sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.
It makes hallucinations much less plausible, but I don't think it really does much about misidentified balloons, glare, something on the camera lens, camera image-sharpening algorithms combining with those others, etc. See the videos in this Metabunk thread for examples. I don't think congressmen have any special skills to distinguish whether a fast-moving blob on an aircraft camera is a spacecraft or a visual artifact. And while people like pilots and intelligence agents might be better, it isn't really their area of expertise either. They're focused on dealing with real planes, not every weird visual artifact that can happen. On the scale of a country you can cherrypick enough things that coincidentally seem alien-like to be convincing to many people, including many government officials. But if it's ultimately all formed out of random noise you'll never get that definitive piece of evidence, just lots of "that blob was crazy and we couldn't figure out another explanation", which is the pattern we've seen.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The binding force behind all "woke" modern movements is anti-whiteness.
A handful of years ago the most prominent SJW focus was feminism, by far. Race got some obligatory mumbling about intersectionality and how white feminists need to listen to the lived experiences of women of color, but then everyone went back to what they really cared about. For that matter the SJW community has been a breeding ground for new identities to champion, like non-binary, demisexuals, otherkin, and plurals, with non-binary being the main one to get traction outside of a handful of sites like Tumblr. The SJW memeplex has relatively little to do with the specifics of the groups it claims to champion, making it quite mutable.
That doesn't make the anti-whiteness any less real, race-based prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine alone killed tens or hundreds of thousands of white people. Even if future SJWs refocus on plurals or something, it is likely that without sufficient pushback captured organizations like the CDC will continue quietly making decisions like that about race. But don't assume they're dependent on any particular identity group or expect them to remain the same while you try to position yourself against them.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
had enough reach that those victims received threats from other people
But the threats don't have to have anything to do with the reach. Everything Alex Jones said about Sandy Hook came long after it was mainstream in conspiracy theory circles. The idea that those involved were actors didn't catch on because of Jones. It caught on because of that one Robbie Parker video from the day after the shooting where he comes across as suspicious, which has been incessently posted on /pol/ since it came out and supplemented with various additional coincidences. 4plebs doesn't go all the way back to the shooting but you can see the discussion back in December 2013:
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/text/robbie%20parker/order/asc/page/1/
Meanwhile Alex Jones was claiming that the shooting happened but was a false-flag orchestated by the government. If we go by this Media Matters page he didn't start parroting the "actors" thing until 2014. It's hard to judge since obviously I obviously don't watch him myself but it doesn't even look like he talked about it much, the grassroots conspiracy-theorist interest was much greater. But nonetheless the legal system blames him for other conspiracy theorists because they share the same beliefs, without proving that he caused those beliefs.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
On imageboards "meme X" has connotations similar to "gimmicky", "not serious", or focusing on shallow viral (and often comedic) appeal. For example Goat Simulator is a famous meme game. It is often insulting, but not always, though it is more likely to be insulting when applied to something that is not obviously a meme. Neko-Arc in the fighting game Melty Blood is universally understood as a meme character whether you like her or not, she has bizarre gameplay elements, is a chibi catgirl, and one of her moves can result in covering the screen with a Twitch overlay while she shows up in front as a streamer, covering up important parts of the screen like the health bars. The Bongcloud is a meme chess opening. Ron Paul was a meme presidential candidate, as were Kayne West, Deez Nuts and Trump, but Trump ended up proving he was more than just a meme. Of course while Trump wasn't a meme candidate in 2020 anymore, he was still a meme president. Anarcho-capitalism and Maoism Third Worldism are meme ideologies.
