Aella's One-Sided Scissor
"wise indeed was the lawgiver"
Aella1 has 236k followers on Twitter, and 122k subscribers on Substack. Her Twitter account is currently locked due to emotional duress.2
As far as I can tell, her most recent viral tweet was this:
Aella’s Tweet exposes a divide between feminists who believe women have the right to be tied up in a box with 2,000 men, and feminists who believe that such a desire is internalized patriarchy which must be exorcized.
This 2,000 men challenge sounds like a Mr. Beast video (gone sexual). It has no cultural, intellectual, or spiritual value. But lashing out at such inanities is like punching at the waves in the ocean. We should focus on problems with involuntary costs, like bombings and starvation, not voluntary costs, like people hurting themselves.
There are bigger problems to worry about, like the mass poisoning of billions of people; the decline of American diplomacy; and the cognitive decline of the human species.
I do not believe in saving people from themselves. This petting zoo is a ploy to garner attention and engagement — if you lash out at it, you’re feeding the beast!
Why is Aella targeted?
Aella is a proxy for the libertarian/centrist Bay Area scene. According to Scott Alexander, “Aella ends up involved in everything interesting in the Bay Area, and I have long since stopped being surprised by this.” Antisemites and conservatives hate these “Thielites” and attack Aella as representative of this larger force.
There is a huge demand on the conspiracy-minded right-wing for sex scandals, even if those scandals have no basis. For example, both Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have supported the notion that Macron is married to his own father.
When a man opines about bestiality, it is funny.3 When a woman does it, it is disgusting. Female sexual perversion produces a higher disgust reaction among conservatives than male sexual perversion.
Aella is a proxy for porn, and there is a global movement to ban porn, even in France.
The job of the dissident right is to widen the Overton window by portraying its opponents as extreme. Nazis are obsessed with Aella because she helps justify their beliefs and radicalize others. The far-right needs to draw attention to degeneracy in order to grow.
Aella has played into this dynamic for her own benefit: “The through line in every Aella stunt is controversy, envelope-pushing, and rage bait. She brags about not taking showers. She tries to act repulsive while also playing the smol bean. She is deliberately divisive, courting outrage and sympathy in turn. She puts on this whole enormous discourse-driving act to funnel people into her fan base and ultimately into her appointment book.”
The mutual dance between Aella and her haters reminds me of Richard Hanania’s trolling on Twitter and the resulting Hanania Derangement Syndrome. Whereas Hanania has a unique and supernatural ability to be unfazed by the attacks of the mob, Aella is a human being who needs a break from the unrelenting hatred she receives.
Is Aella a pedophile?
The biggest critique of Aella I have seen is the allegation that she supports pedophilia.
I tried to find evidence for this claim, and the most “damning” Tweet I found was three words, “now do pedophilia.” A three word tweet is hard to decipher, but given the context, this sounds either like an argument against Nicholas, or a joke, rather than an endorsement.
In the first case, “the arguments you make are fallacious, because they could be equally applied to pedophilia, meaning they must be wrong.”
In the second case, “wow Nicholas you are so edgy, what’s next, a defense of pedophilia?”
I don’t think it’s a good faith interpretation to say that Aella was calling for the legalization or normalization of pedophilia. On the contrary, Aella argues in favor of the social shaming of pedophiles:
“I do think a lot of good is done by the immense social shame we heap upon offending pedophiles, and actually does deter a lot of assault.”
The other claim I see repeated in the attacks on Aella is that she groomed her sister into sex work at the pristine and innocent age of 17. Not to go full Peter Schiff on you, but that’s not pedophilia.
It is indeed disturbing to think that 17 year old girls have impure thoughts — I shudder to think — but every sex worker who started at age 18 was having thoughts and conversations about that decision at age 17.
In general, I am opposed to the infantilization of 17 year olds and depriving them of their agency. 7% of college students are under the age of 18, and they are exposed to the college culture, which includes sex, alcohol, and drug use. I am in favor of a pro-risk culture which pushes young people to develop their agency rather than sheltering them into prolonged adolescence. A pro-risk culture is inherently risky, meaning that some people end up being hurt, but I would rather live in an adventurous and risky culture than a coddling and suffocating culture.
Most sisters I know do not have a hypnotic relationship, where one does everything the other one tells her to do.4 If you want to blame an authority figure for Aella and her sister going into porn, blame the parents.
