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.
For the record I think Aella actually does ragebait in the classic sense of saying provocative and inflammatory things for engagement. So, this means that she actually discourages people from following her lifestyle, the same way Biden bombing a debate turns people off from the Democratic Party as a whole. If you think it's an unadvisable lifestyle, you should be Aella's biggest fan!
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.
“It really just reveals these people want attention more than engagement with ideas”
I think you might have a false dichotomy in your thinking. It sounds like you’re saying that people either want attention or critical engagement with their ideas, but I don’t see why both can’t be true. Aella’s poll reached so many people partially because she has a massive following, and when she writes something that she wants people to engage with critically, some of her massive audience might be around to see it. While most of these people won’t care about deeply engaging with other ideas, maybe 10% will, and attention-seeking behavior makes it easier to find those people. The truth is, if you want to maximize people’s engagement with your ideas, one of the best ways to do that could be to try to get attention.
Also, it’s possible to want different things at different times. A detailed essay on Substack probably doesn’t have the same goals as a satirical tweet, and I think it’s okay for people to want different things at different times.
My point is that it’s trashy behavior that people don’t respect. I’m most familiar with Hanania and I enjoy his writing, but his behavior on Twitter is like 70% engagement slop. Resist lib posting, thirst traps, etc. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he acts in a very certain way for attention. I’m not as familiar with Decker, Yep, or Aella but all the cringe bait shit they do is the stuff that reaches me so yeah it works but it also makes me not want to engage with anything they do considering how obnoxious it is. If I only knew Hanania from his Tweets/Substack notes and not his podcast/writing I’d find him insufferable. The pundits/intellectuals I respect, like Sam Harris or Jesse Singal, don’t act this way.
i disagree. anyone with anything interesting to say eventually either achieves a serenity beyond needing attention or dissolves into cloying, pandering content production long before they accumulate the following they think they deserve.
How do you figure? Even her own posts are peppered with negative comments.
And sure, the relentless hatemongering is kind of tiresome and sometimes factually incorrect, but if you're going to enrich yourself by using the most emotionally volatile taboos for engagement farming, you can't be flabbergasted about proportionally negative reactions without seeming like an annoying retard.
DLA, have you read Girard’s work on scapegoating? He argues that human societies have a fundamental need to form mobs and scapegoat someone, and it’s obvious how this plays out on social media. I respect Hanania and Aella for not backing down to the mob, even if I don’t agree with a lot of their ideas.
What I hope is that AI will eventually make social media almost useless once people can’t tell bots from real people anymore, forcing everyone to get back to physical socialization, or to join social media networks where everyone has to confirm their real identity.
Aella maintains a veneer of plausible sincerity as opposed to Hanania who displays no commitment to any ideals and strives to be as rage inducing as possible. There is something deeply wrong with Hanania whereas Aella may just be a smol horny bean.
My take on Aella is that she wants to have her cake and eat it too. A boring, but correct take. That said, I don't think she's really harmful to anybody besides herself.
Academia has been so thoroughly corrupted by politics at this point you’re never going to get an honest survey on any politically-charged topic, let alone sex. With survey sizes in the hundreds of thousands, she is able to get outside the academic echo chamber and actually do novel research that isn’t going to get published by any academic journal. How positively and negatively freighted and gendered are various neutral terms? (The results of which show a subtle misandry no journal would ever publish.) Are high-powered people submissive in bed? (Nope.) Which fetishes are the most popular and most taboo? (There’s a negative correlation.)
She’s an escort and camgirl. So? Who would know more about sex than a sex worker? I’m not a Christian. If nobody’s getting trafficked or coerced, I don’t care. Probably decreases sexual violence if anything.
She’s weird. Who cares? If her stuff checks out, I really don’t care if she showers. Never stopped lots of top coders.
There's your problem. There are actual science and methodology behind doing statistics, so even if you have rightful slights against academia, you want academic rigour to be there.
Her research is ass. They are mostly just xitter surveys anyway. You can also have hundreds of thousands of responders, if they all come from the same place, it will be useless. (Like we only get to know what Aella's followers think, but she tries to show it as a legit thing on the whole population.)
And I didn't even get into the actual statistics part.
What she advocates for is horrendous. She is repeatedly downplaying her own child sexual abuse as an oopsie and says that if we just let things go, it would cease being a problem (complete lack of self-awareness.
And the traficking part. There are some questionable things about that too.
I think most surveys done in academia have responders coming from the same place (academia and what's local to it), and the numbers are much smaller. I wouldn't dismiss her data just off of that
You're not wrong about that. I declined multiple times partaking in someone's thesis on this reason (as if the partakers are the ones you directly reach, it's most likely can't end up representative).
