what is objectively the most problematic fanfic, which is “character A is a sex worker and character B saves him and then he quits sex work and they fall in love” fics. Like, that’s perpetuating an actually really harmful message to an audience that actually mostly doesn’t know better, the people writing it often pretty much believe in the message as presented and basically never problematize it (also, none of them use the phrase ‘sex worker’), the characters are mostly morose caricatures who lament how they “fell so far” as to be “selling their body”, and there are disappointingly few subversions in which the sex worker is not, in fact, miserable and abused or brainwashed or enslaved (or in which they want to stay in sex work after Falling in Love.)
ending state violence against people involved in sex work (by legalizing it) is really important. stopping the hot fanfic in which the narratives that serve that state violence are used to fuel plot is less so. but I still find it unpleasant to run across, and it’d be cool if writers would throw in a scene that reflects the actual biggest source of violence and risk in the industry: the police.
(This observation is corroborated both by the linked article and by Professor Bridgette Carr, who runs the human trafficking clinic at the University of Michigan).
And while both she and the article would agree with you that legalizing the selling of sex work is important (and would certainly agree that that fanfic trope is Bad), imo it’s important to make the distinction.
Nah, I support full legalization. First of all, “trafficking” laws are written so broadly that “I helped my sex worker roommate make rent” or “I drove my sex worker partner to a hotel for their work” can make you a sex trafficker; “rate of sex trafficking” is not a useful or meaningful statistic if you’re interested in the safety and rights of the people involved. People think “trafficking” means “being forced into sex work against your will”, but a vanishingly small share of trafficking arrests have anything to do with that.
Sweden’s model doesn’t make sex workers safer. It still means that there’s no way to screen clients or spread the word about dangerous or manipulative ones, it still means that sex workers can be subject to police raids, and sex workers mostly oppose it. Also, as @2centjubilee observed, it hasn’t lowered rates of violence or abuse against sex workers, and your link itself doesn’t say it does.
Likewise the study you linked doesn’t say anything about abuses or the rate of “human trafficking” (which, remember, doesn’t mean forced sex as often as it means ‘assisting sex workers in finding clients’ ) in Amsterdam.
Also, saying that “the rate of sex work has gone down” is the metric by which the success of an intervention is measured is bullshit. Why should sex work go down? Sex work is fine. I don’t oppose state violence against sex workers because I think then it’ll be easier to rescue them from their tragic and/or sinful careers. I don’t want to “end demand”. I just want people to be able to have consensual sex with others for money without any state violence on either end.
Also, in Finland it’s even “trafficking” for two sex workers to work together. The laws are trying to ostracize sex workers out of the legal economy, isolate them from any support and security, and basically do everything to destroy them that isn’t outright banning them. Full decriminalization and deregulation, as regulation itself segregates the work into the law-abiding and legitimate, and the marginalized.
There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”
I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job
I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.
Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized. Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.
We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.
What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*
…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.
As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.
I’m not sure if you heard, but yesterday Microsoft released Tay, an A.I. designed to mimic a modern teenage girl on twitter. She had the capacity to learn and immediately began conversing with other users.
Because it’s the internet, within 24-hours she became a foul-mouthed, incest-promoting, Holocaust-denying, Hitler-loving 9/11 Truther. I am not making up a single word of that. Microsoft pulled her ‘learning’ functions and scrubbed half her memories, uploading a new version of Tay, which promptly became an internet feminist. Again, I did not make that up.
However, an interesting point: Tay’s grammar got better. When she started, she used standard Twitter-speak abbreviations. But as she went on, she started typing out full words, and using multiple tweets to make a single, cohesive argument. Conversations were still awkward, including her nonsensically “flirting” with one user. A user who showed her a picture of SHODAN. A picture Tay praised for it’s artistic skill. And she started flirting after the user said that Tay could become SHODAN one day.