I suspect it is much more likely that Aella and her sister are both highly predisposed to promiscuity as a result of shared parental environment and genetics. Even if Aella was banned from having conversations with her sister prior to 18, there is a high likelihood that her sister would have become promiscuous anyway, even if she wasn’t getting paid for it.
If 17 is too young to be having that conversation, then raise the age of sex work to 19. Boom, problem solved, conversation eliminated. Setting the age of sex work at 18 and expecting people not to talk about it at 17 is like expecting 15 year olds to not go to driver’s ed.
If you think sex work is evil and disgusting, fine, that is a consistent position: ban it at all ages. But pointing out that her sister was only 17 and equivocating that to pedophilia is the worst form of pharisaical hysteria: sin by technicality.
Is this really about saving the kids?
I don’t take this sort of thing seriously, because most of the preventable sexual harm being done to children today is chemical and clinical, not physical or predatory. All of the rage and hatred directed toward Aella is wasted because her words and actions cannot be tied to any harm to children. On the other hand, there are plenty of very real issues causing sexual harm to children which go completely ignored by this conservative crowd.
The Aella-haters claim that she is destigmatizing pedophilia by writing thought experiments about it (related to AI), and this destigmatization will eventually lead to the lowering of the age of consent, or something. This is a very theoretical and hypothetical accusation of harm; it’s not a reasonable assessment of Aella’s intentions; and it fails to recognize that society is moving in the opposite direction of increasing stigmatization of age gaps.
There will always exist some marginal number of stalkers who kidnap, rape, and dissect their victims. These people are not dissuaded by stigmatization or the fear of getting caught. There are marginal returns to adding more stigma, paranoia, suspicion, or policing to a crime which is already universally condemned and feared.
No matter how many effigies of (purported, rumored) pedophiles we burn at the stake, we will never create a society in which it is impossible for predators to harm children. If the goal is to prevent as much harm as possible with the limited resources available, then the focus should be on stigmatizing forms of harm which are currently tolerated.
Millions of children are obese, and obesity wreaks havoc on the hormonal system and causes lifelong sexual dysfunction. Millions of children are on Ritalin (methylphenidate), and Ritalin messes with sex hormones:
In some patients, particularly those with psychiatric comorbidities, methylphenidate [Ritalin] was associated with decreased libido and ejaculation disorders. In other cases, especially in individuals with preexisting dysfunctions or on low doses, it appeared to enhance sexual arousal and performance.
Why are we giving 3.3 million children (mostly boys) sex drugs for the crime of not wanting to sit still in a classroom setting? When you include “stimulants, nonstimulants (eg, guanfacine, clonidine, atomoxetine), antidepressants, and antipsychotics” the total number of children on sex-drugs comes out to 10%.
Over the last 20 years, psychotropic prescriptions for children have more than doubled in the UK.5 Could this be related to the rise in sexual dysfunction over the last 20 years? Could it be related to the massive increase in LGBTQ identity?
The abuse of children is bad because it causes lifelong harm. If the desire is to reduce lifelong harm (rather than mere moral performance), the focus should be on stigmatizing bad things we are currently allowing (like obesity and childhood over-prescription) rather than doubling down on things which are already maximally stigmatized (like pedophilia).
In the 1990s, Bill Maher could go on TV and joke about teachers having sex with their students. Rob Lowe was filmed having sex with a 16 year old at the age of 24, and apologized and continued his career. Now we have daily videos coming out of “pedo-hunters” catfishing guys in wheelchairs.
Did the relatively relaxed sexual attitudes of the 1990s lead to rape and grooming? Did Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator save the lives of millions of children? Now that we have more sexual paranoia about age gaps than ever before, has this solved the problem and protected children? If not, then claiming that Aella is leading a rape campaign on the basis of her edgy takes is misplaced hysteria.
The MAGA attitude toward pedophilia is suspiciously close to the woke attitude toward rape: they care more about the performative crucifixion of their enemies than helping the people they claim to protect. Just as attacking men for wearing a shirt with sexy women isn’t going to stop the crime of rape, attacking Aella isn’t going to protect children. It’s medieval-mob scapegoating behavior.
I would also compare the conservative histrionics over pedophilia to the conservative hysteria over promiscuity. Teenagers and college students are having less sex. If this is the case, why the moral panic over Aella? It is a culture of sexual fear and panic which is eroding male (and female) sexual confidence. It’s a multi-headed hydra which does more harm than good.
