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Philosophy, Economics and Justice / Re: do you believe in militant libertarianism?
« on: January 28, 2013, 11:14 am »Quote
Yeah but that's not what we were talking about though. We were talking about the distribution of premium content and that would require my model. I'm sure you could probably find some dumb tools who would buy child porn you lifted off a hidden service. But that doesn't make what you sold them premium content because premium content wouldn't be available for free on a hidden service. You might find content that AT ONE TIME was considered premium content when it first came out but due to the passage of time and antiquated technologies would no longer be considered premium.
Also the typical distributor of premium content would not be like what you described because charging for content that can be copied for free is not a sustainable business model. Just like you're not going to find many people trying to sell repackaged free content as premium content today. It happens, but only by fly-by-night small timers whose extremely low profit ceiling is dependent entirely on having enough unwitting noob consumers to exploit. All the tools and techniques for maximizing profits for a conventional business; establishing brand loyalty and return customers, would be unavailable to you since what's the point? They're not going to stick around once they see the shit you sold them on a hidden service and as word of your charging for freely available content affects your rep.; your business model becomes broken.
That is what the last big commercial distributors did though, the ones I was talking about earlier. I am pretty sure they didn't produce anything at all, all they did was collect a lot from freely available sources and then put it behind a pay wall. The thing is that is how most commercial CP distribution has been since the Eastern European production studios were shut down. The model I discussed was the most recent model that was seen happening prior to commercial CP's complete eradication from the internet. The model you are worried about did happen as well with LS studio though, for example. There have only been two big child porn production studios that have operated that come to my mind anyway, BD and LS. And they did have a big network of distributors and sites and such. But there have been even more distribution sites that simply collected freely available CP and sold it behind a pay wall to idiots who didn't realize they could hop on Tor and get the same exact shit. I agree with you that studios like LS and BD, and the distributors who pay them to continue production, should be treated as criminal. Where I disagree is on the distributors who are not actually paying producers to produce more CP.
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My business model is how the big boys would do it. Building brand loyalty by providing freshly updated premium content unavailable elsewhere that would appeal to enthusiasts and high rollers alike giving you the greatest opportunities to monetize your traffic and thereby maximize profits. Growing a satisfied customer base that lets you not just charge them once, but who are happy to have you automatically charge their card every month. They're always coming back for more because what you give them what they can't find elsewhere.
Sure the model you are discussing has been seen in practice regarding CP, see LS and BD studios and their distribution networks. In other cases it has been the model I discuss, including the last significant commercial CP distribution group to go down (and I mean last as in most recent as well as last as in there were not others when they went down). I recall reading about a payment processor in the US who got fucked for handling credit card transactions for CP as well, I think they were called Landslide. I don't know if they were connected to LS studios or not (pretty much 99.99% of what I know about CP is from reading .pdfs ranging from case studies on groups to offender typologies to even medical / scientific literature....I have not been in the CP community to see these things first hand , and it has been some years since I did an in depth study on the CP world , so my memory is not quite exact regarding these things but from what I can recall from studying). They did not pay producers anything, rather they just processed credit card information for websites (including CP sites) and took their cut. Another model for commercial CP is advertisement based, where the CP is freely available but on sites with advertisements for other adult content. This is most prevalent with jailbait pornography distribution though, and it is often well mixed in with lots of legal pornography. So I do see that there are many models of commercializing CP distribution, and I never denied that the model you claim is real. I also never claimed that it should be legal for distributors to knowingly fund producers to molest children, or that it should be legal for consumers of CP to pay producers to molest their children.
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And this is where you either keep fundamentally misunderstanding me or just fundamentally misunderstand human nature. You can't force people to know the truth, even if mandated by law. What you can do is provide the truth and allow people to come to their own decisions. Isn't that what you're advocating, that people should be free to decide what they want to believe?
Yes I do believe that people should be free to decide what they want to believe.
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I believe that everyone has a right to learn the truth so they can make an informed decision on what they want to believe. Because when you deprive someone of even the awareness of truth, an informed decision can't be made; whether that be to reject or accept the truth. There is no exercise of free will. How can you call that the freedom to decide for themselves when the person isn't even aware there's a question? So yes, I believe force should be used if necessary to ensure everyone is aware of the truth so they can decide for themselves whether to reject or accept it because fundamental to freedom is having that choice.
Meanwhile, in your world it's more important that their delusional parents have the right to freely brainwash their kids than for the kids to have the right to be aware of the truth enough to make their own decisions. This is why I don't believe you believe your own rhetoric that everyone has a right to freedom. You keep saying how you value freedom before all else, yet you would use force to guarantee parents the right to keep their kids powerless, deluded, and enslaved. How hypocritical is that? I consider such treatment to be abuse and has nothing to do with "freedom".