Some years back, calling things a meme in the above sense as a (often not entirely serious) insult was particularly popular on imageboards. Calling women the "meme gender" was a meme that arose around then. The thread that a screencap was already posted of seems to have been the origin, there were a couple "meme gender" comments before that but they didn't get attention. If you read the replies it looks like someone thought of the more serious "women are more likely to follow social trends" interpretation even then. But the primary meaning is more saying that women are too much of a gimmick, like how it would get old if you made a fighting game with only two characters and one of them was Neko-Arc.
sodiummuffin
8d ago
Today in trying to interpret survey results: 22% answered "No" to "Do you think tattoos can ever be attractive on a man?". But when asked "How do you think tattoos generally look on a man?" only 19% answered "Bad" or "Terrible". This implies at least 3% who thinks tattoos can't ever be attractive but think they generally look "OK" or better, and also a severe lack of people who think the average tattoo looks bad but that some small minority of tattoos can look good. I assume they are not answering the questions literally, but the result is sufficiently far from the questions that it is difficult to guess what they are actually trying to convey.
Skimming ahead, in the next table I check out 51% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Assume someone with tattoos is more likely to commit a crime" but only 45% say it is "Always unacceptable" to "Deport immigrants based on their tattoos". So at least 6% think that if someone has a gang tattoo it's unacceptable to think he's 1% more likely to commit a crime, but acceptable to kick him out of the country for it. (Well, unless there's some sort of non-criminal-associated tattoos they want to deport people for? Like if there were a bunch of people who thought of swastika tattoos but just associated them with "political beliefs" rather than "being in a prison gang"?) I guess what's happening here is that ironically the very severity of "deport" makes people imagine worse tattoos, even when the language of "always" should make that a non-factor?
sodiummuffin
10d ago
People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead, so you can't trade off QALYs for time worked 1 for 1. Instead it's just another adjustor to quality-of-life, roughly equivalent to time spent working without being paid (the actual workers get paid, but it destroys the value they would produce doing something else). You could also compare the cost to the standard "economic value of the life" calculations derived from the premiums on risky jobs, and indeed certain safety measures require risky construction work and thus are partially paid for with the deaths and disabling of the construction workers you have implement them. Your calculation is still useful as a sanity check though, even though the actual tradeoff in time spent wouldn't be 11 minutes.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right?
Even setting aside every issue besides immigration, it is possible to believe importing "top 0.1%" skilled engineers is a net-positive without believing that importing masses of economic 'refugees' and illegal immigrants is. Masses of migrants (and their descendants) are a tremendous net-drain on the government budget and societal resources, commit more crime, etc. while small groups of elite immigrants would not be. "People who want to immigrate" is a category that selects for people living in bad countries, and since one of the most common reasons for countries to be bad is the average intelligence/etc. of the people who live there this selects for bad immigrants, but "people who are allowed to immigrate" can be selective in the opposite direction. This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873187030785769964
?? I don’t support an open immigration policy at all. I support a highly selective immigration policy.
Immigration should be limited to those who will obviously contribute far more than they take.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872374103983759835
Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873191959441084531
Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.
I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)
The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
About the same time, Starlink terminals stopped working in newly liberated territories at the Ukraine-Russia front lines in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials later said that was because the speed of their reconquest had pushed forces into areas Starlink that had “geo-fenced” to prevent Russia from using the service.
It was remarkably difficult to find this. Most of the news coverage, especially more recent news coverage, presents it as implicitly nefarious and either doesn't know or doesn't bother to mention that Ukrainian officials have stated what the issue was. Other than this Associated Press article the only other one I saw mentioning the actual reason was this Financial Times article quoting a third party.
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.
Starlink was made free throughout Ukraine so I think it just works if you have a terminal without needing an account. Doing authentication separate from owning the device seems impractical, for many military purposes you want it running continuously and it's not like you want it to start demanding a password (that soldiers have to memorize) any time it loses power. By comparison apparently Ukraine has been supplied with some SINCGARS encrypted radios, they work like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINCGARS
When hailing a network, a user outside the network contacts the network control station (NCS) on the cue frequency. In the active FH mode, the SINCGARS radio gives audible and visual signals to the operator that an external subscriber wants to communicate with the FH network. The SINCGARS operator must change to the cue frequency to communicate with the outside radio system. The network can be set to a manual frequency for initial network activation. The manual frequency provides a common frequency for all members of the network to verify that the equipment is operational.