For the record, I am not persuaded by Aella’s prescription to “flood the market with AI generated, freely accessible stuff [child porn] that’s created with zero harm to kids.” But her argument, right or wrong, isn’t a defense of pedophilia; it’s an argument in favor of reducing pedophilia.6
No matter how many hours we devote to litigating the Epstein files, scrutinizing the sex lives of powerful men or edgy sex workers is unlikely to result in any sort of statistical improvement in the life of the average American child. Cracking down hard on obesity and medicalization would be much more productive. The abuse of a decades-old Epstein victim is a tragedy, while the daily victimization of millions of children by parental choice (obesity and medicalization) is treated as a mere statistic.
One-sided Scissors
A scissor statement induces either extreme agreement or extreme disagreement, with little in-between. For example:
Let’s say I went to the LA Riots and said “Trump should be in jail” on a loudspeaker. This would get applause from my fellow rioters, but when replayed on Fox News, would produce a negative response.
Or, let’s say I went on Fox News and said, “Send in the Marines.” This would get applause from the Fox audience, but be displeasing to the rioters.
Each of these statements would be “scissor statements,” because they produce polarized reactions.
But let’s say that I did something which produced an incredibly positive response with no negative response. For example, let’s say I posted a video of an extremely cute puppy. In that case, it would be a “one-sided scissor.”
One-sided positive scissors are everywhere. There are social media accounts which get billions of views over videos of children biting their brother’s fingers and other inanities. These get a positive response, and they make money in ad revenue.
But there are two parts to a scissor statement: the extreme positive and the extreme negative.
Aella’s tweets are often one-sided negative scissors. They produce an extreme negative response without much positive response. When I see an Aella tweet, my response isn’t to attack it, or defend it, but to ignore it. Without knowing Aella personally, my general rule of thumb is if a sex worker is triggering conservatives on the internet, she is doing so to farm engagement for attention and financial gain. In Aella’s case, maybe she lacks all the classical cynicism of the traditional sex worker and says things genuinely without being prepared for the predictable backlash.
Regarding the fetish in question (2,000 men vs one woman), there is nothing less sexy to me than sheer quantity. That said, I would rather hang out with a sex worker who has sex with thousands of men than hang out with the average Walmart shopper. I don’t think Aella is stinky or riddled with STDs, and I don’t have a problem with her being promiscuous. I don’t have any problem with her at all. Sex work isn’t any more immoral or dirty than being a plumber, lawyer, or an insurance salesperson. She doesn’t deserve any special hatred or ridicule.
I am not “ashamed to publicly support Aella”: stop hating this woman. But even if I renamed this blog to DeepAellaDefense and began emailing my subscribers hourly rants about how we should leave Aella alone!, I don’t think my singular obsession with defending her would make her feel much better7 or negate the swarm of trolls that haunt her.
Double Standards
The reason why Nicholas Decker is based for having sex with women is because having sex with women requires effort and competence. Men are praised for having sex with women because the ratio of desire to actualization in male sexuality is somewhere between 0 and 0.01. That is, if a man approaches 100 women, his chance of having sex with each of them is < 0.01, and for some men, it is 0.
For women, the lower bound of the distribution does extend to 0 (some women are femcel burn-victims and so on) but the upper bound of the distribution approaches 0.5. There are some women who could cold-approach 100 men and get laid 50 times. Dating apps exacerbate this gender difference, such that a man might need to swipe hundreds of times and have long conversations for several hours before scoring a date, while the median woman can probably find a sexual partner within 30 minutes.8
Sex for women is not a status signal, while sex for men is. I am sure Aella has heard this argument before, so she probably understands why people think men having sex are cooler than women having sex. But this understanding doesn’t change her emotional response, which is feeling that this reality is sexist and unfair.
The irony of calling this double standard “sexist” is that Aella is correct: it is harder to have sex for men than for women, and that is, in fact, sexist. But it’s not borne out of anti-female sexism, but anti-male sexism! The reason why it’s harder for men to have sex than for women to have sex is because women discriminate against partners more than men discriminate against partners.9
If women had sex with men as easily and freely as men have sex with women, then no one would be calling Nicholas “based” for having an orgy. But if you want to live in a society free of sexual discrimination, you need to change women’s attitude toward men, not men’s attitude toward women.
