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.

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.

You know fun fact I learned recently from a let’s play: tentacles only refer to the appendages which end in suckers, but along the rest of their length, have no suckers. The other appendages are called arms. So, octopuses actually have no tentacles, they have arms. Squids have 8 arms, and 2 extra tentacles, which are the long ones that have little spade shaped sucker hands on them. So, probably when you pictured tentacles, you were actually picturing cephalopod arms.

cause it’s cool and I like it, which should be reason enough. more practically it works for cases when you lose your remote, maybe cases where you want to change the channel on some TV in a pub somewhere, shit like that. it’s fun.

Every time it comes up I must lament the switch to screens too tall to watch content, the decision to remove wired 3.5mm jacks in order to drive sales of wireless headphones, the switch to increasingly fewer physical buttons. No more IR blaster.