functor
2yr ago
Will AI bring back beauty?
Looking at midjourney's top pieces of art I am struck by the beauty in them. They contain detail, high degrees of realism even when depicting surrealist themes. They tend to be symmetrical and often portray idealized versions of reality. AI art tends to portray archetypal depicitions of its motifs and often excludes blemmishes, dirt and grime.
Compare it with corporate memphis a primarily human generated art form that has gained significant traction in the public space in the past decade. This is the most expensive painting painted by a living woman.
Compare the buildings drawn by the AI with the best exterior of 2022 in Sweden according to architects.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want. People want visually stunning rather than the output of the art community.
functor
1yr ago
They were fighting for a homogenous high trust society that was self-sufficient and built to last. They fought against communists and liberals who wanted a centralized global order with bland global materialism. They defended Europe from Stalin and their loss is turning western Europe into North Africa/middle east. Germany would not be in severe demographic decline with large scale third world immigration if they had won. They wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism and bland American consumerism.
functor
4mo ago
Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?
For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride. Russia isn't putting LGBTQAASASFDSFDSFDSFDSFSD people in concentration camps, they simply seem not to have pride flags while having a don't ask don't tell attitude. Why does that infuriate liberals that much?
Countries in the middle east can engage in all sorts of questionable behaviour but, often it is a lack of LGBTQ flags that infuriates the left. Again, they aren't mass-executing LGBTQ people or having concentrations camps, they simply don't celebrate it or want it rubbed in people's faces.
It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?
functor
1yr ago
People only commit crimes due to poverty when they are truly desperate. A person who has no food may steal, even if they are a mentally sound and moral person.
People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status. The young man who gets into a violent fit of rage and stabs someone when someone cut in front of a line at a night club isn't going to be less violent with more money. The factor that is commonly ignored is social status. A young man with no money, who lives in a ghetto, has poor academic results, has never travelled and doesn't have the looks for instagram is going to be the ultimate low status loser. Imagine using tinder as a cleaner, living with three friends in a dumpy apartment on the wrong side of town. In Sweden, members of this class often have the added disadvantage of being immigrants from countries with an average height well below the average height in Sweden and speaking subpar Swedish. If that guy becomes a gangster, he is a somebody. People will respect him, women will like him, and he will walk past the bouncers who used to reject him.
The welfare state can never give people status. They can give food and some basic entertainment, but it will never make people happy or satisfied. It reduces underclass men to being rescue dogs and ersatz children for middle class girls with sociology degrees. That might be enough for someone who was recently freezing to death on the streets, but it isn't going to satisfy a 24-year-old pizza delivery man.
functor
1yr ago
A mass scale war crime to block food and water to 2.3 million people. Using war crimes to punish a population is an excellent way to get the world to hate you and the victims to never forget.
functor
8mo ago
The big trend with the GWB was the abolishment of the rules of war. There were no prisoners of war, only terrorists who can be tortured in any which way. There can be no negotiation because the enemy are terrorists and are just fundamentally evil. Pashtuns can't have any reason to oppose the Afghan government.
Palestinians are completely justified in having armed resistance and participating in an armed conflict. They are not terrorists, they are armed combatants participating in an armed conflict. There is no special terrorist clause in the Geneva convention.
Israel is an occupying force and is responsible for the people they are occupying. Israel is clearly trying to depopulate Gaza in order to steal the land.
functor
2yr ago
I still see no plausible scenario for these AI-extinction events. How is chat-GPT 4/5/6 etc. supposed to end humanity? I really don't see the mechanism? Is it supposed to invent an algorithm that destroys all encryption? Is it supposed to spam the internet with nonesense? Is it supposed to brainwash someone into launching nukes? I fail to see the mechanism for how this end of the world scenario happens.
functor
5mo ago
It is a genocide. First off 80% of the population of Gaza are there because they or their ancestors were forced into Gaza and have been locked in Gaza ever since.
Israel has denied them food, bombed them at an astounding rate and murdered tens of thousands of people. Judaism is a religion which holidays are celebrations of Bronze age genocides of neighbouring tribes and that rhetoric has been used liberally during the war. While Israeli soldiers have been committing war crimes on an industrial scale they haven't been shy about referencing their historic genoicides.