But something like that doesn't work for Starlink, you can't have someone at SpaceX talk to the user and confirm he's Ukrainian every time a Starlink terminal is turned on.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Same as everywhere else, the people who made the decision are true believers who think this is a great idea for the Navy and/or for their moral/ideological goals.
As I see it, the military is probably the last place that would be under pressure to go woke - the Left hates it unconditionally and passionately anyway, it is impossible to "cancel" it in any meaningful way, you can not really orchestrate an ideological boycott against the military...
There's a weird tendency to personify institutions and act like principal-agent problems don't exist, like how people will tie themselves in knots trying to come up with explanations about how corporations with SJW institutional capture are actually profit-maximizing. Why would someone with a Navy recruitment job care more about "doing the best job possible to slightly improve Navy recruitment numbers" than "making the world a safe place for LGBTQ+ people"? Even more importantly, why wouldn't someone with such an ideology sincerely believe that he can do both? People are biased about the merits of their ideology in other circumstances, they don't turn that off when they're making decisions on behalf of an institution. They can tell themselves something like "This will boost recruitment by showing the Navy is an inclusive place for young people, anyone bigoted enough to object is an asshole who would cause problems anyway." and believe it.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
"Immunized" is taking it much too far given how the percentage of teenagers who identify as trans/non-binary/etc. has exploded. And I would guess that, by most measures, their net positions on trans issues are more pro-trans as well. Rather I would say that they are much more polarized due to the increased salience of transgenderism and transgender ideology.
If your contact with the concept of transgenderism is learning that the T in LGBT refers to crossdressers and once hearing a joke about thai ladyboys, you are likely to be tolerant and not care about weirdos doing weirdo things. If instead it is seeing a whole friend group at school trying to convince a member that he's trans/non-binary because he has long hair and isn't masculine enough, or seeing an attention-seeking person go trans and police "misgendering", or encountering the trans part of the online SJW community, or seeing public figures like Cosmo/Narcissa and Jim Sterling blow up their lives, or at least hearing about it in the media with the constant drumbeat of pro-trans rhetoric and with news stories like MTFs competing in women's sports, you are going to approach the issue in a different way.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
there are risks for women alone at night in confined spaces with strange men
This argument always struck me as strange. An elevator literally opens its doors on its own and has more traffic than a normal room, it's halfway to being a hallway. Under what plausible circumstance does it pose more of a risk than a normal room? The timeframe that you can't leave it is a matter of seconds. Anything you could do in that timeframe (like groping/stabbing/purse-snatching someone) can be done elsewhere by attacking by surprise. The thing that stops someone from attacking you isn't that you can open the doors without waiting 10 seconds, it's the combination of most people not being violent criminals and the violent criminals getting arrested.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.
An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit. It's like if, for example, someone criticized the National Organization for Women for giving Mattress Girl their Woman of Courage award even after the text messages came out discrediting her rape accusation. And then you responded with "Sure it looks like she falsely accused him in retaliation for him breaking up with her and/or for the personal benefits, but NOW has 500,000 members, can you prove the majority of them share her motive?" Clearly they don't need to, the relevant members of their organization hold to a "Believe Women"/"Believe Survivors" ideology and so a single liar with sufficient skill at invoking the ideology was all it took. But instead of just being a response to a single incident, it's WPATH establishing a medical standard. And instead of being an openly non-neutral activist organization, it's the most prominent independent organization setting standards for trans healthcare, one that countless medical institutions listen to.
This then provides valuable insight into the validity of WPATH's decision-making processes, like knowing a medical/scientific organization wrote the conclusion of an argument first. And as I said in my other post, it also gives us valuable information about the processes of institutions that continue to take their recommendations seriously or "that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect". For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to. However, many other authorities like the American Medical Association have not. If a lot of institutions are making decisions on the subject are heavily influenced by social justice ideology, that is valuable information in judging this split. And yes, I already knew that so it's not going to shift my opinion very much, there's already been varying levels of other evidence like the mass-resignations complaining about ideological pressure a few years ago at the NHS's only gender clinic for children (since shut down as of a few months ago). But a lot of people think things like the shift to maximally "gender-affirming care" are just about following the evidence rather than ideological pressure and so this provides a valuable test case.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
If SCOTUS explicitly clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally
Are there rulings saying it doesn't? I'm not familiar with the subject but I would have guessed that it is already interpreted that way but the selective enforcement happens at some other stage of the process.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric
“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”
Children’s Hospital, London, Ontario.
