6 ms·

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 i

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?

code_duck 9y ago
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.
- dopamean 9y ago
  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.
  - addicted 9y ago
    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.
    - dopamean 9y ago
      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.
      - glenstein 9y ago
        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.
    - scarmig 9y ago
      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.
      - hank_pank 9y ago
        I'm really sorry, but... Captain Trump's risking blackmail by chasing The Great Black Male? I don't think I share your views, nor do I know if this pee stuff was real and not just a meme, but you had me doubled over in laughter. I hope that was your intention, thank you either way.
      - loopdoend 9y ago
        Surely they must replace the mattress between presidencies, right?
  - mullen 9y ago
    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.
    - rconti 9y ago
      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.
      - refurb 9y ago
        Wasn't the bed-peeing incident completely made up? Some guy was paid to create a Russian dossier which was later discredited.
        rconti 9y ago
        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.
    - bfuller 9y ago
      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.
      - mullen 9y ago
        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.
  - whathaschanged 9y ago
    All the people I know called it what it actually is, projection by angry liberals who cannot fathom somebody winning the presidency with thoughts different than their own, so they need to fabricate outlandish claims.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    I was thinking as much of his multiple divorces, affairs, and crude statements on record.
  - fullshark 9y ago
    The pee tape is an issue if it could be used for blackmail.
- pfftzaftig 9y ago
  Huh? Have you been following the news recently. I thought your comment was going to go another way.
- MereInterest 9y ago
  I'm curious what you consider to be Obama's moral failings, to say that he would not have passed in the 80s.
  - kolp 9y ago
    He admitted to using grass and coke in his youth. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, had to concoct a story about smoking grass but not inhaling.
  - bfuller 9y ago
    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?
    - soundwave106 9y ago
      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]. [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11135/are-these-nude-photos-of-barack-obamas-mother https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11135/are-these... (link warning, possibly NSFW) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_from_My_Real_Father https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_from_My_Real_Father
      - bfuller 9y ago
        You are correct, the photos have been debunked. I should have clarified that. I was making a statement based on how many people believe they are real.
  - code_duck 9y ago
fnl 9y ago
> But in an era when the truth is so easy to distort, what should you believe? What makes you think that in some time before it was easier to find the truth?
- koolba 9y ago
  Prior to the internet and social media there was less noise, hence a higher signal to noise ratio.
  - RepressedEmu 9y ago
    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...
    - JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
      I'm not sure we are talking about the middle ages here.
    - Retric 9y ago
      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.
  - creep 9y ago
    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.
  - 9y ago
Trundle 9y ago
>who cares? 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.
- nojvek 9y ago
  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.
Spearchucker 9y ago
"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.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Don’t just single out Christians and Muslims. Hindus have arranged marriages, for example. I see that as yet another form of sexual repression.
- vlehto 9y ago
  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.
  - Gustomaximus 9y ago
    > 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.
bfuller 9y ago
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

code_duck 9y ago

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.

dopamean 9y ago
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.
- addicted 9y ago
  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.
  - dopamean 9y ago
    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.
    - glenstein 9y ago
      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.
  - scarmig 9y ago
    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.
    - hank_pank 9y ago
      I'm really sorry, but... Captain Trump's risking blackmail by chasing The Great Black Male? I don't think I share your views, nor do I know if this pee stuff was real and not just a meme, but you had me doubled over in laughter. I hope that was your intention, thank you either way.
    - loopdoend 9y ago
      Surely they must replace the mattress between presidencies, right?
- mullen 9y ago
  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.
  - rconti 9y ago
    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.
    - refurb 9y ago
      Wasn't the bed-peeing incident completely made up? Some guy was paid to create a Russian dossier which was later discredited.
      - rconti 9y ago
        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.
  - bfuller 9y ago
    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.
    - mullen 9y ago
      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.
- whathaschanged 9y ago
  All the people I know called it what it actually is, projection by angry liberals who cannot fathom somebody winning the presidency with thoughts different than their own, so they need to fabricate outlandish claims.
- code_duck 9y ago
  I was thinking as much of his multiple divorces, affairs, and crude statements on record.
- fullshark 9y ago
  The pee tape is an issue if it could be used for blackmail.
pfftzaftig 9y ago
Huh? Have you been following the news recently. I thought your comment was going to go another way.
MereInterest 9y ago
I'm curious what you consider to be Obama's moral failings, to say that he would not have passed in the 80s.
- kolp 9y ago
  He admitted to using grass and coke in his youth. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, had to concoct a story about smoking grass but not inhaling.
- bfuller 9y ago
  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?
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    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]. [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11135/are-these-nude-photos-of-barack-obamas-mother https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11135/are-these... (link warning, possibly NSFW) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_from_My_Real_Father https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_from_My_Real_Father
    - bfuller 9y ago
      You are correct, the photos have been debunked. I should have clarified that. I was making a statement based on how many people believe they are real.
- code_duck 9y ago

fnl 9y ago

> But in an era when the truth is so easy to distort, what should you believe? What makes you think that in some time before it was easier to find the truth?

koolba 9y ago
Prior to the internet and social media there was less noise, hence a higher signal to noise ratio.
- RepressedEmu 9y ago
  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...
  - JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
    I'm not sure we are talking about the middle ages here.
  - Retric 9y ago
    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.
- creep 9y ago
  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.
- 9y ago

Trundle 9y ago

>who cares? 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.

nojvek 9y ago
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.

Spearchucker 9y ago

"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.

muninn_ 9y ago
Don’t just single out Christians and Muslims. Hindus have arranged marriages, for example. I see that as yet another form of sexual repression.
vlehto 9y ago
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.
- Gustomaximus 9y ago
  > 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.

bfuller 9y ago

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