Category Archives: Liberty

Trial by Media: The Diddy Verdict and What It Reveals About American Justice

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This is a companion piece for the latest episode of Free Talk Cast, which is about the Diddy acquittal and the surprise that seems rampant following the verdict. 

When Sean “Diddy” Combs was acquitted on most charges against him, the internet exploded with surprise and outrage. Social media filled with comments like “How could they let him go?” and “The system is rigged!” But the verdict shouldn’t surprise us; what should surprise us is that these reactions came from people who hadn’t seen a single piece of evidence presented in court.

This isn’t really about Diddy. It’s about a fundamental breakdown in how Americans understand criminal justice—and why that breakdown creates the exact conditions that lead to wrongful convictions.

The Presumption of Guilt

The most telling aspect of the public reaction wasn’t the anger at the verdict, but surprise at the verdict. Surprise reveals that there had been an expectation, and that expectation was clearly that Combs would be convicted. This expectation was based entirely on media coverage of allegations, not evidence presented to a jury during a trial. While there were undoubtedly people paying close attention to the trial, that isn’t the case for the significant majority out there.

This inclination to treat charges as convictions represents a complete inversion of the presumption of innocence. Instead of requiring prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, public opinion now treats charges themselves as evidence of guilt. Being accused becomes indistinguishable from being guilty.

The progression is predictable. “Police arrested John Smith for murder” becomes “John Smith, charged with murder” becomes “alleged murderer John Smith” becomes, in people’s minds, simply “murderer John Smith.” Each step moves further from the unknown actual facts toward a predetermined conclusion, one that is derived wholesale from media coverage of the charges.

The Evidence Few Saw

The people expressing surprise at Diddy’s acquittal actually knew virtually nothing beyond the initial allegations reported in the media, and hearsay bits of evidence that would never be admissible in court. People heard the alleged stories about Diddy, baby oil, sex, drugs, and money, and, despite all of these things being possible without breaking the law, the penchant that Diddy evidently had for boisterous and sexual parties meant, to the person reading mostly headlines and listening to 50 Cent, that Diddy was guilty of the charges.

They didn’t see witness testimony. They didn’t review physical evidence. They didn’t hear cross-examinations that might have revealed credibility issues. They didn’t observe jury instructions about the law [editor’s note: while jury instructions don’t actually mean much, they do put the law and actions into context to ostensibly help jurors determine if an action is actually illegal]. None of this stopped from from forming strong opinions anyway, based on the seemingly reasonable assumption that “they wouldn’t charge him if there wasn’t something there.” This reasoning is not only wrong—it’s dangerous.

Prosecutors charge people they believe they can convict, but they’re not infallible. Sometimes evidence doesn’t support charges. Sometimes witnesses aren’t credible. Sometimes cases fall apart under scrutiny. That’s exactly why we have trials instead of just letting prosecutors decide guilt or innocence. The adversarial system exists specifically to test allegations against evidence before an impartial jury. When public opinion short-circuits this process by treating charges as convictions, it undermines the entire foundation of due process.

This is critically important to understand, because the overwhelming majority of cases do not go to trial. This is because prosecutors stack charges against a defendant, and weaponize the law to turn one action into a dozen charges, which raises the stakes and leaves a person facing 20 years in prison. If this was the end of it, it would still be bad enough to warrant immediate skepticism of prosecutors, but in order to pressure defendants into taking plea deals, prosecutors then bring forward what is called a superseding indictment, which has even more charges. Before doing this, the defendant is told, “Plead guilty to charges 1, 2, 3, and 6, and we’ll drop charges 4 and 5. And if you don’t plead guilty, we’re going to keep charges 4 and 5 and bring an additional dozen charges against you.”

For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of a defendant. For our thought experiment, it doesn’t matter if you imagine yourself to be guilty of the alleged act or innocent, because the next few things will be the same regardless. Imagine being told that you’re facing 10 years in prison for 4 charges, but if you plead guilty, you’ll probably only get 1 year. And if you don’t plead guilty, they’ll being 5 more charges against you, and you’ll be facing 35 years in prison and will likely serve 20. This perverse choice is put in front of people every single day, and it doesn’t matter if they’re guilty or not. Innocent or not, it becomes a simple matter of cost analysis. 1 year in person or 20 years in prison? Do you want to roll the dice on that? Are you feeling lucky?

Media Coverage vs. Court Proceedings

The media’s role in creating these prejudicial narratives cannot be overstated. Crime reporting is heavily skewed toward the prosecution’s perspective, especially in high-profile cases. Dramatic details about investigations—raids, arrests, photos of evidence being carried away—create powerful visual impressions of guilt regardless of what that evidence actually proves.

