It’s human nature to survive, but doing things which enable you to survive is not part of human nature?

So the first person who acquired wealth and/or power got no pleasure from it, because that’s not in their nature, but nonetheless kept it and passed it down to their children, who also derived no pleasure from it but also kept it and passed it down, until it had become ingrained tradition, and then people started to acquire the desire for the wealth and power they had had for generations?

If it’s not in human nature to hoard wealth and power, then how do systems arise which are predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible?

So then it’s not capitalism which causes in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?

So the ruling class, with all the wealth and power and ability to do whatever they wanted acted against their own natures to create a system which would create in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?

They do have all their needs met, according to Marxism

One has to wonder how capitalism arose, if the traits which gave rise to it aren’t part of human nature.

He wealthiest already have all their needs met. Still greedy.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-improve-battery-life-tips-myths-smartphones/

Here’s a fun fact: phone manufacturers know this. So what they call “100%” is not actually 100%. Your phone will not charge your battery to full. Battery charging is already designed around this.

You’re right that the best arguments against Marxism are the falsity and over-simplification of economic determinism, and the falsity and over-simplification of the labour theory of value.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32682221

I already said you didn’t read the article. You didn’t have to prove it.

I’m not sure if this kind of thing is just about enriching himself. Of course that’s a big part of it. But he also wants to be a great man of history. He wants to be the person who saves the world. He wants to be forever remembered as the greatest hero who ever lived.

He won’t, of course. Because he’s a clueless idiot. A clueless idiot who managed to fuck up his own PR so hard that he’s burnt away the reputation as a genius that he used to have.

But he really does want to be adored.

This seems like a) you didn’t read the article, and b) that you yourself are homophobic.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/06/30/russia-rising-toll-of-lgbt-extremism-designation

A lot hinges on the exact definition of “limited“. I could launch a limited attack on NATO today.

Yes, I’m sure giving him a gift of money for behaving how he currently is behaving will make him re-think his current behaviour and start behaving differently.

A journalist who is often a regular on a podcast I listen to has a theory on why Musk is seemingly obsessed with the UK - he’s up late (due to ketamine, although she doesn’t go as far as to say that explicitly), and people in the US are asleep so he’s got no tweets to react to. We’re awake here in the UK, though.

If you’re a porn producer in the US and the UK government says “don’t show choking in your videos any more and re-edit the past 15 years of videos”, what are you going to do? What’s in it for you to comply?

And what is the government actually going to do? Is it going to go through every single porn video on the internet to see whether or not it’s acceptable? There’s no way they have the resources for that. So then there are basically three options. 1) allow people to browse porn and probably unknowingly watch something which is now illegal, 2) do a blanket ban of studios which have choking videos - which is basically all of them, or 3) only institute a ban for the most extreme studios, which is then defeating the supposed purpose of this bill - to combat the mainstreaming of choking in porn.

I suppose option 4 is to require porn sites to label everything accurately and filter out all porn which contains choking from UK urls. But even that feels like a stretch in terms of practicality. It’s one thing to say to sites “you need to use an age-verification system which we deem acceptable or risk a fine” and something quite different to say “you need to manually review the millions of videos on your site under new criteria and implement strict new filtering based on geolocation”. If they tried this then the end result would probably be porn sites just doing an Imgur and blocking the UK entirely. Which, like the current age verification system on porn sites, would just see people using VPNs.

As legislation goes it doesn’t seem very well-thought-through. I suppose that’s what the Houses of Commons & Lords are for, but it’s far from a foolproof system.

I don’t disagree that it’s troubling how mainstream choking is in modern porn. It’s definitely been a huge shift. There’s nothing against it as a fetish, but it being a fetish with potential harmful consequences suggests that it should be in the same category as BDSM - something which can be problematic unless it’s done as an exercise in trust between partners with full informed consent.

And there have been plenty of seemingly not agenda-led studies which suggest that teen boys and girls are both picking up a lot of what they consider to be “normal” about sex from porn.

And not even talking to each other about it. IIRC, there was one such study which had both boys and girls engaging in a particular behaviour (I forget exactly which, maybe even choking), and neither party actively enjoyed the behaviour, they were just doing it because they thought that’s what you do and therefore what their partner wanted.

But is the solution to ban porn which features choking? Firstly, I don’t see how this could in any way be effective. How would you possibly enforce it? Are police really going to raid people’s homes based on suspicion that they’ve got a nowadays-vanilla porn video on their harddrive? The police literally don’t have enough resources to investigate and prosecute everybody creating and sharing child porn. And now they’re supposed to go after everybody who visits PornHub?

Secondly, we’re basically talking about a de-facto porn ban because, as the consultation itself noted, that describes pretty much all porn made in the last 10-15 years.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I mean, talking about the difference bewteen porn and sex is something that should be part of sex education at school. But I kind of assume it already is? It would be weird if it weren’t in 2025.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to engage with creators themselves? I know that several porn companies used to put disclaimers before their videos saying that there’s a difference between porn sex and real sex and talking about consent. Several BDSM porn producers also have pre and post-shoot interviews with the performers and make sure they talk on camera about safe words & gestures and consent.

But then that’s something that’s probably not going to be terribly effective in any case and which would require absolutely everybody to get on board, which would have been basically impossible back when it was only really studios producing content, and 100% impossible now that OnlyFans etc are the way that most performers make and distribute porn.

I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer, TBH, but I’m pretty sure that “ban all the porn” isn’t the correct solution.