It's shocking how easy it is to become a liar without missing a beat.
If they slipped and someone caught them lying, it would become exponentially worse. Bad idea.
But they should be proud of their sexuality. Whether it's BDSM or hotwifing or whatever strange kink, who cares? It's the same as shaming someone for being gay.
I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social climate we live in, but... Why?
There are also broader implications: Whenever we discredit the truth, we're contributing to how easy it is to manufacture fake news. There's a certain piece of potentially fake news I've been dying to bring up. It had a big impact on me, and then I realized it might be fake. But in an era when the truth is so easy to distort, what should you believe?
"I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social climate we live in, but... Why?"
It's religion. It teaches roughly 4 bn† people that sex is dirty, that nakedness is shameful, and that talking about it's acts and/or requisite body parts is taboo.
† According to Wikipedia 2.4 billion Christians, and 1.6 billion Muslims.
Then of course we get (big R) Religion, where humans use it as a means of power over other people. This is where we get the things we associate with religion today.
not to mention there seems to be a pattern across religions of the people in power sexually exploiting the powerless while simultaneously telling people they are wrong for having sex
If that was true, you should see significant differences between religions. And at the same time very little differences within religions.
That does not seem to hold. Looks like religions just tend to echo some sort of natural chastity. And that is hardly surprising given how recent things religions are and how old thins STDs are.
"Oh you have tingling feeling in your weewee, it's wrath of God!" and you just explained one thing away while giving more credibility to the god thing your trying to promote.
> If that was true, you should see significant differences between religions.
You do! I'm guessing (apologies if wrong) that your thinking modern mainstream religions like Christian / Islam / Judaism. Much of these are from the same roots and and naturally similar.
Look at religion over longer history in distinctly separate branches of the tree e.g Buddhism is more relaxed than afore mentioned. The Greeks, Romans and Norse (same tree) were very liberal. Shinto / Confucianism looks as sex as healthy. Among the plains indians sex could be part of a spiritual ceremony to pass power. Australian aboriginals used to share women.
And I'm not saying religion is the cause of these views. A better way to look at that would be to see how sexual views change as religion does. It does seem Christianity brought a lot of judgement around sex and other matters that were not there before during colonisation period. I dont know much about this so someone can likely add to this much better.
If that was true, you should see significant differences between religions. And at the same time very little differences within religions.
Not following you. The Decalogue exists in Judaism, Christianity and in Islam. The Decalogue, and marriage, are indeed extremely recent social constructs.
I'm not promoting religion - I despise any form of it. I merely posit religion as being the source of humanity's prudishness (something the rest of nature does not share).
"I merely posit religion as being the source of humanity's prudishness (something the rest of nature does not share)."
Nature as a whole may not, but there are species even more monogamous than we are out there. I've sort of played a game of "construct an even remotely sensible sexual strategy no species uses" and so far I've come up empty; everything you can think of, including the closest equivalent to "prudishness", is used out there.
On that note, the "missing link" for you is probably that sex and reproduction are inextricably linked for all non-humans, and for all humans up until very recently. Hangups about sex are not hangups about sex; to put it in quite atheistic terms, they are hangups about whose selfish genes get to win out over whose. Start looking at it that way and it makes a lot more sense than your current model, probably.
Our current reproductive strategies are currently in total chaos because of the extremely recent introduction of effective birth control and I see little reason to believe that we have found the best response to that in what is still effectively just one generation, nor that our current responses will be stable over the generations, because the shock is simply too recent in generational terms. (Not to mention all the near-in-generational-term shocks that may be yet to come, including but not limited to: Effective male-directed birth control, effective sex robots for males, technology to permit cloning without loss, technology to edit genes in eggs or sperm, technology to permit taking children to term out of a biological womb, and in the craziest case, technology to completely digitize people and make biology essentially irrelevant.) In particular, it does not seem particularly clear to me that the idea that "sex is 100% just sex and nobody should be ashamed about anything as long as it is consensual" is going to win out, because that crowd tends to use birth control of one form or another, and therefore, in the next several generations can be expected to be bred out. By some definitions of morality it may well be moral, but it won't be stable.
If that was true we wouldn't have politicians in UK stepping down for having once touched a woman's knee, or "scandals" about pornography found in a parliament PC.
Brits are less prude than Americans, but way more so than Europeans. Consider how topless sunbathing is ok on the mainland; is met with snickers, cat-calls and crude propositions in the UK; and downright illegal in the US.
A significant amount of people with power to negatively affect your career.
Relevant to the mention of bdsm and tech, Larry Garfield a fairly prominent person within the Drupal industry, got banished after his fetlife (or similar website maybe) account got exposed and spread around.
Ha! This is the number 1 reason why I left Facebook too. People just don't realize how much personal data is stored by FB with no way to delete it. You can only archive it.
My ex's new boyfriend shared a bunch of our FB messages with a group of friends because he was jealous.
No amount of security could have prevented that. It's a social hack.
But I've heard of many many cases where Facebook message history has been used to defame someone. They should have incognito channels like snapchat so things just go poof.
You can trust someone now but no guarantee for future trust.
The climate of judging people for private sexual morality is slowly changing in the United States… Same with marijuana smoking. In the 90s, affairs or past pot smoking were considered a big deal. Since then, we have elected Obama and Trump, who would not have passed moral snuff in the 80s.
I know plenty of people who despite really, really disliking Donald Trump were very put off by the public discussion of the "pee tape" stuff. They called it kink shaming and said that on its own it shouldn't matter if that is the kind of stuff the President is into. I tend to agree and I think a lot of other sensible people do too.