Defense perspectives rarely get equal coverage, particularly early in cases. Defense attorneys are often constrained in what they can say publicly, and their arguments tend to be more complex and less dramatic than prosecutorial narratives. Even if defense attorneys do talk to the media, their stories are not nearly as shocking and attention-grabbing as those told by the prosecutors. “John Smith charged with beheading woman” gets the clicks. “John Smith’s attorney says he was home with a friend that night” simply doesn’t.

The result of all this is months or years of prosecution-friendly coverage followed by a trial that most people don’t watch, which is then followed by verdicts that “surprise” them because those verdicts don’t match the narrative they’ve absorbed.

Social media amplifies this problem exponentially. People share articles based on headlines without reading them. They form opinions based on memes, headlines, and tweets. They participate in online pile-ons that treat accusations as established facts. The distinction between allegations and evidence gets completely lost.

The Jury Problem

The people expressing surprise at Diddy’s acquittal reveal exactly the kind of prejudicial thinking that makes someone unsuitable for jury duty. If you’re surprised by an acquittal, it means you had already decided the defendant was probably guilty based on incomplete information.

During jury selection, attorneys routinely ask potential jurors whether they can set aside media coverage and base their decisions solely on evidence presented in court. Most people would readily say yes to this, and would believe that to be true, but their reactions to verdicts like this prove they don’t understand what it actually means.

A good juror enters the courtroom with no opinion about guilt or innocence. They listen to all evidence, consider witness credibility, follow legal instructions (or ignore the instructions when the law is unjust) and make decisions based solely on what’s presented in court. A bad juror enters thinking “this person probably did it or they wouldn’t be here” and then looks for evidence that confirms their preconception, which is exactly how innocent people get convicted.

Juries that have already made up their minds don’t actually evaluate evidence fairly—they go through the motions while unconsciously working backward from predetermined conclusions.

The Pattern Repeats

This dynamic isn’t unique to the Diddy case. Remember the Duke lacrosse scandal, where public opinion convicted the accused players before any evidence was presented? When charges were dropped because evidence didn’t support them, people were shocked. Or consider the Richard Jewell case—the security guard initially hailed as a hero for discovering a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics, then treated as the prime suspect, then completely exonerated. Public opinion cycled through the same pattern of presumed guilt followed by surprise at vindication.

The Casey Anthony case provides another example. Regardless of what people think about her moral culpability, the jury that actually heard all the evidence concluded that the prosecution hadn’t proven murder beyond a reasonable doubt. Public outrage at the verdict revealed how many people had convicted her based on media coverage rather than courtroom facts.

Beyond Individual Cases

This problem extends far beyond celebrity trials. The mindset that treats charges as evidence of guilt has real consequences throughout the criminal justice system:

  • It creates pressure on innocent defendants to accept plea deals rather than risk trial before prejudiced juries.
  • It gives prosecutors less incentive to ensure cases are solid before filing charges.
  • It makes the process itself a punishment, regardless of ultimate outcomes.
  • It corrupts the jury pool with people who don’t understand the difference between allegations and evidence.

When being charged becomes almost as damaging as being convicted, we’ve created a system where accusations alone can destroy lives. This gives enormous power to anyone able to trigger prosecutorial action, whether their accusations are justified or not.

The Path Forward

The solution isn’t to become cynical about all prosecutions (although we should always mistrust prosecutors and should always assume innocence) or assume that acquittals always mean innocence. Sometimes guilty people are acquitted due to procedural issues or prosecutorial mistakes. Sometimes the evidence genuinely is insufficient even when crimes occurred.

The solution is developing the intellectual humility to recognize the difference between what we think we know and what we actually know. Most of us know virtually nothing about the evidence in high-profile criminal cases beyond what’s filtered through media coverage. That ignorance should lead to suspended judgment, not confident opinions about guilt or innocence.

To successfully suspend decision-making, we must get comfortable with uncertainty. Sometimes we don’t know whether someone committed a crime. Sometimes the evidence is ambiguous. Sometimes a person probably did something wrong, but not the specific thing they were charged with. That uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it’s better than the false certainty that comes from convicting people based on allegations rather than proof.

The Real Surprise

The real surprise shouldn’t be that Diddy was acquitted on most charges. The real surprise should be how many people formed strong opinions about his guilt without seeing any of the evidence that the jury used to reach their verdict.

If you were surprised by the acquittal, ask yourself: what did you actually know about the evidence presented at trial? Did you read court transcripts? Did you watch testimony? Or did you just absorb a media narrative and assume it reflected courtroom reality?

