TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
I honestly think this is a pretty reasonable take. A lot of people are attacking the claim that drafting people isn't controversial. It obviously is, but the majority of society still sees it as a necessary evil, as without it the nation could be overrun by other states that are less scrupulous. This is less of an issue for the USA that only has two relatively weak neighbors, but the principle is sound in general. Ukraine would have collapsed to Russian aggression long ago if it didn't draft its population to fight, and yes it's very controversial in that country with there being many examples of draft dodging enforcement actions that look more like kidnappings, but again it's still necessary.
Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death. While death in childbirth can happen, it's fairly rare with modern medicine. Death in war on the other hand is an expected outcome for thousands or millions of men. If women were told that raising the children was optional after birth, then they'd only need to go through the pregnancy for 9 months, give birth, and then they'd be done which compares to the years-long requirements for many draftees, with unclear end dates. If I was behind the veil of ignorance and told I either had to be either a man reborn to be drafted in Ukraine's war, or a woman forced to bear a child for the state, I'd choose the latter pretty easily.
The main 2 differences I can see between drafting and forced childbirth are the following:
- Forced childbirth hasn't been seen as necessary historically since natural birthrates had been sufficient.
- The idea of forcing women to bear a large share of societal costs is seen as far more heinous than asking men to do the same.
Neither of these is very compelling in our current situation.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
Sure, that stuff looks like nonsense. Practically anything that goes to fund art or "culture" more broadly probably has a chance to end up funding some woke nonsense. That stuff is bad and it's good that Trump canned it.
In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised. The fact that Texas is lapping California when it comes to clean energy initiatives is a dire indictment of leftist governance at the state/local level.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
But I'll go on the record and say that generally, offering pardons to people who have made you personal money is Bad.
Thanks, I genuinely appreciate that. That’s the kind of thing I wish were more common.
MAGA can think Democrats are worse. They can think Republicans are the lesser evil. But at some point, if your own side does something bad, you have to be able to say so without immediately changing the subject.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
Anyone who complained about Hunter Biden's exploits should also be complaining about the multiple private events Trump has held for coin holders. Instead, MAGA shows volcanic rage at the former while the latter is shunted to the realm of "hard for me to care".
Also, Trump is using the coin as a conduit to basically sell off pardons.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. Both shoveled out insane amounts of money
These shoveled money everywhere. Sure, woke leftists ended up getting some amount of it I'm sure. But Texas also got a crapton of money for being the model state in rolling out renewable energy.
If the state government instructs the agencies to devise "regulations" that siphon money away
I don't know of many, if any examples of this happening. What usually occurs is the regulations have a decent reason to exist but which probably fail a cost-benefit analysis on net, with the reasoning that the optimal number of people dying to environmental hazards is not necessarily zero. And then a lot of them get abused by NIMBYs grasping for any veto-points they can find.
Memecoin, by contrast, is piker shit that only hurts the people involved.
Trump used the memecoin to effectively sell pardons off to people.
My personal bugbear is the $Trump meme coin which is exceptional for the scale x blatantness.
One of the big issues surrounding talks of corruption is that people have excessively expansive views of what is considered "corruption" when it comes to their outgroup, often devolving to little more than "they're doing something (anything) I disagree with". But I can't recall anything that comes close to what Trump did with the memcoin.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
multiple trillion dollar bills passed under Biden that did nothing but siphon money to leftists.
What bills are you referring to? I'm sure somewhere in the appropriations there might have been a few dozen million that got directed to progressive NGOs -- and I'd consider that a bad thing, mind you -- but nothing to the level of "multiple trillion dollar bills that did nothing but siphon money to leftists".
Why does it cost $150 billion to NOT build a rail line?
This is an issue of excessive regulation, not corruption. It's still a big problem and is a stain on California's reputation (and by extension all left-wing governance), but it's different then something like Trump's memecoin.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar
No clue what this is in reference to.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
MAGA is the most corrupt political movement in my lifetime in the US. It might be the most corrupt movement in US history, though I'm not sure how it would compare to some of the stuff in the Gilded Age. Republicans deflect the open corruption of Trump by presuming (mostly without evidence) that "all politicians do it, Trump is just honest about it!!!" Then they go off on something like Hunter Biden or Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.
