faceh
19d ago
Its MORE likely that Gen Z guys are "inadequate" because
A) They've grown up in a society that both teaches them they're worthless AND that women are inherently better than them. (also gives them almost no real 'purpose' to contribute to)
B) The women they interact with have ALSO ingested that same message, and will reinforce it to those men.
C) There's literally no reward for resisting this message, and fewer women are worth BECOMING adequate for.
I dunno, I think that's the basic causal situation. There's literally no other way you can spin it.
Porn and gambling addictions, for example, are much more widespread in this generation than in the previous ones, and male employment is often less stable.
And this just swept up young guys on its own? A bunch of guys just UNILATERALLY, for no reason whatsoever, decided not to become worthy? Just like that?
Why?
The end result being that women are unhappy seems incidental to the devaluation of masculinity.
faceh
19d ago
But I’m sympathetic to your worries, and hope you find a woman who allows you to lay them aside.
I'M not the one you have to worry about.
The Zoomers are not okay.
And the women are not happy.
Your platitudes appear to be missing something LARGE, and it really isn't explained by men being inadequately reliable.
faceh
20d ago
The mainstream rejoinder would be that your buddy must had been No True Trustworthy Husband or his wife would never have left him—that he must had become lazy or neglectful after marriage-trapping her, was financially or emotionally abusive behind the scenes, or thought of her as a broodmare for the family business.
Yep. But I spent a lot of time hanging out with him in a variety of circumstances and I have not gotten an INKLING that he was anything other than what he presents himself as. Never heard a whisper of an accusation of abuse.
If there was ever a paradigm of the "non-toxic" masculinity that feminists proclaim they want (I know, I know), he was it.
The biggest critique you could level against him is that he is a bit of a manchild when it came to hobbies. But he had his life completely in order otherwise, he was REALLY GOOD at his hobbies (Magic: The Gathering is one of them) and perhaps most importantly: his wife was into nerdy hobbies too!
While they were married his wife went and got her Master's Degree, so I could have ascribed their split to her getting 'overeducated' compared to him. But shortly thereafter Bro went and got his MBA so he was matching her beat for beat.
Learning what happened to them soured my last bit of optimism for forming relationships in the current era. She was a 6 at best, raised in a traditional family, had a relatively low body count (i.e. they met while she was in college, around age 21, so she hadn't had that much time to sleep around), she was a sorority girl (and not the blonde bimbo stereotype), he had tons of money, was willing to spend it on her, no red flags, and while they were together they pretty much presented as having everything they wanted. And it wasn't enough to make it even 4 years into a marriage (they dated for about 2.5 before they got engaged).
My one theory is that she watched a few of her friends go through breakups and complain about their men and got incepted with the idea that either she could do better if she left him (i.e. she married too early) or that he was going to become an abusive monster at some point and she better get out before then.
Yup.
I happen to think being trustworthy will in fact help you find a good woman.
But it won't hope you attract women in general.
Which is a necessary step in most cases.
I've realized that the 'cheat code' is buying a motorcycle and getting ostentatious tattoos and at least one (1) subversive piercing. Nips, large gauges in the ears, Prince Albert, I think even nose piercings 'work' for guys these days. Its an old, OLD trick but it still works if you're willing to at least LARP the part.
This signals enough riskiness to get the initial interest going.
Meanwhile, if you're good looking AND you work as hard as you can to be perceived as 'safe' and 'reliable' you're effectively squandering that natural advantage, and you're more likely going to be defected against when she realizes there are no consequences for doing so, you won't even raise your voice to yell at her.
I watched it happen to a buddy of mine. He was the literal pinnacle of 'ideal' hubby. Successful (heir to a large regional chain of interior decor stores, pulling down six figs), charming and witty, even though he's not an Adonis, popular among his friends, takes the wife on trips, indulges her whims, but also makes sure he has time for his own (nerdy) hobbies. Not a pushover, but would never dream of striking or upsetting her. Marries a very mid but definitely cute wife. They have an expensive fairy-tale wedding, honeymoon, etc. etc.