Israel has shown that it is incapable of of taking an area the size of a city against an enemy with no logistics. The war started with Israeli soldiers crying in a bathroom of a well fortified position while getting smoked by men in sandals, and ended with Israelis being unable to fight. Israel has ended up deeply divided and is in a permanent state of crisis. Israels situation today is similar to the situation of French Algeria in the 50s or Vietnam in the 60s. They have a population that hates them and the cost of containing it is too great. Israel isn't a sustainable state and the Arabs know that they can outlast them as long as they sustain the pressure.
the complete inability of the western civilian , and by extension politician, to understand what war actually is
Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor. The cowardly and brutal fighting style has once again reminded Europeans why the jewish mindset is fundamentally incompatible with the western mindset and how the Semitic/MENA culture simply is not anything we want to deal with. Israel's popularity has plummeted in the west, especially among younger people who consume their news through social media, which is less controlled by the ADL. The same Jewish institutions who attack westerners for the slightest ethnocentrism have the chutzpah to try to justify bombing the Christians in the middle east so they can build summer homes on the west bank.
functor
10mo ago
They have no other option.
They have created a society in which people have less sex than ever, have fewer children than ever and can only dream of getting the housing their parents had at the same age. They have no idea how to fix it so the result is to find ways to make the people who point out the problems seem illegitimate.
There were large riots due to the problems immigration has caused. Nobody in government has a serious and realistic plan for fixing the massive issues so instead of acknowledging them they simply have to blame a handful of Russian accounts. It can't have anything to do with crime, lack of social cohesion, rampant housing shortages or any other issue that the politicians simply can't fix.
If someone is living with their parents at the same age that their parents owned a house the problem has to be their micropenis. They are loser incels and therefore not worth engaging with. There is no political option to create affordable housing as it would completely crash the financial system to bring down housing prices to 3x an average annual salary. Therefore, what is left is repression and arguments that are insults.
Incels are a real threat to the system. The system has failed to create a society in which people can find housing, start a family. People are angry and politicians have no solutions. Lots of young men with nothing to lose and no prospects are the greatest threat to any regime.
The birth rate makes the UK pension system completely unsustainable. Filling the gap with third world labour is going to cause major issues for which nobody has any answers. So if you ask how this is going to be solved your dick is small, you are ugly, your momma is fat and you are a Russian bot so you have no legitimacy.
functor
1yr ago
Ukraine's demographic pyramid says no
The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US. Most likely the migrants will actually find their new homeland less enticing to have children in and probably will have fewer than migrants in western countries.
As for Russia the number of Russian men who have served is far below WWII levels. There might be a small effect, but I doubt it will be significant.
functor
10mo ago
Have western elites ever been able to formulate a war plan?
Afghanistan was a war without a goal after the first few months. There wasn't much more than slogans as war aims and no real negotiations could be made. Taliban are pure evil, are motivated by nothing but evil, have no legitimate concerns or demands. Those who fight the taliban may rape children and sell drugs but they are still the good guys.
Iraq was mission accomplished without a real plan.
The plan in Ukraine seems to be built entirely on slogans, an extreme sense of moralism in which the western elites are seen as a self evident good and Putin as a completely illegitimate evil.
The people running the west are effectively campaign staff addicted to social media. There is no serious group of people to negotiate with. There is no plan. There is just slogans and polling data on what will yield the most traction as well as whatever the donors are pushing for. Nobody is going to have a serious conversation about eastern Europe's security architecture. Nobody is going to have a sensible discussion about what can be achieved. There will just be virtue signalling on twitter.
Politicians will be allowed to say all sorts of crazy slogans such as "we need to bring down Putin!" and no journalist will ask follow up questions.
We have another forever war with no plan, budget, war aims or leaders that will be held responsible. A war lead by people who will never go any where near the front themselves and who are more interested in the perception of the war than the war itself.
Wars like that don't tend to end with nice treaties.
functor
2yr ago
The Iran deal, the US expanding right into Eastern Europe after Russia pulled back and the long list of self proclaimed US exceptionalism gives the rest of the world strong reasons not to trust the US.
functor
9mo ago
Like their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, their entire goal is to lose spectacularly and hope American and European leftists get extra mad at Israel for being competent at warfare
Their strategy is simple. Israel has the non ultra orthodox population of Wisconsin and the area of El Salvador. It is a tiny country with abysmal natural resources that is deeply fractured. Israel needs to be kept in a permanent state of crisis as this will effectively make the country infeasible. Israel is going to be in a permanent state of chaos.
Europe has nothing to gain by Israel creating another refugee crisis. The support for Israel is low in Europe.