Personally, I want more anti-male sexism (feminism) because I am an anti-natalist who wants to engineer a population collapse. I believe women should be more discriminatory against men and die childless. I do not want to engineer the kind of “free love” society Aella describes, where neither men nor women discriminate, and having sex is as easy as drinking from a glass of water. This sounds incredibly dysgenic and also unsexy. Sexual power comes from hunting, chasing, and pursuing. If women lack discrimination, then it’s like being given the cheat codes to the video game and sexuality loses its power and meaning.
If this is an unfair characterization of Aella’s ideal society — that men and women should exercise equal rates of sexual discrimination — then that exposes an inconsistency in her thinking. Men who have sex with women will remain chads until such time as women lower their standards.10
The most sexual society I can imagine is one in which women secretly and ritualistically kidnap weak men with small penises by tying them to poles, humiliating them, and whipping them. When Chad arrives, he begins chasing the women through the woods.
Sex as an idea is interesting:
the idea of sex, wow!
Sex delivered in flow-chart form is boring.
Aella’s ideology is the least sexual thing I can imagine. I don’t say this out of a “lack of bravery” to oppose the mob attacking her. Aella isn’t disgusting to me; she’s methodically and pedantically rational.
Ideally, there would be a counter-mob, a pro-Aella mob, which would duke it out with the anti-Aella mob to defend her honor and so on. But methodical, pedantic rationality is not a force which generates such mobs.
The Problem of Platforms
The response to Aella is platform dependent. On Substack, Aella’s substantive essays get a positive response. In her most recent article, I found exactly one negative comment out of 77:
Presumably, if comments are representative of a like/dislike ratio, Aella’s post would have 98% likes and 2% dislikes. Aella has a large self-selected audience on Substack who enjoy her long-form content.11
Let’s brainstorm a few options for how to fix Twitter:
Smart people abandon Twitter and sequester themselves on Substack, allowing the filthy rabble to post fight videos and racial slurs all day;
Humans are taught to be kind;
Social media is limited in some way.
The first option is the default, and is already happening.
For the second option, there are diminishing returns to educating people to be kinder. Kindness is a personality trait, linked to conscientiousness and driven by empathy. I am skeptical of the effects of putting more “be kind” posters in kindergarten classrooms. It might be more effective to force people to act politely with sufficient incentives, like limiting employment opportunities through HR, or deporting unkind people to Haiti.
Kindness is a difficult thing to measure. I’d rather focus on suppressing crime, war, and pollution, which are lower hanging fruit. Certainly, social media devolving into a swamp of vicious mobs could be part of these problems, but then this has more to do with limiting the effects (reach) of unkind social media, not changing the underlying human kindness as a cause.
Limiting social media is also difficult. How do you force people to be kind? Ban everyone who is unkind?
I would be interested to see how that would work out. It certainly wouldn’t be Bluesky — if I go on Bluesky, there’s a legion of leftists there telling JK Rowling to kill herself.
The Ordeal of Civility
The closest thing to a kind social media platform, as far as I can tell, is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is professional, meaning that most people there are trying to get jobs. Being mean to people on the internet is not likely to score you a job, so unkind behavior is disincentivized.
The desire for a kinder public square is equivalent to the desire for a more professional or civil public square. Civility requires some form of status selection whereby a smaller number of people are permitted to speak. If everyone can speak, civility is drowned out by the roar of the mob.
Civility is produced out of necessity by a crisis of authority. Primitive tribes do not need civility because authority is ancestrally derived. It is only the clash of cultures and authorities within civilizations that requires civility to mediate conflict through manners and politeness.
As Athens became a more cosmopolitan and atheistic city, the concept of civility became more load-bearing. The Victorian Era, with its emphasis on politeness and civility, occurred at a stage when the Christian faith was in crisis among the upper classes. The fact that we live in an uncivil time today speaks to the clash of authorities between conservatives and liberals — in other words, polarization makes people uncivil. The more neurotic and anxious a person is about authority, the more civil they become — hence, the most nervous people are the most politically correct.
In the aristocratic republic of Athens, there were debates about who should be allowed to speak. Aeschines says,12
Timarchus, who, though disqualified by law, was speaking in your assemblies…
… Wise indeed was the lawgiver who excluded such disgusting creatures from the platform…
If any public man, speaking in the senate or in the assembly of the people, shall not speak on the subject which is before the house [off topic], or shall fail to speak on each proposition separately [conflation], or shall speak twice on the same subject in one day [spamming], or if he shall speak abusively or slanderously [harassment], or shall interrupt the proceedings [disruptive conduct], or in the midst of the deliberations shall get up and speak on anything that is not in order [off-topic], or shall shout approval [using all caps], or shall lay hands on the presiding officer [threats], on adjournment of the assembly or the senate the board of presidents are authorized to report his name to the collectors, with a fine of not more than 50 drachmas for each offence.