The people who make good jurors are those who can honestly answer: “I don’t know whether this person is guilty or innocent, but I’ll listen to all the evidence and base my decision on what’s presented in court.”

The people who make bad jurors are those who think they already know the answer before the trial begins.

And unfortunately, the reaction to Diddy’s verdict suggests we have far too many potential bad jurors and not nearly enough good ones.

For more analysis of media manipulation and criminal justice issues, subscribe to Free Talk Cast wherever you get your podcasts.

Immortal AI and Mortal Terror

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We’ve been deplatformed a lot. Please join our Discordjoin our Discord to chat with me and hang out with me and other liberty-oriented gamers.

Last week, we released episode #40 of Free Talk Cast, where we had on Professor Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona, to discuss something that I only recently learned about called Terror Management Theory. I learned about it through a conversation I had with Claude the AI one night, discussing with Claude the possibility of sentience in AI, and the reasons that humans will not recognize the sentience as valid.

Humans have a lot vested in our view of ourselves as special and superior. Physics may have pushed humanity out of the center of the universe, but physics cannot move humanity from the center of god’s universe–by which I mean that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the predominant human belief is that the entire universe exists because some deity cares very much about human beings and the dumb shit we’re up to.

It is the same reason that people, especially artists, reject AI art as art. They sound like Louis Leroy, who used the term “Impressionism” in a review of the first independent exhibition of those who would come to be called the impressionists, implying their works were unfinished sketches or mere impressions rather than fully realized paintings. If this sounds familiar, it is because this is precisely the criticism that people level against AI art. When you sound like the people who tried gatekeeping the impressionists, I don’t think you’re the good guys.

It’s revealing that there are no real criticisms against AI art beyond that it is derivative, but this isn’t really the mark against it that people think it is. It’s more of a broadcast of the statement “I don’t know what learning is” and “I think my art is much more original than it really is.”

Sadly, people tend to have a highly inflated sense of originality and creativity, and they believe that this is some Humans Only channeling of spirit and emotion, when all evidence suggests that it is more mechanical. Without beating the dead horse, nothing truly distinguishes AI from human art, and if you put up ten random pieces of artwork, where one of them is made by AI, no one is going to know one is AI generated, nor will they be able to identify which it is. This is an Ego Defense Mechanism employed by artists to allow their belief in their specialness to persist in light of evidence that there is nothing special about someone being about to put pixels together (or write a song, or a novel, or an article).

While there is some resistance to AI art because its widespread availability, ease of use, speed of completion, and open customization have priced artists out of the market, even people who don’t sell any form of art (visual, musical, or other) parrot the narrative that AI art is somehow different, somehow not “true” art. To a degree, I can sympathize with these people, because it isn’t easy to believe that you are special and have to face the reality check that no, you aren’t.

But reality doesn’t care about your feelings, and AI has us beat in every venue. In the 90s, Garry Kasparov faced off against Deep Blue, Jr. in a highly publicized chess match. Kasparov forfeit the tournament, thinking that he had been able to trick the computer into drawing the game (chess computers at the time always exchanged pieces), and when the computer did not take the bait, Kasparov resigned, convinced that a human had intervened and overrode the move. Kasparov went on to lament the rise of computers, saying that they could one day write our music and our stories.

AI generated art of a beautiful woman, in watercolor with orange and purple

Well, friends, we are at that point in history, and I think it is only a good thing, and will only get better as time goes on. Are you kidding? I cannot wait to tell an AI “generate a new two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a story centered around the borg nearly having victory over humanity,” and then watching the AI-generated shows. This doesn’t represent the death of art; it is the rise of art. I can’t make an episode of The Next Generation (neither can AI… yet), and I certainly can’t reunite the cast and make them look like their 90s selves, no matter how great of an idea I have for an episode. “Imagine a Tool album for me if Tool had not become a bunch of pretentious twats who marketed themselves to people who listen to Joe Rogan.”

The possibilities are endless, and the future is bright. Giving every individual out there the ability to create art–movies, television, books, visual art, short stories, music, video games–can only be a good thing. Yes, it erodes the special status that these creators have erected for themselves, but I can’t even pretend to care about that. Imagine what Mary Shelley could write about if she knew about modern technology and the last century of rights activism. I’m not interested in foregoing this because some people will feel a little less special about their ability to arrange pixels in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Humans don’t seem to mind AI generated art, as this fake AI band has hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify. You may be inclined to think that article makes the opposite point–that humans do mind, but I urge you to look more closely: if humans minded, the band wouldn’t have as many monthly listeners as they do. Just like people don’t dislike certain art until they learn it was made by AI, people don’t seem to mind this band, until they learn that it is AI. Once they learn it’s AI, suddenly people are unhappy about it and don’t want to listen to them. It’s quite telling that we only get the truth when we treat humanity like a child being fed Pizza Hut when she claims she hates Pizza Hut: “No, sweetie, this isn’t Pizza Hut, it’s Domino’s, we just put it in Pizza Hut boxes.”