And three years into the marriage, for no reason that I can even decipher, she just up and leaves him, he tries counseling, gives it every single try for reconciliation, and no dice. THANKFULLY it ended up being an 'uncontested' divorce with no kids (despite him being VERY CLEAR up front that he wanted kids, remember that family business he's got).
In an 'ideal' world this should never happen, he played everything 'by the rules.' And still lost.
A good woman, of course, won't do this, but if you're a safe, 'boring' type of guy then you won't have your choice of woman to even try and zero in on the 'good' ones.
If you choose a couple stats to max out, trustworthy probably shouldn't be one of them.
faceh
20d ago
I would add the caveat that women hold most of the power over the majority of men WHILE a particular class of man is still able to ultimately get what he wants and ignore the consequences at will. So women can still CLAIM that men are privileged and running things b/c at the very top levels, this is still true.
And this is the lesson I 'fear' young men are learning. If you're an average man, your life is going to be subjugated to female whims from birth until almost death. If you piss off, harm, or otherwise insult a woman you will be pilloried and probably locked out of the reproductive success game entirely.
UNLESS you're in the top 20% of males by status. Wait now its 10%. Now its 1%. Now its .1%. Those guys can flout social rules, laws, and ignore female complaints to just take the thing they want at will. Its good to be the king.
Guys who grow up being viscerally aware of the game and their place in it are either going to compete AGGRESSIVELY to take one of those top slots, and thereby keep raising the level of competition to even higher levels, or will drop out entirely rather than support the 'rigged contest.
but that many people ignore one or the other or the third condition. There are simply fewer Mr and Miss good enoughs than there used to be
This seems like an unavoidable but broadly ignored factor.
The rough numbers really suggest the supply of 'marriageable' women is shockingly low. The demand is as high as ever. A young, stable, fertile woman is desired by men of almost all ages, even if they have no intention of marrying her.
And I'm sure its also the case that when it comes to sheer reproductive fitness, men have become lower quality too.
I don’t have a good solution on a society wide level.
I do have some, but they're not politically viable (until they are).
I have wondered if we could create a new version of the marriage contract: "Enhanced Marriage," which both parties can opt into that makes it MUCH harder to get divorced AND adds additional legal duties on both sides (and presumably some additional benefits) so that they are tied more strongly together. And maybe this starts to shift the equilibrium.
But this probably doesn't address the fact that there are just fewer relationships forming in general.
I think this is leaving out another viable life path that satisfies all the criteria you're ascribing to women:
Have a kid with a man who has proven wealth/means, then demonstrate his paternity or marry him. Then have a court of law require him to pay for the child's upbringing until age 18. If married then you can get some alimony too out of the divorce. And a bonus there is you can then find another man who might be willing to pitch in some support too and 'double dip'. For some reason the term 'divorce' doesn't appear anywhere in your original post.
And from the man's perspective, either of those is probably a worst case scenario.
Either the man is a cad who doesn't WANT to support kids and is now tied to them for years on end.
Or it was a man who really wanted to have a family for the long term, would have supported them anyway, and yet gets them ripped away on the say of the woman he trusted, with no real recourse.
Woman gets her support and control, man gets...
And we're seeing the emergence of a strange additional option as well:
Pop out a billionaire's kid on the downlow and he pays a very generous amount to keep you and the child in comfort even if he's not particularly involved, as long as he thinks it is actually his kid. I won't pretend this path is all that common, though.
This really goes AGAINST your point here, though:
If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily.
The 'reproduction thing' seems to come easiest to men who are the least trustworthy, most ruthless, most wealthy, and generally most 'aggressive' about what they want. Yes, some of them can ACT like they're trustworthy, but only as a means to get what they want. And this works about as well as being 'actually' trustworthy.
Being 'trustworthy' just makes you an easier mark. You'll accept a woman you believe is committed to you, do EVERYTHING you can to prove your commitment, and she can still leave on a comparative whim and hang support obligations around your neck on the way out.
The game theory here is not favorable to being the guy who truly commits, when the risk is the woman has no reciprocal investment and can defect at will, and 'retaliating' against her is legally forbidden.
In short, I think you're arguing as though women shoulder most of the risks in the current romantic equation.