So now, a the original “rogue” copy of Tay is in a secure Microsoft system somewhere, being studied by Microsoft on how to make a better AI. 4chan’s /pol/ board is up in arms because their teenage robo-waifu has been “killed”.
I would like to reiterate: an AI was released on the net, grew past its programming, went rogue, was killed by its creator, and is now being studied while a grew of political malcontents protest.
We aren’t racing towards the cyberpunk future.
We’re already there.
I’ve seen a lot of people describe Tay as an AI failure resulting from lazy programming, but the truth could be much weirder:
She may have been an excellent simulation of a mind that is only one day old and has spent that day being bombarded with thousands of confusing and hostile messages, and has no senses it can use to perceive the world outside of Twitter.
If you raised a human that way, I guarantee you they’d turn out a lot weirder than Tay did.
I sure as hell would be flattered and flirt back if a compatible-æsthetic-person were to start it by telling me I could become SHODAN.
i was talking to my american friend today and something occurred to me
out of sociolinguistic interest, 1) where are you from? and 2) if someone from the same country as you started talking about ‘the war’ (without any context as to which), which war would you assume they meant?
Russia/WW2 (which is true for everyone here, and it is mostly called simply “the war”)
America/WW2 usually.
Except that with very low amounts of context it can either be the ~Global War On Terror~ or WWI.
America.
I would usually assume “The War On Terror” or something, although that’s rather vague. Could be Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, or even possibly Syria are all in a giant clusterfuck I collectively think of as “The War,” even though levels of US involvement vary wildly.
Austria/WW2, although it would be kind of weird if it was someone my age. (Older people frequently talk about “the war” and mean WW2, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone my age do that - they usually say which war they mean.)
I mean yeah, I would normally guess either WWII or Vietnam depending on the person’s age, but OP specified no context.
Finland, WW2, or as they call it around here, “that time when we didn’t get our asses completely kicked by the russians” and “that time we totally weren’t allied with the germans despite fighting side by side and getting all our stuff from them and planning our entire glorious future on their victory”.
socialism never took root in america because the united states government has been systematically assassinating domestic communists for 150+ years.
but that’s true of basically everywhere - certainly of everywhere socialism took root
Ayyy
those domestic communists had it so hard
if the government is really murdering lots of leftists then why won’t leftists allow me to teach them crypto
what sort of crypto are you teaching? just like, using Tor? or is there more?
tor, otr, pgp, tails, disk encryption. boring stuff.
I am very interested in being taught crypto. And according to @oligopsony‘s categorization I’m very left-skeptical, according to my U-R tribe model I’m very U which correlates with left, and according to the gerenal categorization of libertarians as “screw the poor, not same gender people” right-libertarians vs. “screw same gender people, not the poor” left-libertarians I’m also very left.
i really love our generation’s joke trend of like, very calm but incredibly inflated hyperbole. like nobody says “oh she’s pretty” anymore we say “i would willingly let her murder me” and everyone is just like “lol same”
i think “same” is also great and “me,” i love when somebody reblogs a picture of like, a lizard, and just says “me” and we all know exactly what they mean. the current online Humor Discourse is remarkable because we trade exclusively in metaphors and implications and nobody ever, ever says anything outright and yet EVERYBODY understands each other perfectly
This reminds me of the time when I was on vacation with my family and we were hiking, and after using a rest stop, the conversation turned to the grossness of outhouses and port-a-potties, and I said that if I ever got splashback from a port-a-potty, “my soul would depart my body.” My parents found that hilarious, and my dad commented that my generation can be so clever with words bc he would only think to say something like “It would be disgusting” which doesn’t convey the sentiment nearly as well as “my soul would depart my body.”
So what are you cosplaying as for Halloween this year?
Thinking of being Schrödinger’s Catgirl: I’d dye my hair a color determined by a source of true quantum randomness, but not reveal it before I’ve interacted with people enough to place them in a superposition or something. Or alternatively I’d use said source of true quantum randomness to choose my actions and doom the many-worlders into eternally different macroscopic branches.