Yes, her "work" is not completely useless, but at the first step, she should hire someone who can vet the questions for any implicit biases etc.
She should also refrain herself about making comments on ongoing surveys. That automatically spoils the results.
All in all: statistics are hard even in much more straightforward subjects, let alone anything with people. It's best to handle them with suspicions and try to surmise what are the authors ends on it.
“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.”
I think you are missing quite a lot of nuance here and misrepresenting the multiple ‘feminist’ perspectives. I for one don’t think it is internalized patriarchy if Bonnie Blue or any other woman wants to do this. Any adult woman is free to opt into this.
But I do vehemently disagree with Aella that this is a normal (i.e. majority) manifestation of female sexuality. This is Aella’s whole schtick - she generalizes her weirdo autistic prostitute desires to women as a whole. She is an outlier, not the norm.
You miss a large, more centrist, critique of Aella by jumping to the feminazi trope.
the first camp captures this nuance perfectly. after all, you describe the nuance and also belong definitively in the first camp. generally speaking, a posture of defending the right to do something often includes criticism against that thing.
I really think it's as simple as: most people think the way of life she promotes wouldn't be conducive to collective betterment, and the rage bait makes her extremely visible, thus considered harmful. That's it. That's 80% of the argument. The rest is noise and social media mob dynamics, nothing really new.
It's probably not true that Substack comments are positive, you forgot about posts. Under articles they are, because people who don't like her ideas are far less likely to engage to her blog, but under articles almost all comments are always positive. Look at Substack posts about Aella and you'll see negative comments. I've seen two posts about Aella get mostly negative comments (one by Fleschmann, the other I don't remember). Arguably there aren't many Substack posts so it's hard to verify, and people on here don't have the habits of pilling up on each other so I guess they repress negative posts.
Like most prostitutes, she seems to have a really low-disgust sensitivity, and it clearly alienates her in many ways. For this reason, as you've noted, it's often very hard to tell if she is joking or not, and as far as we can tell she doesn't seem to have a great sense of humor. So it's all speculation, most of the time, including most of this article. Apparently she is smart, which is weird considering she seems to be lacking self-awareness. Which hints to me that she is intentionally rage-baiting, though it's unclear.
I suspect that people with apparently no negative comments on controversial essays are just hiding them, I've seen this a bunch of times before and it just doesn't pass the smell test
Both you and Aella present atypical positions with good faith and relatively competent attempts at reasoning them through. Even if you were both always horribly wrong, your existence is extremely important to the functioning of competitive selection in a free market for ideas.
And of course substack has more functional selective pressures than short form social media.
I've never seen this expressed before:
"Personally, I want more anti-male sexism (feminism) because I am an anti-natalist who wants to engineer a population collapse. "
I checked through your writing and this is a claim that takes a higher level of abstraction the fact that modern feminism causes lower family formation and thus rapid population aging. Usually leftists consider biology as some sort of evil fabrication and so deny all of this happening, while rightists want to save Christendom. You, however, say that this is all actually a good thing. This is not unreasonable - maybe the real world is saying Christendom (and most contemporary dominant meta-narrative mythologies) is incompatible with continuing development and new technology. In your favorite way of framing things, this would be the philosophy corresponding to a bull.
It's like e/acc: rip the bandaid off civilization so that the competitive pressures of stark necessity creates radical innovation of durable new institutions. There will be suffering but a lot of suffering better to get it over with now than later.
I am more of a deep libertarian leftist - for a decentralized confederacy of new elites innovating new institutions and mythology meta-narratives. The winners of creative destruction's future of civilizational natural selection will come from the feet of, that is the choice of community residence for, high level human capital. Unlike you, however, I don't advocate for any particular accelerationist policy right now, other than deregulating innovation especially in AI and biotech, simply because contemporary political socioeconomic dynamics are too nonlinear/chaotic and unpredictable right now.
The lack of familiarity with the subject is a bit of a problem here. She’s talked much more about pedophilia than the one tweet. The most notable is a recent post she put out on Substack in defence of child porn: https://open.substack.com/pub/aella/p/ai-child-porn-will-probably-save?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web . I still don’t think she’s a pedophile, but anyone defending child porn turns radioactive in the eyes of the public regardless.
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.
For the record I think Aella actually does ragebait in the classic sense of saying provocative and inflammatory things for engagement. So, this means that she actually discourages people from following her lifestyle, the same way Biden bombing a debate turns people off from the Democratic Party as a whole. If you think it's an unadvisable lifestyle, you should be Aella's biggest fan!
her content is low quality
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.