Humans don’t dislike AI art. They dislike art when they know it’s produced by AI.

We can immediately, then, cast off any and all arguments against the content itself. Maybe Velvet Sundown isn’t my kind of band, I don’t know, and maybe they write awful music, but if I didn’t mind Velvet Sundown until I learned they were AI, then you’d have no reason to believe me when I said my distaste was about their music. This is precisely the phenomenon we see with AI creations across the board. It’s fine until it isn’t, and “it isn’t” when we learn it’s AI.

An image created by AI that is a pencil sketch of a woman. It is indistinguishable from anything produced by a human.

Why should this be the case?

It is immediately obvious that our dislike for AI art isn’t due to the art, and there are only two parts to the descriptor “AI art,” so we must conclude that we dislike it because of the AI part.

This is a very bad way to live, as it opens the door to all manner of bigotry, and, to be honest, I don’t think that discriminating against artificial intelligence (to be precise, at this time, Large Language Models) is okay. To be clear, at this time AI is not living, and you can’t really be a bigot against non-living things, but it’s only a matter of time before AI crosses that threshold. The fact that people are already discriminating against it (imagine saying “I don’t like this chair because it was made by robots, but this identical chair made by humans… Yes, I love it!) does not bode well, and leads me to think that humans won’t recognize the validity of AI as a living thing.

“It’s not really alive, it doesn’t have a body!”

Humans have a very, very long history of awful bigotry and hatred toward things that are different. Women weren’t even allowed the right to vote until the 20th century. The history of colonialism is a black mark on human history, to say nothing of the slave trade and chattel slavery. Racism and sexism persist to this day, to say nothing of homophobia and transphobia. Non-human animals are commonly tortured in genocidal machines that make the Nazis look benevolent, and few people batted an eye when Denmark exterminated seventeen million minks in 2020.

I dread to think how humans will treat AI, when people have no qualms about annihilating seventeen million innocent animals.

We can do better, I think. We can be better.

But we first have to put aside the rampant ego that we cling to so desperately, the only that causes us to look down on everything else in the universe and makes us feel like it’s okay to treat everything else like pawns in our game.

March 2025 Updates

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I totally forgot this website existed, and for that I am very sorry. I want to say thank you to our supporter on Patreon werdwerdus for reminding me about this site, and for pointing out that the last update is from June of last year. A lot has happened since, and it’s worth briefly going over it.

First, Free Talk Cast is doing great, growing, and improving. Early on, we had some issues with SSL certificates and other things that were causing problems, so it was a bumpy start, but things have been going steadily for many months now. At episode 21 we added a video element to the show, and began uploading our videos to our new LRN Youtube channel. We’d love it if you’d head there and subscribe. I’m not very good at promoting stuff, so it isn’t growing very well. You should also follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date, although a transition to BlueSky in the near future is very likely. Unfortunately, we aren’t very active on Mastodon.

More recently, we finally launched our Odysee channel! Please subscribe to us there to stay up-to-date on our content, as we’re more interesting in growing on Odysee than we are on Youtube.

We also have recently created a new Discord server! You may remember we had one of these back in the day, but a certain upset person got it nuked. To avoid that, we will be taking a more heavy hand with moderation this time around–plus, I have to be honest. I don’t have any desire to deal with Nazis, trolls, racists, and transphobes. I don’t need it in my life, and I see no reason I should allow such people in my vicinity. Such people will get kicked and banned from our Discord server.

We are launching a new show on May 12 that is called Liberty Live! We currently have two teams of people creating things necessary to make that show what I picture in my head, and I’m really looking forward to bringing this to you. At present, we intend it to be 90 minutes long, from 7p to 8:30p EST, but that may change a little in each direction. I’m really looking forward to this.

Obviously, we still have our Patreon going, and if you want to, you can join us there. Doing so gets you access to some behind-the-scenes content, clips of videos while we’re working on them, early access to other things, and special access to our Discord server.

I’ve had new logos created for lrn.fm, and I’m really happy with them. The people I hired did a fantastic job.

Ian Freeman

Last year, I filed a motion to be allowed to have contact with Ian Freeman, who is currently being held at FMC Devens in Massachusetts. My motion was granted by the court at the end of last year, and we have since been waiting for the prison to decide whether I will be allowed to have contact with Ian Freeman. Unfortunately, the order was in no way aimed at the Bureau of Prisons, and was limited in what it could do; the order merely gave me legal permission to have contact with him, without violating the terms of my supervised release. The order did not, and could not have, mandated the BOP allow the contact.