Isreal is a country of neurotic people with abysmal school results. They aren't competent at war, they are just exceptionally brutal while fighting people who barely have weapons.
functor
1yr ago
Especially in the US there are probably a lot of people who would rather blame lizard people than face the reality that their own ideology is at fault. You can't have complete separation between church and state while the state enforces Christian morality. Much of the American right clings to the constitution and libertarian ideas while wanting society to enforce their morality.
If the state is supposed to be not involved in religion, who says gays can't marry?
functor
1yr ago
In Sweden woke peaked 9 years ago and has been in steady decline since then. It has been strange to see the anglosphere go woke while watching social media and society in general lurch to the right at home. A leading antifa member in Sweden once said the difference between a green voting liberal feminist and a neo nazi race warrior is a non white mob threatening their condo. The liberal middle class is only liberal and woke until it has consequences. Threaten their property values, and they will often demand whatever it takes to defend their lifestyle.
What happened in Sweden was that middle class areas experienced an increase in crime. Schools in good areas experienced diversity, and the dysfunction caused by hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the medical system started to impact the life of people who used to be woke. Unlike the US that much more urban sprawl, richer people in Sweden often life in downtown areas. When their daughters had to go home at night while Afghan gangs sold heroin in their neighbourhood, the interest for BLM narratives was replaced with enthusiastic support for law and order. Surging electrical prices limited enthusiasm for the anti nuclear left and has caused real economic damage to the Swedish middle class living in large homes that have to be heated in the winter.
Australia probably has gone woke because woke hasn't had a major negative impact on people's lives. You haven't had gun crime increase 1000% in 17 years, you haven't seen your electrical grid become unreliable, posh schools don't have 15 year olds pretending to be twelve causing mayhem in class.
The online right thinks the masses can be inspired by ideas and ideology. Rightwingers tend to have little interest in ideology and are content as long as they can barbecue. Australia will stop going woke when woke has an impact on people's lives.
functor
4mo ago
Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created. The issue is that people live in suburbs that have the greenery and freedom of a city while having the services of a rural area forcing people to drive places.
The car based city layout makes people obese, is ugly as sin, and isn't functional as it is incredibly demanding to maintain.
functor
6mo ago
The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well. It is the good old trope of getting your three wishes but each wish comes with a giant caveat.
They wished for ended discrimination against Asians in college admissions and didn't get increased odds of whites being accepted.
They complained about migrant crime and got dorky Indians instead of Guatemalans.
They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.
They complained about muslim terrorism and got a surveillance state that rivals stasi.
They complained about muslim terrorism but instead of getting an immigration ban after 9/11 they got tens of thousands of largely right wing voters killed/seriously injured fighting wars in the middle east that caused a migrant crisis and effectively ethnically cleansed Christian populations. Their "clash of civilizations" ended with the US supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and opening the flood gates to Europe by bombing Libya.
The migrants are living on welfare they complained. So they got a migrant with a job.
If you can't even state your own self interest how on Earth do you expect to win anything?
functor
6mo ago
I don't really see the appeal for a lot of these migrants coming to the west. Indians who could be making 2000 dollars a month which goes a very long way in India become underpaid engineers in the UK where their after tax salary ends up being 3000 dollars which barely covers rent. My Indian colleagues love sharing photos of the beautiful houses they grew up in, their gardeners bringing in daily tropical fruit and all the family life they have back home. In their new country they live in a cramped apartment in a semi-ghetto.
My predictions is that we are going to see an exodus to India which won't just consist of Indians. Northern European weather is awful, taxes and regulations are high and the cost of living is through the roof. It is better to move to your Indian employees than to move Indians to Europe.
The inverse, how many women can you hookup with without raping one?
By rape I don't me beat up, drag into an alley and wrestle to the ground while she screams and fights, I mean women who really wasn't into it or ended up getting something different than she expected. These loose sexual encounters are difficult to read and people aren't communicating clearly. If a women can change her mind half way through, have blood alcohol content above a certain rate or be ok with x but not y without giving a manual before hand it isn't strange that women have had miserable experiences.
False rape is a common trope on line. The reality is more like a middle ground. A lot of these cases aren't a man consciously trying to rape a women, they aren't a women enthusiastically participating in sex and then changing her mind the day after. They two drunk people steared by horniness having an akward encounter that went wrong. The women in these college rape cases have a point. A lot of women are having deeply uncomfortable experiences that they really didn't want. The men also have a point, they didn't put on a mask and bring a gun in order to execute a planned crime.