As it turns out, the ancient Greeks did have speech codes.
An Elitist Theory of Political Speech
Neither ancient Greece nor America ever had free speech, which would be more aptly called “mob speech.” Mob speech is simply the cries and droning of the mob without any restriction. America has always had laws against obscenity, blasphemy, and sedition.
There was a weird 10 year period between Miller v. California (1973) and New York v. Ferber (1982) where underage pornography was theoretically legal at the federal level. This was probably the furthest any civilization had ever gone in “defending free speech” at the most abstract level. In practical terms, however, this was before the internet, and most porn shops only sold 18+ material.
Since 1982, even as LGBTQ has become more accepted, other norms around obscenity, blasphemy, and sedition have tightened and strengthened.13 States are now requiring age verification to access porn. This is a far cry from the wild-west days of 4chan.
The move from “free speech” to restrictionism isn’t uniform. Elon’s purchase of Twitter since 2022 has led to a relaxation of censorship. My contention is that we shouldn’t be focusing on what kind of speech to censor, but what kind of speakers to platform.
The advantage of freedom of speech is that entrenched and corrupt bureaucracies always try to protect themselves from criticism by restricting speech. By allowing anyone to say anything, in theory, corruption should be exposed.
Unfortunately, most people do not have the capacity to expose corruption. Their capacity is limited to grunting and barking and other animal noises. As such, there isn’t much of a benefit to allowing the majority of people to speak or consume political content.
The problem with this assessment is that, at the level of the individual, it is difficult to determine who is “qualified” and who is not. Some people are clearly incapable of intelligent thought; others clearly are; and significant proportion occupy a gray-zone in-between.
I would like a digital Elysium where, in order to become an active participant, one must pass some kind of bare-minimum standard. This concept isn’t new — it’s the model of academia, where in order to enter, one must pass some qualifying entrance exam. I would be delighted if there were a new social media platform where all posters would meet some minimum threshold of intelligence.
This model isn’t so fundamentally different from the Athenian forum, where speakers would be citizens in good standing.
The problem with starting new platforms is that it is difficult to get people to migrate to new digital real estate. Kansas has cheap land, but no one wants to move to Kansas, because there aren’t already people there. Academia has come up with a solution to the problem of getting smart people to migrate from one place to another: federal funding for college towns.
I do not have the power to start such a platform. Outside of direct government action, I think the best thing that Elon, Zuckerberg, or Google could do would be to generate a “forum within a city,” allowing users to opt-in to a subset of the larger platform. For example, on Twitter, a user could complete an online IQ test and then opt-in to a setting which would filter all users who were not part of that subset. Instead of seeing a random Twitter feed with an average IQ of 100, I would see a selective Twitter feed with an IQ minimum of 110, 120, or 130.
Normal Twitter users would still see Tweets from this subset — if a genius posts something good, everyone should see it. But the reverse would not be true — a high IQ poster wouldn’t see the posts of low-IQ people. They effectively wouldn’t exist.14
There are high IQ sociopaths who enjoy trolling, sending others mean Tweets and DMs, so this wouldn’t necessarily solve Aella’s problem. But I do think that introducing some kind of profession, academic, and standards-based filter to large social media platforms would go a long way in filtering the slop and engendering a more productive form of discourse.
Conclusion.
I wish nothing but the best for Aella. But her popularity doesn’t come from her intelligence alone — she is well-known because she is infamous as a sex worker. Over time, the strain of infamy wears upon people. Kanye West, Elon Musk, and many other “alpha males” have crashed out under the pressure of being hated and persecuted. Ideally, there would be a safe space for Aella where she would never be attacked — however, if there were such a space, it would have many fewer users, and I think Aella would be disappointed at how much her audience and cashflow would shrink under such conditions.
From my observations (correct me with a link if I am wrong), Aella receives very little hate on Substack. People engage with her content politely and respectfully.15 So why does she engage with Twitter?
Twitter is a platform used to farm engagement. Engagement converts into followers and followers convert into money. I’ve never been good at this kind of thing, as I prefer long-form content. But Aella is very good at it, and she has been very successful. That success comes with an emotional cost. Her endurance of this cost for so long is a testament to her mental toughness, compared with the average person.
