HST was not the best person, and that Gonzo shit set an extremely bad example for a generation of stupid romantic young men (*cough*) but like. he could write, and he wasn't a soulless dead-eyed careerist

Or to put it another way:

If our solution to child sexual abuse online is to ban kids from the internet, then we really just gave up on making the internet safe.

And good god. Adults don’t deserve constant harassment and exploitation either.

Vichy comes up a lot but it was a much more plausible (however immoral) calculation to think you were picking the long-term winning side in 1940, than to think in Jan 2025, yeah, this is gonna be a stable, lasting, consolidated authoritarian regime I should tie myself to for decades into the future.

I love to write an article where all the responses are qt's are like "yes i have had this problem for ten years but never talk about it"

There is even a virtually silent pandemic of pelvic pain, for men and women, because no one wants to talk about any of this, because your pelvic floor is where all the Bad Things happen (pee, poop, sex). Fortunately I will do anything in the name of journalism, including… well, you’ll see

In talking to people about this I learned that many think, for instance, men don’t even have pelvic floors. Buddy, do you ever

It’s also a reminder that the Internet actually used to be (somewhat) safer. All the biggest platforms used to spend more on safety and content moderation.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was much, much better than the dystopia we’re in now that they’ve decided to cater to the most violent users instead.