And Dems don't care that much either, as they'd rather focus on hallucinations like Trump raping children with Epstein. The corruption might appear in the laundry lists of grievances they throw out against Trump, but it's hardly a motivating factor for most.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3mo ago
Reactionary predictions on elections like these have had a terrible track record in 2016, to some degree in 2020, and then very much in 2024. The US public has swapped the party in the White House with near metronomic frequency. If anything, the populist age has only made that tendency even more pronounced. The only thing that would stop this is the end of democracy in the US.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style?
If you don't specify a style then some image generators like the one chatGPT uses can default to a few particular styles that are either cartoony or overly elaborate. But you can also tell it to do a specific style that's not one of the defaults and then that problem goes away. And the default styles only look "repetitive and cheap" because people associate them with AI now, and there's a vocal contingent that wants to make people think AI = bad.
ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields.
Yes, it's been noted that people are far more hostile towards AI art then they are towards AI programming. But as a programmer I'm quite contemptuous of that view, as it implies art has this mystical, almost supernatural property that software never could, when in reality the vast majority of both software and art are purely functional.
Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings
You have it backwards: Westerners (including Americans) are the most anti-AI grouping, especially compared to Asians.
my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime
This is a pretty cold take.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
This is mixing two different issues. You're arguing against fraud, as in the buyer was promised one thing and was given another (e.g. quartz vs diamond). Provenance matters in that case because the transaction is explicitly about provenance.
That's not what happened here. Nobody was sold a counterfeit Monet. The problem was that people claimed they could identify AI art by looking at the image, then confidently condemned a real Monet as obvious AI slop. The lesson is that many people are laundering provenance anxiety as aesthetic expertise. When they think something is AI they suddenly "see" flaws that don't exist.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
I'm fascinated that you've labeled this as a left/right thing. Is that true? Have there been studies?
Only vibes for now. If I had to guess it's something like 55% of people don't care as long the end-product is high quality, 30% are anti AI with some being very loud, and 15% are explicitly pro AI. This is pretty uniform across the political spectrum from the far right to the center left, and then there's a discontinuity at the far left where it's closer to 30% don't care, 65% anti AI, and maybe 5% pro AI.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
Art has a functional component of looking nice or representing something, and the social component of representing the author or a time period. The vast majority of art in the world is aiming to do well at the former, while only a tiny percentage of high art is for the latter and ends up as museum pieces or in private collections. Oh, and there's the "my friend/child/GF made this".
If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true. Then when another round of evidence comes up that, no really, most people can't tell the difference, the conversation shifts motte-and-bailey style to "oh the problem is AI art doesn't have the social meaning", which is true in a small sense, but then they again try to imply that means all AI art is garbage. So there's a nugget of truth in that argument, but it's almost always presented in a bad-faith way.
On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.
You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil. So you can find people opposed to AI art basically anywhere, although it's clearly not universal. But on the far-left specifically (mostly the woke Bluesky types) the opposition to AI art is monolithic.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
Fine art will almost certainly survive if only to continue serving as a defacto entry point to money laundering.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
Interesting story. I've played a ton of modded Rimworld, though I've not made any mods for it myself. I have made mods for games like Vic 3 (here's one of my mods) and AoW4, and have used AI for the art. Nobody said anything, though granted my mods don't have a ton of users or anything. But still, it seems like there's a weird parallel world going on where all you might get is a snide comment here and there, while on the other hand are threads like this excoriating AI use in mods in pretty harsh terms. If anything it seems like the anti-AI hysteria has only gotten worse over the past few years.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
This is... an interesting mindset. It seems like you're cognizant of its shortcomings and aren't really trying to proselytize it so I would never be too hostile towards it when the average person has so many dumb beliefs that they're obnoxiously overconfident in.
But as a former edgy atheist I feel compelled to push back at least a little bit. I think you should value truth more highly as an end in and of itself. Sure, people want the answers that religion provide, e.g. "where did we come from", and especially "what happens to us after we die!?!" It's nice to think there's a big "plan" and that we get a nice big reward after life in the form of "heaven" to go to. But it's just not true, and the questions that faith answers are in reality either unknowable, or have mundane answers that aren't very satisfying.