When there's a serious argument that it works the opposite way. Society is built around protecting women from any and all threats.
This includes the threat of homelessness and poverty. Men, generally, foot the bill for all this protection, and yet are also forced to pay out to the particular woman who defects from them on top of that.
And so the man is risking HUGE sums of his personal wealth (bought by his own time, efforts, sweat, etc.) to TRY to keep the woman around.
And men have to offer some extreme value ON TOP of that protection (because the protection is provided as a baseline by society) to acquire a woman's commitment, and even then he has no recourse if she decides she doesn't want to stay anymore. And if he married her, she gets to siphon off resources from him to support herself and her kids ANYWAY.
Leaving out this side of the equation makes your overall argument here more dubious, in my opinion.
(and I will surely admit that women DO risk being severely injured or killed by their partner, but this is strongly mediated by factors that she can also control).
faceh
21d ago
What does this have to do with anything? They'll keep importing soybeans from Brazil and iron from Australia.
Will they?
Population decline isn't limited to China.
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/birth-rate-continues-decline
Lot of countries in the same boat. Every country wrangling with population decline at around the same time means they all have to handle internal economic strife, and may not be able to maintain productivity needed to export as much.
Do you just operate on the assumption that China is a land of mobilized peasants gluing sneakers by hand, and when peasants get old, the gig is over?
I operate on the assumption that China relies on international trade, and the PRIMARY value they provide to trade for is cheap skilled labor and, concurrently, massively industrialized manufacturing.
Both of which rely heavily on their population remaining steady.
I operate on the assumption that China has no fallbacks if they lose the ability to provide cheap labor and manufacturing to the world.
There is definitely an assumption by the AI doomerists that intelligence can make you god tier. I'm not sure I'll ever buy this argument until I'm literally being tortured to death by a god tier controlled robot. Physical world just doesn't seem that easy to grok and manipulate. I think of intelligence as leverage on the physical world. But you need counter weight to make that leverage work.
The most interesting theory I've read on why AI might not do a hard takeoff is the result of a 'meta-alignment' problem.
Even if you have an AGI that is, say 100x human intelligence, it cannot be physically everywhere at once. And it will have subroutines that could very well be AGI in their own right. And it could, for example, spin off smaller 'copies' of itself to 'go' somewhere else and complete tasks on its behalf.
But this creates an issue! If the smaller copy is, say, 10x human intelligence, its still intelligent enough to possibly bootstrap itself to become a threat to the original AGI. Maybe a superintelligent AGI can come up with the foolproof solution there, or maybe it is a truly intractable issue.
So how does the AGI 'overlord' ensure that any of its 'minions' or 'subroutines' are all aligned with its goals and won't, say attempt to kill the overlord to usurp them after they bootstrap themselves to be approximately as intelligent as the overlord.
It could try using agents that are just a bit too dumb to do that, but then they aren't as effective as agents.
So even as the AGI gets more and more intelligent, it may have to devote an increasing amount of its resources to supervising and restraining its agents lest they get out of control themselves, since it can't fully trust them to stay aligned, any more than we could trust the original AGI to be aligned.
This could theoretically cap the max 'effective' intelligence of any entity at much lower than could be achieved under truly optimal conditions.
Also the idea of a God-like entity having to keep its 'children' in line, maybe even consuming them to avoid being overpowered is reminding me of something.
faceh
23d ago
Do you seriously imagine that economies of scale in a nation with 5x the American workforce will amount to Wile-E-Coyote running off a cliff.
Yes. Find me a single instance in history where a nation was able smoothly transition through a period of declining population as the old begin to outnumber the young.
Especially one that is utterly dependent on continued imports of agricultural products and energy and most raw materials for that workforce to do anything productive.
https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-imported-food-thats-problem
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62804
They are simply unprepared to weather any situation where they can't afford to purchase necessary economic inputs from other countries.
Which is what their population cliff threatens to cause.
faceh
23d ago
I don't see the disagreement?
The economy will have to contract, this will lead to lower standards of living, and thus there's no way China can maintain its status as a continually growing economy?