“It really just reveals these people want attention more than engagement with ideas”
I think you might have a false dichotomy in your thinking. It sounds like you’re saying that people either want attention or critical engagement with their ideas, but I don’t see why both can’t be true. Aella’s poll reached so many people partially because she has a massive following, and when she writes something that she wants people to engage with critically, some of her massive audience might be around to see it. While most of these people won’t care about deeply engaging with other ideas, maybe 10% will, and attention-seeking behavior makes it easier to find those people. The truth is, if you want to maximize people’s engagement with your ideas, one of the best ways to do that could be to try to get attention.
Also, it’s possible to want different things at different times. A detailed essay on Substack probably doesn’t have the same goals as a satirical tweet, and I think it’s okay for people to want different things at different times.
he meant attention itself is a higher priority than thoughtful engagement
My point is that it’s trashy behavior that people don’t respect. I’m most familiar with Hanania and I enjoy his writing, but his behavior on Twitter is like 70% engagement slop. Resist lib posting, thirst traps, etc. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he acts in a very certain way for attention. I’m not as familiar with Decker, Yep, or Aella but all the cringe bait shit they do is the stuff that reaches me so yeah it works but it also makes me not want to engage with anything they do considering how obnoxious it is. If I only knew Hanania from his Tweets/Substack notes and not his podcast/writing I’d find him insufferable. The pundits/intellectuals I respect, like Sam Harris or Jesse Singal, don’t act this way.
I guess we just have different perspectives on the type of things that bother us
i disagree. anyone with anything interesting to say eventually either achieves a serenity beyond needing attention or dissolves into cloying, pandering content production long before they accumulate the following they think they deserve.
>Aella receives very little hate on Substack
How do you figure? Even her own posts are peppered with negative comments.
And sure, the relentless hatemongering is kind of tiresome and sometimes factually incorrect, but if you're going to enrich yourself by using the most emotionally volatile taboos for engagement farming, you can't be flabbergasted about proportionally negative reactions without seeming like an annoying retard.
DLA, have you read Girard’s work on scapegoating? He argues that human societies have a fundamental need to form mobs and scapegoat someone, and it’s obvious how this plays out on social media. I respect Hanania and Aella for not backing down to the mob, even if I don’t agree with a lot of their ideas.
What I hope is that AI will eventually make social media almost useless once people can’t tell bots from real people anymore, forcing everyone to get back to physical socialization, or to join social media networks where everyone has to confirm their real identity.
Aella maintains a veneer of plausible sincerity as opposed to Hanania who displays no commitment to any ideals and strives to be as rage inducing as possible. There is something deeply wrong with Hanania whereas Aella may just be a smol horny bean.
My take on Aella is that she wants to have her cake and eat it too. A boring, but correct take. That said, I don't think she's really harmful to anybody besides herself.
Here's my defense of Aella from elsewhere:
Academia has been so thoroughly corrupted by politics at this point you’re never going to get an honest survey on any politically-charged topic, let alone sex. With survey sizes in the hundreds of thousands, she is able to get outside the academic echo chamber and actually do novel research that isn’t going to get published by any academic journal. How positively and negatively freighted and gendered are various neutral terms? (The results of which show a subtle misandry no journal would ever publish.) Are high-powered people submissive in bed? (Nope.) Which fetishes are the most popular and most taboo? (There’s a negative correlation.)
She’s an escort and camgirl. So? Who would know more about sex than a sex worker? I’m not a Christian. If nobody’s getting trafficked or coerced, I don’t care. Probably decreases sexual violence if anything.
She’s weird. Who cares? If her stuff checks out, I really don’t care if she showers. Never stopped lots of top coders.
There's your problem. There are actual science and methodology behind doing statistics, so even if you have rightful slights against academia, you want academic rigour to be there.
Her research is ass. They are mostly just xitter surveys anyway. You can also have hundreds of thousands of responders, if they all come from the same place, it will be useless. (Like we only get to know what Aella's followers think, but she tries to show it as a legit thing on the whole population.)
And I didn't even get into the actual statistics part.
What she advocates for is horrendous. She is repeatedly downplaying her own child sexual abuse as an oopsie and says that if we just let things go, it would cease being a problem (complete lack of self-awareness.
And the traficking part. There are some questionable things about that too.
She shouldn't be taken seriously whatsoever.
I think most surveys done in academia have responders coming from the same place (academia and what's local to it), and the numbers are much smaller. I wouldn't dismiss her data just off of that
You're not wrong about that. I declined multiple times partaking in someone's thesis on this reason (as if the partakers are the ones you directly reach, it's most likely can't end up representative).
Yes, her "work" is not completely useless, but at the first step, she should hire someone who can vet the questions for any implicit biases etc.