You’ve redescribed faith as existential nicotine. I understand the craving, but the fact that a cigarette calms withdrawal is not an argument that smoking is good. You also have what seems like a bit of a cognitive defense mechanism towards the end with the Das Kapital and Libertarian philosophy bits. To me, that reads like you think that if a person doesn't have religion then they'd just fall back on some secular philosophy and be religiously fanatical towards that instead. And since we all have our "religion", being Christian is hardly a vice even if it's not logically supported, right? But the real lesson to draw from that is not "therefore religious faith is fine." The lesson is "humans are prone to motivated belief and ideological addiction across the board, so we should be more suspicious of all such attachments."
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
In my experience working on an indie game, trying to commission art pre-AI was extremely hit-or-miss. Artists were extremely flaky and sometimes had weird hangups with stuff like "commercial use". Maybe you could find consistent high-quality artists willing to work for $30, but I was trying to pay well above that ($50 for a basic 2D character, $100 for more complicated 2D background images) that I was told was on the lower end of the market rate, and still found it extremely difficult to find anyone that wouldn't randomly ghost me for months at a time.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
You're already presuming that those of us who say "yes we do believe in the superstitions" are lying.
This is not my presumption. If you tell me that you believe in (supernatural) God and Jesus, I'll trust that's your genuine belief.
Well yes, if one were to hold themselves up as a "Christian", but didn't actually believe in (supernatural) God, then I'd qualify that as pretty hollow belief. And the term "cosplaying" would not be inaccurate.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
Thank you for being honest.
My question to you would be: why is faith enough for you? Religious communities hold up faith as this wonderfully good thing, but all that faith means is that you believe something without evidence. You're giving in to wishful thinking. Granted, everybody (including me!) does that to some extent, but it's generally seen as a failure-mode of human cognition. Why admit that openly, and do nothing to try to resolve it?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4mo ago
Another social experiment regarding AI art: A Twitter user posts a real Monet painting and says it's AI. The results are about what you'd expect. A few people say they can't tell the difference, but a lot of people arrogantly claim the "AI-generated" image is complete trash. Lots of very confident-sounding nonsense about "composition", color theory, brushstrokes, random little details about the plants, etc. Reddit discussions are here and here. The response afterwards seems to mostly center around a motte-and-bailey that pretends nobody made any claims about how AI does on the formal qualities of artwork, but that human art is still vastly better due to vague notions of "artistic intent".
The Left's antipathy towards AI art is well-known by this point. I did a small experiment to see if the Right was as susceptible and can report that at least some users are. It seems like the Right is split with some users being open to AI art on pragmatic grounds, some liking it simply due to the Left hating it, and some are just as opposed as the Left and let it cloud their judgement. I posted some modded AI artwork for Slay the Spire 2 on /v/ and had a decent chunk of users saying the usual "ugh this looks terrible". Then I started including official card art from the game for comparison while still implying it was all AI-generated, and the response got even worse. The card art for Abrasive, Squash, and Secret Technique attracted particular scorn. Again, this is human-made art that revealed preferences show nobody really has a problem with, yet the responses they got when people thought they were AI included the following:
You're posting stuff your average pixiv prompt jockey would consider low quality.
That genuinely looks like MSPaint quality.
This looks like shit doe. But I guess AIjeets don't have taste.
By "this good" do you mean like cheap clip-art? Or do you think that's actually good art?
I kind of doubt we have many true-believer Christians on the forum. There's plenty of cultural Christians, i.e. people who don't really believe in the superstitions but nevertheless have their arguments cosplay some hollow Christian aesthetics as a mostly futile attempt to craft a broader right-wing worldview. And I bet we have an even bigger swathe of people who don't believe in that, but see cultural Christians as "fellow travelers" in the fight against the Left, and so they give them a free pass.
When I've tried to debate some actual true-believers on here, it's always gone badly since they mostly trend towards metaphysics, which in terms of debating bears a very close resemblance to conspiracy theorists in that it's very jargon-heavy, highly specific to the individual, and ultimately unfalsifiable.
You're not wrong. I also think wokists are vile.
The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.
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