I suppose if the hospital's "Gender Pathways Service" is already prescribing puberty blockers so freely that there's no requirement for diagnosis beyond the child or child's parent getting a referral by saying something about transgenderism to the family doctor, giving them before the first appointment saves time. While doing so based on 0 appointments is obviously unusual, quite a few of the anecdotes I've heard mention prescriptions after the 1st appointment. The way you describe it used to be much more standard, I remember trans-activists complaining about previous requirements like living for 6-months to a year as the opposite gender, but doesn't seem common anymore.
It's possible they justify this with the argument that puberty blockers are much less significant than opposite-sex hormones and are just "giving the child time to choose" or some such thing, but that seems heavily contradicted by the evidence. For one it amounts to much the same decision: 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans. For another puberty blockers themselves, particularly when used to avert puberty entirely rather than delay precocious-puberty a couple years, are serious business. We know about them impacting bone density based on the use with precocious-puberty, but we also have reason to believe they impact brain development but have zero research on what that impact is in humans. The best I've found is this study on sheep. A concern mentioned by the NHS's independent review:
A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.
Given how the medical system is normally so obsessed with the precautionary principle (like the FDA shutting down early unapproved COVID testing) it seems crazy that something as significant as preventing puberty entirely has become standard practice based on no more than the same drugs previously being approved to delay precocious puberty. There's a severe lack of research on even the safety/side-effects of using those drugs that way, let alone a randomized control trial of effectiveness indicating it actually performs better as a treatment of trans-identifying children than doing nothing.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
I don't understand what you mean. Gender is not used to mean gender identity. They are distinct concepts.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
"Those seeking state driver's licenses in Massachusetts are closer to being able to designate their gender as "X" instead of "male" or "female." The state Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would allow for the nonbinary designation on licenses."
— Steve LeBlanc
"Facebook's message was clear when the social media network added new gender options for users on Thursday: the company is sensitive to a wide spectrum of gender identity and wants users to feel accommodated no matter where they see themselves on that spectrum."
— Katy Steinmetz
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/male
b: having a gender identity that is the opposite of female
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/female
b : having a gender identity that is the opposite of male
Merriam-Webster changed those and similar entries in 2019.
Many people use the terms “gender” and “sex” interchangeably. However, gender and sex actually refer to two separate things. Gender is an identity — your personal sense of who you are. The term can also refer to socially constructed categories that relate to what it means to be a man or a woman.
BBC Three: Gender is what you feel, not what parts you have
The truth is that gender is in the brain and physical sex is a completely seperate and different thing.
There is of course also use of the "gender role" definition, though such use is rarely consistent. Rather, as I have been saying, definitions vary according to the needs of the argument or situation at hand.
If you have actual evidence that trans-activists now generally believe that the terms "sex" and "gender" mean the same thing, I would be interested in seeing it (note that I said "generally", not one nut job.
This is newer, less mainstream, and even less coherent than defining gender as gender identity, it's me commenting on what anecdotally seems like a growing tendency in pro-trans arguments rather than something mainstream enough to be in Merriam-Webster. I said that it had become fairly common on social media to see arguments basing sex on gender identity as an illustration of what seems like a broader move away from the "gender and sex are two different things" argument, which at least still treated biological sex as a legitimate concept. (Probably because of those adopting the trans-activist "gender vs. sex" distinction in order to argue that things like sports should be based on sex. Some of which already have regulations or laws which happen to use the word "sex".) Most don't explicitly make that argument, they just use "gender" and "sex" interchangeably the same way normal people do while basing both on "gender identity". But some do make it explicit, and for them often the structure of the argument is something like 'sex is a social construct/complicated (argued in a way that equates those with 'meaningless', the same way 'gender is a social construct' was used) and therefore 'sex' is either best defined based on gender identity or abandoned entirely".