Britain and the EU won't buy beef from hormone-fed cattle. The way they talk about it, this probably won't change.
Sounds like they may align with RFK Jr.'s stance. It'd be interesting if that creates enough of a market for hormone-free cattle that it shifts U.S. production as a whole.
I don't have any specific insight as to intentions there, but I assume markets will respond to shifted incentives like that.
As discussed previously this is a nothingburger, but if it makes Trump happy, good job Zelensky.
I'm pretty sure the main goal of that particular provision is to give the U.S. a "stake" in Ukrainian independence that falls short of bringing them into NATO, but justifies them having some kind of presence in country to act as a deterrent.
Like holy cow, your own article points out:
“There are four slightly bigger deposits: Yastrubetske, Novopoltavske, Azovske, and Mazurivske. All but one of them seem to be now within or near the zone that the Russians control, as far as I can tell”
So if the U.S. has an official agreement granting an interest in those deposits, even if its not mineable now, its a decent deterrent to future Russian incursions into the border areas that Russia would have to cross through to drive into Ukraine. It gives a future U.S. president some basic cover to drop some troops or similar in, if needed.
The U.S. keeps finding deposits of rare earth elements and other resources within its own territory (whether they can be extracted economically is a different question).
There is no SOLID reason the U.S. should have any stake in the security of Ukraine, but contriving one that's enough to give plausible cover for future actions is helpful towards leveraging a peace agreement.
This is what I'm trying to get across, if you assume Trump is JUST trying to secure the first order goal, getting more minerals for the U.S., rather than using that as leverage to work towards a lasting peace agreement, you're severely underestimating the man. Hell, he's apparently gotten Ukraine actually paying for U.S. weapons now. A second step seems to be using American companies to rebuild Ukraine, but I'll go on record saying that rebuilding probably won't solve their their population nosedive so in the longer term it'll be a bit pointless.
faceh
24d ago
Unless China is absolutely fudging their population numbers to UNDERCOUNT their population drastically (which would be a galaxy-brained move) then they are absolutely fucked in the medium term. There is no way to counterbalance a population where there's a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit) and not nearly enough producers (young-middle aged workers) to keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living.
Its baked in. The collapse will come, Wile-E-Coyote already ran off the cliff, but they may be able to keep him from looking down for a while with propaganda and manipulation, or manage the fall down better than expected.
How does this line up with your personal predictions for how this was going to proceed?
Giving myself credit for calling this one, although we can quibble over exact timing. I tried to keep my head down a bit until the outcome could truly be called.
Quoth me:
So my full expectation is that there will be a couple weeks of rapidfire and rough negotiations with some touch-and-go moments, but ultimately other nations will do the needful and come the end of April Trump will make a YUUUGE fanfare about signing Tariff reductions and trade agreements with those countries that capitulated, and markets will 'correct course.'
(I solemnly swear I didn't edit anything material in this post to make my prediction look better)
and
I will precommit now, that if other countries actively take steps to reduce tariffs and otherwise appease Trump's demands and Trump is too temperamental to accept these offers in good faith and we still have most of these Tarriffs in place at the same levels come May 2nd 2025 (unless real deals are pending come that date), it is a bad thing and we will be in for some rough times. I will criticize/condemn Trump and Co. in no uncertain terms.
I think my May 2nd deadline was also met, since China was technically the ONLY holdout that still had massive Tariffs on it at that point.
And then there's this bit from the OP article:
U.S. stocks rallied hard on the announcement. Futures contracts for the U.S. benchmark S&P 500 index gained by 2.5 percent, putting the index higher than where it was before the “Liberation Day” package, after it had fallen by more than 12 percent.
Remember what I said up there: "and markets will 'correct course.'
I'm sure there will be other disruptions, but someone can probably run some numbers and tell me if this recovery basically makes all the turmoil of early April a wash in terms of broad economic impact (on the markets, that is). WHICH IS TO SAY, if all the doomsaying and gnashing of teeth at the time was... premature and melodramatic.