That’s a completely different situation. Assuming that such a tape exists, the issue isn’t that Trump has sexual kinks. The issue is that the President is subject to blackmail from a foreign power.
If such a tape existed for anyone else and was in the hands of a foreign government, that person would not be able to get the lowest level of security clearance in the US because the opportunity for blackmail places them at great risk.
In an ideal world Americans would be more like the French and not care about people’s personal consensual sex lives at all, in which case the tape would lose all its blackmailing power, but since the American public does care, the possibility of blackmail is real.
Interestingly, the "pee tape" as described doesn't really even depict the typical self humiliation-oriented urination kink. The allegation is that Trump hired five prostitutes to pee on a bed, not one that he was in or using but one that Obama had used years earlier.
It's unclear to me whether that even counts as a kink: if it's true, I'm not sure Trump was getting a sexual thrill out of it. My guess is that it's more of an unchecked mental illness, with Trump as Captain Ahab chasing after his great white whale.
None of the people I'm talking about misunderstand what the real point is. What they took issue with was the snickering about the content of the video and the fact that someone's sexual fetishes would be used as blackmail in the first place. Everyone understands the gravity of the President being blackmailed.
Well that's better- it at least shows the problem isn't misunderstanding the significance so much as it's letting a peripheral issue occupy attention at the expense of the more important issue.
But that's a problem because it's exactly this kind of conversational shift that makes derailment a good tactic for mitigating the impact of political scandals.
The Pee Tape is an issue because the Racist President had prostitutes pee on a bed that the Black President slept on. That is what the issue is with the Pee Tape. It is not about kink or anything else, just a racist doing racist stuff.
I think it's less about race and more about embarrassment. He seems to have deep-seated psychological issues that are being triggered by having been mocked at the correspondent's dinner. I'm not sure how he felt about Obama before, but he has become obsessed with fighting back and undoing everything Obama did just on principle -- regardless of whether he otherwise likes or agrees with the policy.
No. The dossier has neither been discredited nor substantiated. It was Republican opposition research (I don't think we know what candidate or group funded it) and then was later picked up by someone connected to Hillary Clinton after the Republican primary was over.
AFAIK, there's no more or less reason to believe it now than there was when it first came out.
The "pee tape" has been widely discredited. I'm not pro trump but using the word "racist" three times in two sentences and offering fake news as proof does not help your point, in fact it makes you look silly.
I'll break the news to you, the current President is a racist. He is not just a little casual racist, he is pretty damn racist. Let's not tap dance around the issue anymore and let's just call him what he is.
He is also dumb, but that has nothing to do with being a racist or our discussion.
Can you imagine if during Reagan's campaign someone leaked nude photos of his mother? Or Bush? Do you really think Evangelicals would have gone for that?
Muckraking is not a new phenomenon at all, even to this degree. The "nude photos" of Ann Dunham have been debunked as false. [1]
I speculate you are right, though, that less people these days would give a flip about whether one modeled for a underground fetish publication in the late 1960s, even if true.
Unfortunately, there are still a significant amount of people who would have an issue with this. But to me (and probably others), the claims made say nothing about Ann Dunham (even if they were true). But they say a heck of a lot of negative about the authors of what seems to be the primary source of this muckraking [2].
He openly admitted smoking marijuana in his youth. Bill Clinton weaseled out of it, famously claiming he "didn't inhale" and didn't like it. 16 years later, Obama didn't feel the need to fudge his history in that regard.
I presume that holds unless the only "signal" you get is your local priest and feudal lord? Especially since for most of human civilization the vast majority(95%+) couldn't read or write...
Presumably people have gossiped for about as long as they have been able to speak. However, the 'truth content' of the average communication seems very low.
Take something as simple a speed limit sign. That sign is not literally 'true', it simply refers to what the calculation for penalties will be based if you exceed the unstated actual speed limit. Reporting is at best a game of telephone, social media ends up so many hops from what actually happens to be nearly completely separated from reality.
Hmm. We do get more information, obviously, but I am not sure that means the ratio of true or correct information over false or incorrect information has changed. Formerly, there have been far more myths and lore around that are easier to falsify today, so this goes both ways.
I'm going to disagree with you there. I remember a time when everything written in print was taken as fact. You were treated like a schizophrenic if you suggested a newspaper printed something that wasn't true. Now people routinely fact check from multiple sources.
Sure there may have been more signal to noise ratio, but robber barons had much more influence. Like Bezos and WaPo but EVERY paper.
Truth and information has always been under the control of will. If someone has a "truth", there is a binary decision. The signals have always been under control of he who broadcasts them. The noise doesn't matter, apart from your ability to decide what the most likely truth is for yourself.
There's a huge difference between being ashamed of your sexual preferences and your sex life being nobody else's god damn business.
That being said, I find if laughable that the op considers himself "infosec" savvy but when it came to his sex life made such a glaringly obvious mistake. I'm not saying the woman who extorted him was in the right, but touting yourself as an infosec guy but opening yourself to the oldest trick in the blackmail book is pretty funny
If they slipped and someone caught them lying, it would become exponentially worse. Bad idea.
But they should be proud of their sexuality. Whether it's BDSM or hotwifing or whatever strange kink, who cares? It's the same as shaming someone for being gay.
I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social climate we live in, but... Why?
There are also broader implications: Whenever we discredit the truth, we're contributing to how easy it is to manufacture fake news. There's a certain piece of potentially fake news I've been dying to bring up. It had a big impact on me, and then I realized it might be fake. But in an era when the truth is so easy to distort, what should you believe?