untz

Do you mean a numbers swap or a phone-accessible chat space? Both are doable, obviously there are pros and cons, but the more that needs to take place centrally the higher the cost on the infrastructure. But either model is doable in theory, of course, and it’s not the tech but the money

Went ahead and threw you around $140 in XMR to get that going. Privacy is a good thing to have.

I think whoever decided that this is a good idea needs to be put in timeout until they explain the following:

a) What exactly is the harm in question

b) Why would this ameliorate that

c) Why would you think that

Because look, “harm” is used in this vague, nonspecific rationale on purpose - people aren’t talking about the same thing, and also, no matter how they contextualize harm, age verification won’t solve any one of them, never mind all of them. Chronological age is a heuristic that they put in as a very haphazard and arbitrary age of consent that isn’t even the actual age in most states. We then essentially pushed it out worldwide and guess what, most countries disagree. Ultimately nobody is right, because no serious scholar of human development thinks that chronological age has any actual meaningful significance on an individual level. In turn, it’s also impossible to verify without external evidence that a resourceful child can easily get when motivated, but you aren’t legally allowed to ask anyway. Unless you believe that AI is black magic, in which case bless your heart but get the hell out of any position of power, it doesn’t even recognize me as me when I have glasses on, never mind the arbitrary nature of a number set because laws needs legal fiction for points of reference or you can’t have bright line rules. This is ultimately a number pulled out of pseudoscience in the late Victorian era by some very privileged white people in Anglophone countries. Nobody in my family have the actual date of our birth on our government IDs, and in fact this is pretty common in many parts of the world. When they established the age, it’s true for most Americans who are not wealthy, or did not live in a city, especially women. Russia was still on the Julian, not Gregorian calendar. People literally believed that masturbation was the cause of contradictory illnesses and the cure is corn flakes and milk enemas. Even in the US what exactly is the harm actually isn’t a consistent concept, never mind UK, or Europe. In fact, the UK has a serious delusion about aggressive porn being prevalent and affecting children en masse even though for hundreds of years flagellation was known as “le vice anglais”.

English public schools all have 3-400 years of well documented histories of commonplace sexual abuse. William Thackeray arrived at Charterhouse, age 13, and was immediately asked by an older boy for a handjob. Whatever you think is the harm and however you want to place blame, verifying the fundamentally unverifiable ain’t it. It’s the same shit as thinking that social media is addictive by design (go on any site and friend nobody, see how you like it). Or that Purdue Pharma created the opioid crisis on a drug discovered 100 years earlier that is an analogue to the first track on the B side to the Velvet Underground and Nico. Or are we going to pretend like Lou Reed didn’t exist? Modern western music was invented by that album and 2 songs on it are straight up about scoring.

The refutation that masturbation caused any harm was the last among a chain of events that in Britain separated doctors from quacks, since the claim, made first in the late 1700s literally to sell snake oil, ended up legitimized by Tissot in Switzerland and then France, could be debunked simply if anyone who knew Latin checked Tissot’s citations - they are actually all BS. We know this because people did and discovered the very thing. And to think that corn flakes and milk enemas aren’t enough? Nonreligious nonmedical circumcision is literally a practice that came about from the pseudoscience that we never fully ditched. It also didn’t stop masturbation, and caused no harm since lube had already been invented, and if insurance wasn’t paying for it you’d see a dramatic drop in the rate of the procedure since it’s an article of faith even if it’s driven by financial interests (and also, we have evidence from countries where it is purely done for cosmetic reasons that cost of the procedure and the rate correlates, causation would be wildly unethical to study). Maybe it never caught on in Europe because so many churches claimed to have Jesus’ prepuce that he either had 7 dicks or there was a lot of casual lying happening. Somehow they are still lying to themselves and those around them, but so are we, and to each other. That’s idiocy we can do without, and downright embarrassing for grown ass people to believe in miraculous panaceas to non-problems. Any and all of the harms that have been used to justify the measure have pretty much been debunked or at least the studies do not replicate. Seriously, the State of Wisconsin had to retract nearly a decade’s worth of crime statistics because every single case of child sex trafficking was actually a child trafficking themselves. They released the report during lockdown, but archive.org saves what the state conveniently forgets to linki back. If y’all can’t get on the same page, maybe it’s because there’s no page to get on in the first place. Just because every country has idiots doesn’t mean that we should all give them the benefit of the doubt. Power corrupts, but also it gives license to cast dispersions to deflect blame for wrongdoing. If we buy their obvious bullshit, are we not consenting to become idiots ourselves? Fuck that. I didn’t spend a quarter century in school to believe in old timey bullshit like I’m 5, and nobody deserves that. I don’t care about political teams (I have sports for that, politics kill people, it’s not a joke), I care that people think this is governing. Shit or get off the pot and I think time’s up.