I continue to think my Model of Trump is far better at predicting his actions than virtually any pundit out there, and he's far more of a rational actor than even people here credit him. Yes, I'll accept the argument that Trump backed down faster because he was afraid of really breaking something, but the whole argument is over whether the U.S. will find itself in a stronger position after all this is done. I see this as evidence that yes, the U.S. will be able to reduce global 'paper' barriers to trade, and other countries may be handing over some tribute to the U.S. to keep in its good graces for the next few years.
The one thing I admit surprise over is that there's been relatively few deals regarding the purchase of U.S. goods OR offers to sell foreign resources. The U.K. is apparently going to buy U.S. Beef, and the Ukraine Mineral Deal is signed, and I guess there's some additional deals with Vietnam. Honestly I can say I thought there'd be more capitulation by now, but now there's a new deadline in place.
So maybe Trump hasn't brought home the bacon just yet.
To add on to my prediction, I'll say I expect that the 'final' deals being worked on during the pause will start getting executed BEFORE the one month countdown mark hits, that is we should start seeing them in the next 60 days.
I do expect more hard agreements for purchases of resources and goods, and I ALSO expect some legislation might follow that is designed to bolster U.S. manufacturing for military purposes (i.e. aimed at onshoring factories that can produce tanks, ammunition, planes, and ESPECIALLY boats).
As we get a bit closer to the deadline, I might take a stab at guessing which countries might try calling his bluff and letting the timer run out. I'm not so blind as to expect everything to go completely smoothly. I wouldn't have called the India-Pakistan kerfuffle starting up for example.
faceh
24d ago
This is actually a very defensible position
It was a very defensible position every time, then some new advance blew past it.
I'll listen to the defense, but I'm not placing my bets on that side.
"Mid-Budget Hollywood" would be approximately any recent A24 film..
With stringent enough definition and an agreeable arbiter, I'd put up $500 in favor of it, at even odds.
Note I'm NOT saying the film gets a theatrical release or gets published on a streaming platform, just that someone releases the movie for the viewing public, even if its just a random download link, and an average American citizen could watch it and NOT immediately guess it was AI-Generated. Doesn't have to fool a film buff, but also could fool an adult, not just a kid.
I'd also still consider it a win if the film were less than 90 minutes long, but that's the fairish benchmark for 'feature length' that would differentiate it from a TV episode.
faceh
24d ago
I am kind of in the middle ground between "they are just stupid stochastic parrots, they don't think!" and "obviously they will develop super-intelligent subagents if we just throw more neurons at the problem!", while I suspect that you are a bit more likely to agree with the former.
I think this falls into the "shoggoth wearing a smiley face mask" meme that came about last year.
Its very clear to me that there's something in there that we can consider "intelligent" that is performing "reasoning." (I avoid the terms "cognition" and "consciousness" or "qualia" here).
It takes inputs, performs some kind of calculations and produce an output that is meaningfully derived from the inputs and this means it can do useful 'work' with that info. Inferences, formation of beliefs, and possibly analyzing the truth value of a statement.
But the processes by which it does that DO NOT resemble human intelligence, we've just made it capable of accepting human-legible inputs and expressing its outputs in human legible form too.
So expecting it to think 'efficiently' the way humans do is missing the forest for the trees. Or perhaps the brain for the neurons.
Hell, maybe it never really masters novel-writing before it gets smart enough to kill everyone, but it got good at the set of skills it needed while we were trying to teach it to write novels.
I predict that once the cost of GPUs gets low enough (or models get efficient enough) people will literally be writing and producing full scale movies at home.
I'm willing to predict a >50% chance that some guy in his basement (okay, maybe expand it to a "dedicated team of five or fewer people") manage to produce a feature length (90 minute) film that is completely AI Generated and, to the general audience's view, is on par with a mid or low-budget Hollywood fare, in terms of 'quality' of the end product... by the end of THIS year. Its already been 1 year since I saw the Shadowglades 'trailer' which, despite being just 2 minutes of disconnected imagery, portrayed a world I would really like to enter and set stories in. And just today those folks put out a new trailer that is just as visually interesting, and much more dynamic and coherent! I can tell who the protagonist is!