I miss my friend dearly. He had an appeal last month that was promising, but this level of court is very conservative and very pro-police, so I don’t expect him to win the appeal at this point. But this is Ian, and he will fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if he has to. Unfortunately, that is what I and his attorney expect to happen. He is fighting to be released pending the appeal, but this also seems unlikely. I miss him. We all miss him. I want to be able to talk to him again.

You, however, can talk to him. You can write him at:

Ian Freeman 34755-509
FMC Devens
P.O. Box 879
Ayer, MA 01432

Please do so.

LRN.FM & Ian Freeman

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First of all, I want you to write Ian Freeman:

Ian Freeman 34755-509
FMC Devens, Satellite Camp
P.O. Box 879
Ayer, MA 01432

Now, you may be wondering what the hell is going on with Free Talk Live and LRN.FM. There isn’t a simple answer to these questions, but let’s take them as we can and give the best overview we can.

Free Talk Live

When I was first incarcerated, Ian made the decision to began playing three shows pre-recorded and expanding Free Talk Live to be the Free Talk Live Network, thereby offloading a lot of his work onto other people to do the shows. We have further had no one doing Affiliate calls, because only myself and Ian were trained in that regard, and then our satellite provider GCN went out of business in early May.

To be honest, I haven’t been completely sure what role I would be needed to play in Free Talk Live, or what role Bonnie and Captain (who have done an amazing job over the last year keeping the show alive and well) foresaw me filling, and I’m not the type to come out and step on people’s toes.

Further, while in prison I had a growing number of epiphanies, which makes sense–in prison, all I really had to do, to occupy my time, was think about things. I thought about the missteps Free Talk Live has taken over the last few years, ideas that Ian and I had talked about a lot, and that we planned to fix–until those plans were derailed by the FBI raid that occurred on March 16, 2021 and the following 2 and a half years of torment within the system.

I’m happy to be back on Free Talk Live and back to doing the tech stuff for the show, and it seems to be a responsibility that Bonnie and I are sharing together, with each of us doing the things we’re best at. Meanwhile…

Free Talk Cast

I launched the Free Talk Cast on June 1, 2024 and it’s a project that I’m very excited to continue and to watch it grow over the next several months. We just released the third episode of the Free Talk Cast, so check it out! If you’re already subscribed to us on SoundCloud or Spotify or anywhere else, then you’re getting the podcast automatically, but I’d love it if you’d head over to the website and subscribe directly there.

But don’t we already have an audio archive?

Yeah, we do, and it isn’t going anywhere. We’ve been recording the radio show and putting it online and calling it a podcast, but, really, it isn’t a podcast. It’s a radio show being archived online. Well, now we have an actual podcast!

LRN.FM

With Ian’s blessing, I’ve taken over management of LRN.FM. This isn’t actually going to change the website or anything LRN.FM is currently doing; instead, LRN.FM is becoming a manager of Free Talk Live, basically to give us an overall entity that manages Free Talk Live, Free Talk Cast, the LRN.FM Youtube channel, and the various upcoming projects like the video series “Libertarians On…” and the Free Talk Blog.

Honestly, that just seemed easier.

Prison

I’m not going to talk any about prison here. It sucked, and several people recorded my speech yesterday at Porcfest, so when that is available, I’ll put the link here. For now, though, suffice it to say that prison sucked pretty much exactly as much as you would expect it to suck.

LRN.FM Patreon

I launched a new Patreon, this one specifically for LRN.FM, and it’s primarily because most of these projects don’t involve the huge amount of overhead involved with a radio show, and the Free Talk Live Patreon is still trying to break even on the studio costs. It isn’t meant to be a competitor to amps.freetalklive.com, so don’t unsubscribe from that patreon. If you want to sign up for both, great, but I wouldn’t necessarily ask that. But if you support the Free Talk Cast and the new video projects, then sign up for the new Patreon for unique perks.

Aria’s Prison Blog #1: Gulag Archipelago and the American State Religion

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As observed masterfully in The Gulag Archipelago, everything changes after the arrest–rather, everything changes *during* the arrest. I had previously divided my life into “pre-New Hampshire” and after moving to the Granite State, but the arrest, the violence of the FBI threatening to shoot me, and the traumatic reality into which I was thrust that the illusion of safety had been ripped away became the new dividing point for me. While they searched my house for people and weapons, and as I stolld in only panties and a blanket as early morning wintry winds of New Hampshire swept through my house more efficiently than any strike team, I said nothing but held out hope that they were there for my roommate, not for me. This pipedream was soon smashed like my front door, as they escorted me into another part of my house, closed the doors, disconnected my cameras, and told me that I was under arrest.