Deanna Adkins, director of the Duke University Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care:
From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.
The idea that science can make definitive conclusions about a person’s sex or gender is fundamentally flawed.
Forbes: The Myth Of Biological Sex
Or the controversy a little while ago about a fictional Warhammer 40,000 sourcebook mentioning biological sex:
Goonhammer: Transphobic Language and the Horus Heresy
“The hormonal and biological make-up of the human male” sounds innocuous if you are not aware of the process that’s going on to alienate people from their trans friends, family, co-workers and neighbours. If you do not know enough about this miserable “debate” to know the words used to imply hate rather than state it outright. To someone who does, this sentence is viciously coded.
Let’s get the science out of the way: There is no specific hormonal or biological make-up of a human male. Sex is basically a pair of giant buckets of characteristics we lump people into. There is no single specific indicator of sex, there are hundreds, and almost every human who has ever existed is a jumbled mix of them.
An Open Letter to Games Workshop
Today we wish to address the accidental (we are to assume good faith) use of Gender Critical* language in the Horus Heresy Age of Darkness Rulebook, but there is no reason that such checks shouldn’t extend to further minority subjects such as race, ethnicity, and disability in your mainline products.
This is a letter imploring you, Games Workshop – in order to better protect members of your community – to employ or consult sensitivity readers for subjects that mirror the lived experiences of your hobbyists, but extend beyond the lived experiences of your writers.**
However this is unfortunately phrased in a way that is uncannily and uncomfortably close to the rhetoric used by Gender Critical and trans-exclusionary groups. You need only skim tabloid press for examples of the terms “biological male” being used in malice, and open the comment sections for the people who use them to justify hate.
This is not anything as coherent as trans-activists all switching to a new definition, and some of those explicitly say sex is biological to the extent that they recognize it as a legitimate concept at all. Rather it's that the previous "gender vs. sex" redefinition left a loophole in that people could still say "sex" if they knew and cared about the redefinition, so now doing so is associated with the enemy and there is an effort against it employing various arguments/redefinitions/accusations-of-transphobia.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
especially with some examples I've seen posted on twitter, where the art is almost identical to some of the stuff it was trained on
The examples you have seen are almost certainly someone using img2img and then it being spread around with the source image as if the resemblance is spontaneous. Several cases like that have been going viral among the anti-AI-art people recently.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
The post you're referring to might be "Does Class-Warfare Have a Free-Rider Problem?".
I'm skeptical though. It seems like the place that the modern SJW memeplex got going was internet communities like Livejournal/Tumblr/Something Awful and various fan communities, there's not a lot of career advancement happening there. (And being on the internet there's not even a lot of awareness of how wealthy anyone is, except insofar as it is displayed by behavior.) There might be advantages to be found in some early takeovers like academia and sci-fi writers, but in plenty of the proto-SJW communities like within activist circles the beneficial move was to not bother with the community in the first place. It was only later that it got enough power over influential institutions for there to be real benefits. You can say something like "it's incentivized by status-seeking/tearing down leaders/tribalist instincts that people are prone to because it helped obtain resources over evolutionary history" but at that point the connection between the behavior and the benefit is getting pretty tenuous.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
A majority reject the following: DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%
It's hard to interpret survey answers like this, presumably the 41% are expressing support by picking the more positive-sounding answer but how durable is that support? How they would respond to additional information or a different context? How much of this is pure partisan affiliation that doesn't translate into supporting specific policies at all?