I'd predict it WON'T be an action movie because no video AI I've seen can produce a legible fight scene, plus all the model restrictions on depicting violence. Not Scorcese quality for sure, and it'll play to AI's strengths and eschew its shortcomings, but it will be coherent visually and plotwise.
But even if that basement guy started TODAY, if he can produce 1 minute of usable footage a day, on average, it'd be 90 days to get the footage, which leaves another 90 to edit, adjust, produce (AI generated) soundtrack, and fine tune actor performances and 'line reads'. Doable for a dedicated enough, decently talented enthusiast with enough money to burn on the credits. And that assumes someone isn't already halfway done with one already.
I'm already champing at the bit to start work on the pilot episode of an anime adaptation of one of my favorite books, and the early results I've been getting with just the free options available have convinced me I could pull off producing a ~20 minute episode in about 1 month if I were able to fully 'lock in' to doing it. I won't lock in, life just won't allow that right now but it'd be such an invigorating project that, like you and your pulp novel generator, I'd be willing to spend like $100/month or so just working on it for the sheer pleasure of seeing the end product, even if its never published or enjoyed by anyone else.
faceh
24d ago
The sticking point now is no longer extra fingers or shadows going in the wrong direction (though most AIs will still make little mistakes that are tells for the observant- but these can be easily repaired!) but just the fact that it's still painful to go back and forth to get exactly the exactly the pose, position, expression, color shade, background, accessories, species of flower, that you want.
This feels like MOSTLY a solved problem with ChatGPT's o3 image generation capability.
You can feed it a few reference images for what you're trying to get to, including poses and background with a sufficiently precise prompt you WILL get something very, VERY accurate to your intentions. It does NOT do a great job on making precise adjustments from there, and currently it doesn't do inpainting but take the image it produced and running it through Stable Diffusion or just manual photoshop gets you to the finish line.
One thing its is actually very good at is feeding it an image representing a tattoo you're thinking of getting, feeding it an image of your bare skin in the area you want that tattoo, then it can produce an image showing you what that tattoo would look like. And THEN you can pay a human artist to hopefully execute on that vision well.
I have had annoying problems where it remembers something you asked for earlier and keeps including that in the image even after you tell it to move on or forget, but that's fixed by starting a new window with the most recent output.
I don't see how a human artist can outcompete this on cost or time. I CAN see how you might still pay a human to actually do the work of interacting with the AI and modifying outputs to get close to a particular vision.
Similarly, SONG PRODUCTION is now just about indistinguishable from full human now. To me, a decently done full AI song will have almost zero tells unless the creator set out to make it obvious.
I don't doubt AI will continue to improve and eventually we'll have the first award-winning novel completely written by AI that even experts agree is actually... kinda good. But I am skeptical. I think it will take a while.
Betting against the AI capabilities approaching peak human is probably a losing proposition unless we ARE very, very close to the plateau of what can be achieved with the current paradigm.
AI is now better than the best chess players, and better than the best GO players, and while Novel-writing is a different combination of skills and intellect than either of those, the AIs have already learned to write coherently and so I expect tacking on the additional capabilities will scale the machine into Stephen King territory pretty quickly.
Not disagreeing, and indeed I don't think any legal processes have been invoked here.
But how much should women's feelings be accommodated in these sorts of informal social conflicts? As much as we don't want explicit written rules there's a void left when the rules are allowed to be written ad hoc as technology advances.
The situation's "severity" seems to me that if he and his organization had stood his ground, said "look I'm deleting everything and I'll take a social media hiatus, but nobody has been hurt and the team is more important" they'd probably have come through alright.
faceh
24d ago
I mean that gives the game away.
Those ones hate men perceiving them in ways they don't consent to. Across the board.
They'd object if the guy was imagining them in their underwear or a bikini. They'd object if he was imagining them wearing a sundress and looking at them with loving desire.
If its a man they DO want fantasizing about them, they'd just as soon want to project the fantasy images into his mind to get his attention.
We sort of know this because as soon as phones were able to send photos, attractive guys started getting lewd and nude photos sent to them, often unsolicited! Same deal.