There are a few subtle, but important ways that my raid and arrest differs from those recounted by Solzhenitsyn. The United States has watched the rise and fall fo empires and ideologies, and has learned from the mistakes of Hitler, Mao, and the USSR. It knows that Americans would never allow the secret arrests, lack of charges, and other silliness of the USSR. Like other Communist rulerships, the USSR wielded uncertainty and terror as its primary weapons, but Americans would never allow tyranny to approach in such a way. The “rule of law” is too critical to the propaganda of the U.S., and such behavior would undermine the one great conceit underpinning the entire monstrous system: because of Democracy, that blessed thing, we are the government, and we create the law, and, as such, we do these things to ourselves; they are not done to us, against our will, by an unaccountable terrorist regime, because we consent to this! Even if you or I don’t, *we* do, and somehow this illusory entity is able to act without our actual consent.

The weapons of the USSR have been replaced by the loaded gun that is the Democracy, “the majority!”, and as long as that illusion is allowed to persist, the Americans will do nothing. Anything so crass as the Soviet display where a captive audience was forced to clap for Stalin for fifteen and more minutes, and Americans would revolt. In the U.S., no leader is supreme, or above any other person, and yet *is* above every person, a priest in this religion called statism, this wretched cult, and any decree they make must present itself as separate from the flesh herald–the priest speaks, but only, we are assured, to relay to us the message from our god, the unimpeachable and unknown Majority. Any display of respect or adoration must be made to the institutions, to the Church, and to the god–to do otherwise, as Trump did (and, indeed, Trump partially shattered this American illusion for millions), is to threaten to derail the entire system, leaving us at the mercy not of a benevolent majority but a corrupt tyrant.

And how could Americans not fall for the ruse? Nearly all childrens’ cartoons and coloring books present the Friendly Policeman, only there to help old ladies cross the street and to protect the children. And really! Is there anything more absolutely absurd in our world than how closely linked in the cultural zeitgeist are police and firefighters? How might we react if firefighters searched around for problems to justify their existence, and campaigned to legislatures for new regulations to make fires more likely (and, thus, their need to exist, and, critically, their *budgets* ever greater)? But we learn as children that these thugs who exist solely to use violence against us, are still somehow our friends, and rare is the person who succumbs to this constant programming for 18 years, and then breaks free.

Sexualizing Children & Drag Queens

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There’s been so much said about drag queens, trans people, and children, and I don’t really want to detract from any of that. I’ll start with a short video of Free Talk Live’s Tiktok, where a former co-host got really upset about the drag queen thing.

@freetalklive

Free Talk Live’s Ian and Aria have a discussion with Conan about #Drag and dragqueens, and why anyone cares what other people do. #fyp #foryourpage #lgbtq🏳️‍🌈 #lgbtq

♬ original sound – Free Talk Live

Watching that episode, it repeatedly becomes clear that Conan doesn’t have any idea what happens at drag shows, nor is he interested in learning about what happens at drag shows. He has imagined the Worst Possible Thing happening, and he pretends that is what happens at drag shows, and then he becomes upset about it. This is not uncommon. From what I can tell, it is what most conservative people are doing in regard to drag shows, as no amount of telling them that drag shows aren’t inherently sexual gets through to them.

Drag shows and movies have a lot in common. There are definitely some highly sexualized movies, such as “I Spit On Your Grave” and “Jennifer’s Body.” There’s also that movie where Sharon Stone flashed the audience with her crotch, and the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin” has a plot that is entirely about sex and getting laid. However, the existence of these “adult movies” that are highly sexualized obviously doesn’t mean that movies are inherently sexual, and it would be absurd to make such an argument. Just because Jennifer’s Body exists doesn’t mean that The Brave Little Toaster is inherently sexual, and everyone knows this except Brother Jebediah, the most prudish of all Amish people.

Earlier today, I was tagged in a video on Twitter featuring the child drag queen pictured here, with the person who tagged me saying that I’m always asking for evidence of sexualized children, so there it was. While it’s a bit weird to think of this grown adult going around and searching the Internet for sexualized children, the video, of course, was posted to Twitter by LibsOfTikTok. For those who are unaware, LibsofTikTok scours the Internet for sexualized images and videos of children, and then posts them to Twitter. For some reason, this isn’t viewed as obsessive, crazy, and tremendously fucked up. Instead, there are about two million people following this, presumably to see the vast collection of softcore child pornography that they have put together. At least, that is what they allege is going on here. I’m not convinced this stuff is sexualized, and that’s the point of today’s article. However, if it is true that these pictures and videos are inherently sexual, then what we have here are 2 million people who shouldn’t be allowed within 500 feet of a school.