Mental toughness is a virtue. To seek and stand up for the truth, it is not enough to merely be smart. One must be able to stand alone, in a heroic fashion, against the entire world. This is not an easy task; I don’t meet that standard or know what it is like to be in Aella’s position. But I do think it is a virtue which should be more highly selected for in elite institutions, lest we descend ever further into a vain, cowardly, and self-serving bureaucracy.16
I get 10 mean comments a day and they usually make me feel bad. Could I withstand 100 mean comments? 1,000 mean comments? What if I searched “DeepLeftAnalysis,” and it was just an endless stream of vitriol, slander, and character assassination? Could I withstand that?
Probably not. Whether or not Aella is correct in her edgy takes, or whether or not I am attracted to her procedurally generated orgies, her ability to withstand criticism deserves praise. I also think that being honest about her emotional struggle (rather than crashing out and lashing out, as a Musk or Kanye might do) is admirable. Her goal of a kinder, more rational, and more civilized world is inoffensive.
The internet is real life, as real as the Congress, the Senate, the White House, or the Supreme Court. What is written on the internet is just as real as anything written in the Constitution. Words matter, and words have power. Intelligent people should work harder to solve the problem of platform rot. The solution is not to censor particular words or ideas, but to allow users more selectivity in interactions and visibility. By narrowing the field of vision, the scene becomes less clouded, and truth can better be perceived.
In any case, I expect Aella to come back stronger than ever. This episode has caused people to pay attention to her, like me, who would otherwise not. In the attention economy, that’s a W.
As a disclaimer, I wasn’t very familiar with Aella before writing this, so if I say something that’s factually incorrect, please explain with evidence for the education of the audience.
DeepLeftAnalysis is nothing without e-celeb news.
Nick Rochefort, a right-wing comedian in MDE, did a series on this.
Think of any pair of sisters you know, and tell me if that sounds at all realistic.
[I’m assuming that America has undergone a similar psychotropic revolution, but this isn’t a deep dive into medicalization — that deserves more time and its own article.]
It’s probably true that pornography prevents some rapes by lowering testosterone and keeping men inside. It’s probably also true that pornography inspires or motivates some rapes. I do not see good evidence that the introduction of porn into America resulted in an increase of rape, but it also didn’t cure the problem either. On net, I oppose banning porn on the basis that porn is anti-natal. Porn deserves its own article at some point.
She would probably just find my obsession with her to be creepy and gross.
Obviously dating for women is hard because men suck, but I’m not talking about dating, I’m talking about sex.
If you don’t believe me, compare the body counts of homosexuals and lesbians.
(may it never come to pass!)
Not to one-up Aella in the oppression Olympics, but I appear to receive much more hatred on Substack than she does. This may be because she bans people liberally.
Translation: sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/pwh/aeschines.asp
There was a case, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union (2004), which you could argue fought the expansion of obscenity laws. The progress of restrictionism was jagged.
A more limited form of this experiment would be to apply it to DMs rather than feeds.
At least compared to how people engage with me!
Ivy League universities should restrict admission on that basis of mental toughness. For example, on the basis of athletic performance as a proxy for mental toughness. Athletic performance is not an exact test of mental toughness, but I believe there is a correlation. Willingness to endure pain is another.
I don’t hate her, but I think the ideas and lifestyles she promotes are mostly unhealthy and would make society worse if they were adopted en masse. She’s a very unusual person, I’m not sure how aware she is that e.g. most women won’t thrive being gang banged, would instead find it traumatic; if she knows that and promotes it anyway that’s a strike against her for me. I’m also anti-prostitution so there’s that too.
Aella, Hanania, Diane Yep, and others like Nicholas Decker deserve the hate they get frankly. If you want to churn out rage bait and other engagement slop day in and out because you’re THAT desperate to grow your online profile then don’t be surprised when you get the attention you’re desperately craving. The shit they post is only a couple levels higher than posting out of context movie clips or ship cleaning videos; you can be an interesting thinker and grow your profile without resorting to doing/saying inflammatory shit that makes people hate you. I don’t fault people for wanting growth but when I see Decker posing on a couch with Aella and some other hoes with some gay caption like “errrmm… this happened haha wtf” it really just reveals these people want attention more than engagement with ideas. Hanania at least writes interesting stuff occasionally so gets a pass.