The fundamental issue is that all forms of training for how people should behave, what is expected and norms for sex has been replaced with do what you feel like. This is going to lead to a greater than 0.1% instance of someone clearly not getting what they bargained for. By replacing norms with do what you feel like we have entered a behavioural sink. The feminists wanting consent laws probably aren't evil man haters, they are probably women who have been legitimately hurt and are deeply unhappy about the state of things. However, their solution of throwing men in jail for years based on hearsay worsens the situation and furthers the rift between men and women instead of healing it. Having removed romance, deep bonds and love from sex as well as the stability of marriage we have created the grounds for bitter encounters.
TLDR; Don't expect to be happy the day after you sleep with a drunk/high guy who doesn't know or care about you.
functor
1yr ago
The only reason why labour would be pro Israel is because of the incredible ethnic activism by jews. Historically, Australians have had little reason to care about Israel/Palestine while a rich, influential and rabid minority have been aggressively pushing their ethnic agenda. Israel is a lot less popular with the population at large than with politicians who get free trips to the wailing wall. Causing a conflict over an issue where only 21% of Australians support the parties position is not a smart move. Clearly their voters are more pro Palestine than the politicians swayed by the lobby.
functor
1yr ago
It is fascinating that not more is done to fix an issue that undermines the confidence in the system.
Republicans should push hard for making IDs a free government service. Giving ID cards to people wouldn't be that expensive, and it would be hard for democrats to oppose a program that would help homeless people get a bank account and integrate into society. Not requiring voter ID is rather unique to the US and a hard position to defend when IDs are required for almost everything else in society.
As for stability having a more unified voting system that makes it harder to cheat would increase stability. Having a percentage of the population believe Bush/Trump/Biden stole the election is a destabalizing force.
functor
1yr ago
For example, what is Biden's policy towards Venezuela, a brutal dictatorship which is responsible for a large chunk of the U.S. border crisis,
When Ukraine is everything but democratic because they are in a state of war it is excused. Yet, those under threat from the US are supposed to be completely democratic despite America's long history of sponoring terrorist groups, assassinating leaders and trying to colour revolution countries. If Venezuela didn't hold a tight ship they would have ended up like Iraq, Syria, or Libya. Putting countries in a state of perpetual state of semi war in order to destabilize them increases migration. The US has sanctioned Venezuela, funded an armed coup attempt and continuously worked to undermine the country. As with most of America's foreign policy misadventures it ends up with a massive flood of migrants. The best way to stop the migrant flow is to stop the aggressive posturing. Stealing Venezuelan assets makes the situation in Venezuela worse which encourages emigration.
What about Biden's position on Iran, a country which funds terror throughout the world,
When Ukraine gets invaded we all have to help them. When Iraq gets invaded, Iran is supposedly supposed to just quietly accept it. Why would they? It is a neighbouring country with deep cultural ties to Iran. Of course they are going to help them defend themselves. Iran has given support to groups under direct military threat. Destablizing Iran would mean another giant refugee crisis. Iranians are the most similar people to westerners in that part of the world and if anything they should be our natural allies. Stealing their assets is not only immoral and absurd, it is directly damaging to Europe. When Hillary Clinton was sponsoring Jihadists in Syria which flooded Europe with migrants Iran was helping Syria stay together. We should thank Iran for their support against ISIS.
American policy has been aggressively attacking countries that aren't subservient to the United States and causing continuous blowback.
functor
1yr ago
It is clear as long as Israel is an expansionist country pushing Palestinians out of their homes, blockading them and making it impossible to have a continous Palestine there won't be peace. Israel undermines nearby countries such as Syria creating fallout that spreads across the region and into Europe in the form of waves of refugees. Israel and their expansionist policies are a major source of the regions problems and they are not interested in letting millions of Arabs live in peace in the town their family has lived in for generations.
When Americans were too into a warmongering fury 20 years ago the Iraqis and taliban helped them come to their senses with a firm and proper lessons in not sticking one's nose where it doesn't belong. The Palestinians are currently doing the same. Israel needs a good hard punch in order to learn to keep out of Palestinian territory. Unless Israel gets a proper shakedown the Israel problem and the massive waves of migrants they produce won't be stopped.
It did not abolish itself, it is occupied and the occupiers will ensure that Germany is kept in line with their ideology. The Germans knew full well what would happen if the Americans and Soviets would take over the world and there is a reason why they fought tooth and nail to stop it. The foresight of German thinkers in the 20s and 30s was astonishing and they understood the direction the anglosphere was taking.
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