Lets say they were working as recruiters and their managers said "The DEI report indicates our numbers aren't good enough, please trash all applications in the hiring pipeline from candidates that aren't female, black or Hispanic." What percent would respond with "Sure! Some bigots would call it discrimination to throw out the white/asian male candidates, but DEI isn't discrimination against white people."? What percentage would say "I thought DEI didn't entail discrimination! This is wrong and I won't do it."? What percentage would be somewhere in between? And of course most aren't going to be personally involved in implementing DEI policies, so how would they respond to more distant narratives, like a political debate about a discriminatory policy that has more specifics than just the DEI label?
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
Reading the first half of your post it seemed like a message from a mentally ill person. Learning that he later killed himself in a car bomb did not increase my assessment of his sanity.
I tend to find schizophrenic or similarly disordered modes of thinking very recognizable, so it's always weird to me when other people see them and don't immediately realize what's going on. You also have to consider the base rates here: mental illness is much more common than the number of people who know about "secret physics-revolutionizing propulsion systems" level information, or indeed information considerably less earth-shattering than that. And what percentage of people who know about the latter would react by messaging an obscure Instagram account, mixing in unrelated stuff about war crimes, and then bombing themselves in front of Trump Tower?
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
You reversed it. First the text goes inside the square brackets, then the link goes inside the round brackets.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Maybe you're thinking of some particular subset that I'm not, but not that I've seen? Anime loves high-school, so a lot of characters are 16-18, and a fair number are 13-15 too. Reddit famously once (temporarily) banned subreddit mod holofan4life for posting a picture of Kaguya from the romantic-comedy Kaguya-sama in a bikini. (Presumably for "sexualizing minors" either because she's 16 at the beginning of the show or because her breasts aren't big enough.) Outside the school settings ages still tend to be pretty young and often feel like they were chosen at random, Yoko Littner is canonically 14, though it's not mentioned in the show. I'm less familiar with videogames but I think a lot of visual novels have school settings, and the characters in the aforementioned Atelier Totori range from 13-17.
Of course, the same is true for whole swaths of western media, like the teen sex comedy genre of movies, or teen dramas, both of which can have outright sex-scenes without anyone of note screaming about how that makes them "child porn". Some media from SJW-adjacent people will engage in the ridiculous business of deliberately writing characters to be 18+ because they believe it would otherwise be immoral to depict them sexually, but it's still not a mainstream taboo. Now, I think SJWs would probably go after those if they could get away with it (and probably have something to do with there being less teen sex comedies nowadays, though mostly for other reasons), but they're too obviously mainstream to act like they're doing something weird. Anime-style media is an easier target because any free-floating feeling of weirdness can be converted into talk about how something feels "creepy" for "sexualizing minors", without consciously thinking about how the same standards would apply to western media that doesn't feel "creepy".
This has virtually nothing to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve technological advancement and thus feature in science fiction and futurism.
This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.
This is a small part of transhumanism in that it is a specific speculative method for using current technology to survive long enough to take advantage of possible future transhuman technology.
This is the only part of your post about a central aspect of transhumanism.
When people are dying of some disease like cancer, or when their family and friends die, they don't want it to happen. The longevity aspect of transhumanism is just the same thing but thinking more long-term. Maybe you think you'll gladly commit suicide when you hit 80, but actual 80-year-olds don't seem inclined to do that. And certainly people don't seem to prefer death to "culture shock". Sometimes people make peace with death, but this seems to have more to do with having to accept something you can't change or it being your only remaining escape from suffering than actually being happy with it. They also don't like it when their strength or eyesight fails them, or when routine parts of life become painful or difficult. Transhumanism says that we should use technology to fix those problems if we can, the same way we have used technology to fix other perennial problems of the human condition like starving to death or nearsightedness or being eaten by wolves.
There are other aspects of transhumanism besides life extension, though as the most pressing concern it is the most prominent. Intelligence enhancement would be the second-most prominent, and is a natural extension of how we value the contributions of genius scientists/etc. and do things like implement universal education to help children be successful and contributing members of society. And then minor stuff like giving yourself extra senses or superstrength or whatever is cool but not actually important, so it often features in fiction but rarely comes up in actual transhumanist writing.
More options
Context Copy link