She should also refrain herself about making comments on ongoing surveys. That automatically spoils the results.
All in all: statistics are hard even in much more straightforward subjects, let alone anything with people. It's best to handle them with suspicions and try to surmise what are the authors ends on it.
This is an article that I was thinking of writing myself; I'm glad that you've got it taken care of.
“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.”
I think you are missing quite a lot of nuance here and misrepresenting the multiple ‘feminist’ perspectives. I for one don’t think it is internalized patriarchy if Bonnie Blue or any other woman wants to do this. Any adult woman is free to opt into this.
But I do vehemently disagree with Aella that this is a normal (i.e. majority) manifestation of female sexuality. This is Aella’s whole schtick - she generalizes her weirdo autistic prostitute desires to women as a whole. She is an outlier, not the norm.
You miss a large, more centrist, critique of Aella by jumping to the feminazi trope.
the first camp captures this nuance perfectly. after all, you describe the nuance and also belong definitively in the first camp. generally speaking, a posture of defending the right to do something often includes criticism against that thing.
I really think it's as simple as: most people think the way of life she promotes wouldn't be conducive to collective betterment, and the rage bait makes her extremely visible, thus considered harmful. That's it. That's 80% of the argument. The rest is noise and social media mob dynamics, nothing really new.
It's probably not true that Substack comments are positive, you forgot about posts. Under articles they are, because people who don't like her ideas are far less likely to engage to her blog, but under articles almost all comments are always positive. Look at Substack posts about Aella and you'll see negative comments. I've seen two posts about Aella get mostly negative comments (one by Fleschmann, the other I don't remember). Arguably there aren't many Substack posts so it's hard to verify, and people on here don't have the habits of pilling up on each other so I guess they repress negative posts.
Like most prostitutes, she seems to have a really low-disgust sensitivity, and it clearly alienates her in many ways. For this reason, as you've noted, it's often very hard to tell if she is joking or not, and as far as we can tell she doesn't seem to have a great sense of humor. So it's all speculation, most of the time, including most of this article. Apparently she is smart, which is weird considering she seems to be lacking self-awareness. Which hints to me that she is intentionally rage-baiting, though it's unclear.
I suspect that people with apparently no negative comments on controversial essays are just hiding them, I've seen this a bunch of times before and it just doesn't pass the smell test
This needs a new name New Thot Libertarianism perhaps?
Both you and Aella present atypical positions with good faith and relatively competent attempts at reasoning them through. Even if you were both always horribly wrong, your existence is extremely important to the functioning of competitive selection in a free market for ideas.
And of course substack has more functional selective pressures than short form social media.
I've never seen this expressed before:
"Personally, I want more anti-male sexism (feminism) because I am an anti-natalist who wants to engineer a population collapse. "
I checked through your writing and this is a claim that takes a higher level of abstraction the fact that modern feminism causes lower family formation and thus rapid population aging. Usually leftists consider biology as some sort of evil fabrication and so deny all of this happening, while rightists want to save Christendom. You, however, say that this is all actually a good thing. This is not unreasonable - maybe the real world is saying Christendom (and most contemporary dominant meta-narrative mythologies) is incompatible with continuing development and new technology. In your favorite way of framing things, this would be the philosophy corresponding to a bull.
It's like e/acc: rip the bandaid off civilization so that the competitive pressures of stark necessity creates radical innovation of durable new institutions. There will be suffering but a lot of suffering better to get it over with now than later.
I am more of a deep libertarian leftist - for a decentralized confederacy of new elites innovating new institutions and mythology meta-narratives. The winners of creative destruction's future of civilizational natural selection will come from the feet of, that is the choice of community residence for, high level human capital. Unlike you, however, I don't advocate for any particular accelerationist policy right now, other than deregulating innovation especially in AI and biotech, simply because contemporary political socioeconomic dynamics are too nonlinear/chaotic and unpredictable right now.
What about low iq weridos like me who like listening to smart peoples ideas
Facebook used to require a college email. I mean Aella is a sicko but she should be allowed to speak freely until she actively hurts someone.
The lack of familiarity with the subject is a bit of a problem here. She’s talked much more about pedophilia than the one tweet. The most notable is a recent post she put out on Substack in defence of child porn: https://open.substack.com/pub/aella/p/ai-child-porn-will-probably-save?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web . I still don’t think she’s a pedophile, but anyone defending child porn turns radioactive in the eyes of the public regardless.
But how can we assess Epstein if the government doesn’t distribute child porn as a free public service ? /sarcasm
I
I will defend you from the endless stream of vitriol, slander and character assassination, DeepLeftAnalysis