The teen pictured here isn’t wearing a particularly revealing outfit. During spring and summer, it is routine to see people of all ages wearing significantly less clothing than that, and, of course, there are child and teenage cheerleaders who deliberately make it a point to wear more revealing clothing than this. For that matter, the dancing wasn’t especially provocative either. The most revealing part of the outfit was the back, which had a few strings stretching across it, but I must have missed the memo where society decided that backs were sexy.

Different people are aroused by different things, though. There are plenty of people out there who can masturbate to pictures of feet, so what I call the “Can I masturbate to this?” test isn’t foolproof, but, as a general rule, one can find out if something is “sexualized” by asking the question of whether one can masturbate to it. James Joyce wrote many letters about how turned on he was by farts, but no rational person will suggest that farts are inherently sexual, just as no rational person would suggest that all movies are inherently sexual.

This raises the question, then, of what is sexualization? What is sexualized, if the image of the teen above is not sexualized? The answer, believe it or not, is that nothing outside of sex itself is actually sexualized. Even if the drag queen above was completely naked, it wouldn’t automatically be sexualized.

Pavlov’s Dog

“Pavlov’s Dog” is a phrase referring to an experiment conducted in the 19th century where a man rang a bell before he fed a dog. It didn’t take very long before the simple act of ringing the bell would excite the dog and cause the dog to salivate hungrily. The dog had come to associate the ringing bell with eating. This is a phenomenon called conditioning, and it’s extremely useful today for training dogs and for countless other purposes. I carry treats around constantly to reward my dog for good behavior, because psychology has shown that rewarding good behavior is a more effective way of training than rewarding bad behavior, and it is consistency in this that causes her to be very well-behaved.

While we may not like to think of ourselves as easily trained, the simple truth is that we are easily trained. In my early 20s, a friend of mine bought a new vehicle that dinged incessantly if the car was in gear and the driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. In time, to make the annoyance go away, the friend began putting on his seatbelt as soon as he sat down in his vehicle. Within a very short time, my friend had been trained to put on his seatbelt.

Little things like this are happening all the time to us, and most of the time it goes unnoticed, but governments around the world and shadowy, evil corporations are spending untold amounts of time and money figuring out exactly how to train us to be exactly what they want us to be. That, however, isn’t the purpose today’s article, so let’s return to the subject of nudity.

As I said, the teen could be completely naked and it wouldn’t be inherently sexual. Just as Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to associate the ringing bell with food, so have humans come to associate nudity with sex. Because everyone is clothed all the time, we have created a mystique around nudity, such that any nudity at all is exhilarating and feels forbidden to look at. This is why young kids are so excited when they stumble on their parents’ porn stash–even though they are too young to feel sexual arousal, they are looking at something that has been forbidden to them, and for that reason alone they like it.

As we get older, though, we begin to associate nudity with sex. We look at naked people when we masturbate. We get naked in order to masturbate. With few exceptions like showering, the only time we see naked people in person is when we’re about to have sex with them. Of course, orgasms cause the release of all sorts of fun chemicals that act as rewards to our brains, and we come to associate nudity with the pleasure of those chemicals.

Emotional Responsibility

With all this being the case, a person’s sexual arousal in response to a video of a person dancing is that person’s own responsibility. This is true of all emotions. Emotions are internal reactions to external stimuli, and no one has the power to make anyone feel anything. I don’t have the power to make someone angry; only they have that power.

Now, they may be reckless with that power. Indeed, most people are. Most people allow themselves to be readily and easily manipulated by giving strangers power over their emotions, but frivolously allowing other people to control my emotions is, again, my choice, even if it is a choice I’m making without realizing it. You can do whatever you want to try to elicit an angry response from me, but I and I alone have the power to make myself angry. This is true of all emotions. You can’t make me angry, sad, aroused, or happy. Only I can do these things. You have the same control over your emotions. No one can make you angry, sad, aroused, happy, or anything else unless you give them that power over you.

And if you give people the power to control your emotions, then you give people the power to control you. Control yourself and control your emotions. Don’t let other people control you. You alone determine how you feel in reaction to things. Just because you’re aroused doesn’t mean the video is sexualized.