Really it is hard to argue with you because on an emotional level I agree with you. I think it is horrible for parents to keep their children from true knowledge and education. However, I still do not think I have any right to force others to teach their children my belief system, any more than I think they have the right to force me to teach my children their belief system. I imagine that over time the extremely religious people will become extinct actually, information tends to spread even to the most repressed of places. Additionally, people who are so religious as to desire only to indoctrinate their children with religious Dogma will probably eventually fall so far behind the rest of humanity that they will go extinct in the modern world (ie: they pray for healing, and die, and we get medicine, and live. Or they use outdated antibiotics because they don't believe that bacteria could have evolved. Or they try and start a holy war and get wiped out by militant libertarians for initiating force against others). I do think that what you want is the ideal thing, for everyone to have access to the truth from an early age. However I do not always think that the ideal thing is the right thing, and this is one of those cases.
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I'm in absolute agreement with you here. But freedom depends on having a "choice", and in order for someone to be able to "choose" one must be aware of a choice to begin with. By depriving these kids this awareness you are depriving them of the ability to choose, and therefore depriving them ultimately of freedom.
And why would you do something so inhumane and cruel that is of no benefit to society or our species? Why would you use force to deprive innocents of their freedom of choice? Because you think it's more important to protect a parent's right to enslave their children. You don't seem to understand that depriving a parent of their ability to do this is not depriving them of their "freedom" because freedom should not include the freedom to enslave others.
I am not depriving them of anything, rather their parents are. I am merely stating that I do not think it is my right to dictate to parents the values that they should instill into their children. I would use force to protect the freedom of a parent to choose the values they instill in their children, and I would use force to ensure that the children of these parents can choose a different path than their parents have, if they so choose.
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Again you fundamentally misunderstand me because I'm in absolute agreement with you here. But I also believe the parent DOES NOT have the right to enslave their kids by depriving them of exposure to science and facts whereas you do. The real world outcome is the mental enslavement of innocents. Not freedom.
I do not believe that the parent has the right to deprive their children of exposure to science or facts, I merely believe that I do not have the right to force t
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I believe that parents have a right to teach their children whatever they please, and although it is unfortunate that some people will choose to teach their children only religious dogma, I do not think that I have any right to force them to stop doing this.hem expose their children to science or facts. If the children voluntarily attempt to obtain science and facts from a source who voluntarily desires to teach them science and facts, I do not believe that I or the childs parents can prevent them from doing this. But I do not believe that I can force the parents to teach their children science or facts, or to have their children taught science or facts.
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Just because it could appear to someone else that scientific method is flawed doesn't make their understanding any less wrong. And it certainly doesn't mean we as a society should start respecting invalid viewpoints just because someone has one. It's clear you don't understand that science is not a "belief system" by the way you keep referring to it like one. Its knowledge is amassed by observations and analysis of the physical world we live in. Even the interpretation and analysis of physical data have to be grounded in scientific method to be credible. It must be based in the empirical evidence and the reasoning must be sound. There is nothing "subjective" about it.
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Yeah because the devil is nothing more than an idea personified in numerous works of religious fiction. It exists in the realm of mythology and imagination. Dinosaur bones exist in our world of concrete fact. That you would even equivocate and say you can't know for sure the devil didn't plant them even though insofar as being able to know the difference between fantasy and physical reality, YES YOU CAN. This is why I suspect you are a religious wingnut and that you might not even be aware of it. That you secretly yearn to accept religion and find god but are just too embarrassed to admit it right now. Maybe all that religious schooling unhealthily influenced you in this way.
I am not so certain as to say that I can disprove the existence of God or the Devil. I believe that God and/or the Devil are inherently unfalsifiable (which also inherently disconnects them from being worthy of scientific study, at least hard sciences, sociologically religion can be studied of course). I do not think that I can prove that I am not in the matrix either. I certainly do not see the probability that God or the flying spaghetti monster or the invisible pink unicorn exist to be high enough for me to start basing any of the actions in my life on their presumed existence. That said I also recognize that I simply cannot disprove things that are impossible to falsify. If there is an a powerful supernatural being, he could easily plant dinosaur bones to try and test peoples faith. I certainly do not think there is such a powerful supernatural being, and just as strongly I think that there are indeed dinosaur bones. I would not go as far as to say that I am a subjectivist, thinking that I cannot know anything, but I would say that I believe I cannot know anything with absolute certainty. Knowing anything with absolute certainty would require omnipotence/omnipresence , and even in such cases I am not convinced that absolute certainty can be obtained (actually, if God were real, which I highly doubt is the case, I find it hard to imagine that he could actually be certain of his omnipotence or omnipresence).
Thus I do see science as a belief system of a sort. I see it as the belief system that has the most evidence backing it, and that has been the most useful thing to humans. Actually I rather hate organized religion myself, I think that organized religion has been responsible for an enormous amount of the suffering in the world, and indeed I think that if it were not for organized religion we would be thousands of years more advanced than we currently are, and live in a far more libertarian world at that. So I am no fan of religion, but from a purely philosophical point of view I have trouble to claim that I know anything with absolute certainty, and from a scientific point of view I do not even bother with unfalsifiable claims, and I recognize the existence of God as being such a claim. As it is unfalsifiable I cannot claim to know that it is not true, but I can say that I very strongly believe it to be true that God does not exist.
And despite having received some education at private religious schools, due to the fact that my family thought it would provide me with a higher quality education than public schools, my immediate family consists largely of atheists and scientists. I have known for my entire life that I should give about as much credit to religion as I should give to Santa.