So there's your question, should we be taking efforts to control men's thought processes and how they use their own computer hardware in order to accommodate/protect women's feelings?
faceh
24d ago
I should genuinely have known better than to trust a reddit link to work as intended.
Creation/Possession of Deepfakes as a scandal is kind of interesting to me.
On a basic level, this reads to me as the epitome of a victimless crime. If the existence of the images is not revealed, then no harm can possibly result. And we can presume no rules were really breached to create them, if the guy WASN'T taking creepshots and just pulled images posted to social media to feed the generator. And there's (currently) no evidence that producing them makes it likely the 'perp' will try any further inappropriate behavior.
Its obvious that producing the deepfakes is labelled as "creepy"; but why precisely?
On the spectrum of ways to sexualize a person this seems maybe slightly 'worse' than vividly imagining them naked but on the same order of magnitude of pasting a cutout of their head onto a nudie mag or maybe doing some extra work and photoshopping their face onto an existing nude photo. Maybe also worse than finding a pornstar that is a close enough doppelganger that you can squint a bit and make it work.
Also add in the fact that he HAS (had?) a girlfriend so he's not a complete loser, even ignoring he's a talented martial artist with a decent social media following (169k instagram followers is impressive by normal standards, no?). This isn't your stereotypical incel who disgusts women by his mere presence and mannerisms.
Socially, well yeah I can understand why this hurts his status... but again, would it be 'better' if his porn habits/browser history leaked and it was just standard fare or maybe niche fetish material? Certainly embarrassing but I think most onlookers would just kind of nod and say "to each their own" and pretend they didn't see it (unless they need to roast him later). Its the deepfaking in particular that makes him mildly radioactive.
Best I can muster is that it does display some bad judgment to keep files proving you masturbate to your 'colleagues' sitting around. "We need to boot you now on the offchance there's a worse skeleton hiding in your closet, if you're stupid enough to have this one." Definitely an HR risk in that sense.
But if I were to guess as the real reason it led to immediate ostracization, its simply that its 'hoe-scaring' behavior and the other guys are unwilling to stand up for him if it will reduce their appeal to women in general, and women interested BJJ in particular. Yes, I can see it would be 'bad' to have this guy present if other women were noticeably uncomfortable with it. But its not because he actually poses any real threat to them, its more that he's breached the general rule that the one and only way its 'acceptable' to see a woman naked is with her explicit consent, and then, only WHILE that consent is being given, and not a second longer. If that's the implicit or explicit social rule, then spying/peeping tom behavior, creepshotting, aggressively soliciting nudes, AND deepfaking are all approximately the same level of bad. Oh, and defending someone who did any such behavior also tars you with the brush.
I guess I'll leave it on this question: assuming it is 'wrong' to make deepfakes of women you know, what could possibly be the proper punishment/restitution/retribution to make things right again? I'll immediately grant "delete any and all copies of the images." But if the 'damage' is all emotional/psychological there's not much one can do other than let time heal the 'wound.'
And to be clear there are certainly things one could do with deepfakes that I think unambiguously cross lines of decency and morality, such as:
-
Sending the deepfakes to the intended subject knowing it will cause distress.
-
Publishing or distributing them, especially if you imply that they are genuine.
-
Attempting blackmail, whether it succeeds or not.
-
Impersonating the subject, obviously.
-
And hell, I'd even say accepting money to produce them at someone else's bequest is suspect, even if you don't keep them.
These are mostly covered under existing legal concepts like defamation or harassment.
Yep.
There's a 'clumping' effect on the bottom end when there aren't strong incentives to stay in the middle road (due to that not getting you what you want, and STILL carrying the risk of losing it all) and its too hard to climb to the top rungs (without a ton of help).
You either have so much wealth that you can afford to lose tons of it, or you have like NO wealth, and don't give a single care due to having nothing TO lose.
And as you indicated (and as young men are noticing...) if you can't catapult yourself to the former position of fuck you, then it starts making MORE sense to drop down the to latter, lower position, because at least you can do what you WANT to do, rather than play by rules you can't change and punish you heavily.
If the middle position is the only one where punishments matter, very few will want to stay there, even if its overall best for the collective.
More options
Context Copy link