By their own admission, Prostasia is not merely a child protection org. They fight "the abuse of human rights in the name of children," "bigotry" & "unchecked government surveillance." They don't mean bigotry against or surveillance of children.
All feelings re: NB, puritan panics, uncritical disgust reactions, etc, aside, IMO it's clear that one of their main goals is advocacy for the rights of pedophiles, even if just non-offending ones, & not just as a way to make kids safer. They should just be explicit about this.
They might even have more success that way than by pretending the tortured "not ALL child abusers" takes or pro-lolicon & child sex doll advocacy are really part of an evidence-based approach to keeping kids safe.
You can see the issue in this pro-doll piece. It argues that banning dolls = bad bc 1) there's no evidence linking them to real sex crime, 2) not all of them are used sexually, 3) those that are aren't seen as proxies for kids, prostasia.org/blog/dolls-pre…
4) slippery slope to banning all sex dolls, 5) it violates privacy, 6) dolls might help pedos not offend against kids, but there's no data about this. In other words, 90% of the article is about protecting doll fetishists' & pedos' rights. Only the last point is about kids.
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The more I read of Prostasia, the more like a boutique pedophile advocacy org it seems, even if for non-offending pedophiles (though even that seems less & less clear), & the more the stuff about protecting kids seems like an afterthought or a convenient framing for other goals.
Why is an org that brands itself as primarily about child protection hosting "sexual liberation panels" about why "fantasies aren't abuse?" Why does the workshop promo specifically reference fetishes involving baby roleplay with stuffed animals & pacifiers?
Not only did the prosecutor make the false claim that 13 year old Adam Toledo had a gun, which they are now trying to downplay, the video, which is genuinely horrific (be warned) makes it clear he had his hands up when they shot him.
I'm already regretting watching the video. Don't really have the stomach to watch a 13 year old gunned down. Also not sure if sharing it is right or not, except that it clearly shows the cops murdered him, contra whatever they say.
Article on the gun. Specifically, the spokesperson for Cook County State’s Attorney now says the County Assistant State’s Attorney, who claimed that "he has a gun in his right hand," had "failed to fully inform himself before speaking in court."
Revisiting this several years on. I still think Boyer and Atran are largely correct about how to understand religion. The divide between "elite" and "popular" religion, in particular seems more and more salient to me all the time.
Roughly, elite religion, which researchers previously considered representative out of their own bias, is the product of sociological & psychological outliers, & gains broader social purchase primarily through coercion, but quickly loses its hold without that. It's where most of
the most salient differences bw religions are at their most pronounced. Popular religion, by contrast, seems more deeply similar everywhere, and includes a lot of beliefs/practices previously dismissed by researchers as not representative of their respective religions, but which
One of the most stunning exchanges I've ever seen on here, branching out into multiple, simultaneous threads, quote tweets, etc. Can't capture it all, but here are some of the main branches. Politics twitter has nothing on engineering twitter. If you've got a few min, be amazed.
Some scans of harder-to-find Japanese art book images to dispel feverish and monotonous election vibes. Starting off with some Amano.
Some of the more explicitly Klimt-y Amano
Some "Oriental" Amano. The 3rd image may be a little more popular, since it's his version of the heroine Ilian from Moorcock's fantasy novels, & was used as cover art for a Japanese translation of Count Brass.
If I'm getting this right, a White woman who started a failed MeToo org for people in STEM only to be accused of racist harassment herself was exposed as having created an account where she pretended to be a nonexistent queer Native American professor at Arizona State University.
And she was exposed after trying to ditch the account by claiming the prof died of COVID and doing this bizarre eulogy thread to her.