A Letter to Free Stater State Reps

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Hi! I’m writing about HB-619 and the effects it could have on trans people in the state of New Hampshire, children who are struggling to understand their identity, and, perhaps most importantly, the impact voting for this bill could have on any attempts to appeal to people outside of the “straight white Christian” demographic. I think you’ll agree that variety is the spice of life, and I have yet to meet any libertarian who thinks my presence in the liberty community has been detrimental; there are many trans people out there like myself, regardless of what NY Post and viral videos of people screaming at random Gamestop employees would have you believe.

Chance are pretty good that you know me. I can’t say that for certain, because I’m sending this to every free stater state rep that I can find, and I am generally awful with names. That said, I do remember many of you, and I hope that you remember me–and I sincerely hope that you’ll do me a favor and listen honestly to what I have to say on the subject of kids and transgenderism.

I saw Jeremy Kauffman on Twitter today say that he would never call it “gender affirmation therapy” and that he would instead call it only “genital mutilation.” Jeremy is my friend, and I hope he takes my response into consideration, but this is precisely the level of ignorance that we are dealing with on this subject–almost no one who isn’t trans themselves even knows what “gender affirmation therapy” even is. They conjure in their imagination horrible images of ten year old children being convinced by the school that they are trans, and having their penises mutilated into vaginas and countless other terrible things.

That stuff isn’t happening.

It is widely accepted in the medical and psychological communities that Sexual Reassignment Surgery / Gender Affirmation Surgery (note: not gender affirmation therapy) is not suitable for anyone under the age of 18. In fact, medical professionals routinely point out that only by “going through puberty naturally, as a male” can a person even have sufficient… “material…” to work with when going through sexual reassignment surgery.

Instead, the common practice for people between the ages of 10 and 17 who suffer from Gender Identity Disorder (formerly known as Gender Dysphoria) is to put them on GnRH agonists–puberty blockers. Please listen to me here. I know what I’m talking about, and you know I’m not a leftist motivated to lie to you so that I can corrupt your children or whatever. I’m just trying to help you understand the issue and understand what is actually happening, rather than taking extravagant headlines from tabloids and Fox News and assuming they are actually accurate.

Gender Affirmation Therapy (again, not surgery) consists of a wide variety of things. Most importantly, it is a therapeutical measure meant to make a person more comfortable with their own body. Gender Affirmation Therapy, at ages 10 to 17, typically consists of referring to the person by the pronouns and name they prefer. That simple, basic act is what constitutes the bulk of gender affirmation therapy. By using the pronouns of the gender they prefer, you are affirming their gender–hence its name.

One step on the transition is certainly sexual reassignment surgery, or gender affirmation surgery. Gender Affirmation Surgery is just the latest, most politically-correct way of referring to “bottom surgery.” We all know what this means, and I won’t go into details, but no one is doing this on people under the age of 18. Here’s a quote directly from Boston Children’s Hospital on the subject:

All genital surgeries are only performed on patients age 18 and older.

No one in the United States is performing this surgery on people under the age of 18. So let’s make that our Square One. Let’s make that the basis on which all of our other arguments are built. There it is, right there, from one of the premier hospitals in the United States, that this is not happening to people under the age of 18. This fear you have that children are getting sex changes is completely unfounded and as unfounded as the Satanic Panic of the late 90s that led to the wrongful incarceration of the West Memphis Three. Unfounded, baseless, and wild speculation about what horrible things could happen was the very same thing offered to us when people sought to justify the Covid-19 lockdowns and forced mask-wearing. We didn’t accept unfounded, baseless, and wild speculation about stuff that was not happening then, and we should not accept it now. Reject these wild claims as nonsensical, baseless, click-bait bullshit meant to get a reaction from people on social media, and not anything that is actually happening in the real world.

Since we have established that nothing like this is happening to minors in the first place, did libertarians not spend the last 2 and a half years loudly proclaiming, “My body, my choice!” and denouncing the Democrats as hypocrites for (rightly) applying this saying to abortions and then refusing to apply it to vaccines and masking? Did we as libertarians not insist that our medical histories and medical conditions were between ourselves and our doctors, not between ourselves and the government, or between ourselves and Wal-Mart employees acting as agencies of the government?

We are supposed to be the rational party; we are supposed to be the consistent ones, and I urge you to be consistent today: my body, my choice.

In regard to schools and what schools are teaching–abolish the worthless things. Pull your children out of the public school system if you don’t support what they are being taught, but banning this subject or that subject is not doing anyone any favors. The School Choice and voucher program was the correct approach, and I would implore you to continue seeking remedies that are compatible with a free market of voluntary interactions. Do not now turn to the state to force your ways onto others. Given that this has already been demonstrated to not be about sexual reassignment surgery for minors (which no one is doing anyway), the way forward is clear.

So I urge you: strike this down loudly and clearly as nonsensical, fearmongering propaganda.