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Hi guys! Have you heard about the Eunuch Archive?
The Eunuch Archive is a friendly support site for the Eunuch Community. Originally a part of the Body Modification E-Zine (with the tagline "the fetish is reality"), since the late 90's they've been hosting erotic fiction by and for people with a kink for being castrated.
Can't say I read a lot of these stories, but going through the titles there seems to be a some amount of "wife gets back at husband", or "help, I've been sold into sex slavery". One theme that stood out was the idea of castration being normalized in the future. For example the user "Jesus" wrote a story "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?", describing the procedure, and praising it's health benefits. The punchline comes at the end (keep in mind the story was written in 2002):
There also many stories that are far more disturbing, or as they put it themselves:
The summary for one states:
Yikes... you can't say they didn't warn you.
Well, I suppose it's better that people get their rocks off on some seedy website. After all it's just fantasy, and the people running the site make it clear they don't condone anyone actually trying to do this sort of stuff.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH?
WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health. It is often cited in academic literature, and invites the world's top experts in the field to write the standards of care for transgender people.
Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.
Well, I suppose I can't criticize what people do off the clock. Ok, so maybe their academic research was actually still on the clock, but isn't the whole point of academia to explore and document all, even the weirdest corners of society? If they can combine their work with their hobby, all I can say is: good for them!
As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH's latest Standard of Care?
As mentioned above the SOC is a set of guidelines developed by the WPATH with the goal to "provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transgender and gender diverse people with safe and effective pathways to achieve lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, and to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment".
This latest version has been the subject of some controversy. For example, the previous version contained "suggested minimum ages" for a number of procedures, like:
14+ years old for cross-sex hormones
15+ years old for double mastectomies
16+ years old for breast implants, facial feminisation surgery
17+ years old for metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, hysterectomy, fronto-orbital remodelling
18+ years old for phalloplasty.
In the latest version the only one that remains is the limit on phalloplasty. In another controversial decision, they decided that children can move straight to cross-sex hormones – they will no longer be requested to start with a suppression of puberty. Perhaps most controversially, the latest Standards of Care now includes an entire chapter on eunuchs, and proposes a new "eunuch-identity":
Well, I suppose it could be a coincidence. I mean just because they suddenly came up with a eunuch-identity, doesn't mean they got it from the regulars of the fetish webs-...
...
Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚
I saw this stuff probably a month ago, briefly thought about writing it up, and then let it lie because there didn't seem to be a way to do the subject justice without tripping the "low charity" alarm. I think you probably did better than I would have, but I think it could use a better ending. Ditch the partisan voice, sum up the factual content dispassionately, and then lay out why this is worth talking about.
Here's my take on a few productive questions:
Is WPATH influential?
Are these guys influential within WPATH?
Is their behavior objectionable, and if so why?
If it is objectionable, has the system produced a reasonable response?
If the system has not produced a reasonable response, what's the appropriate way to talk about this here?
...I think a lot of Reds are going to think this is a pretty big deal. I think a lot of Blues are going to think it's not that big a deal, for a variety of reasons. So what size of deal should this be?
...I appreciate that from a tribal perspective, the fact that these questions would even be asked is itself something of a problem. But this is not a tribal space, and battle-cries do not contribute to the conversation. Such questions do need to be asked here, because the evidence indicates that we, collectively, are not on the same page on this. So what's the scope and scale of the disagreement, and where do the borders lie?
[EDIT] - looking at the conversation below... Does this look productive to you?
Most of the red responses are sardonic call-backs to memes. Those memes arose from a lot of previous arguments, but most of those arguments, by volume, didn't happen here, and most of the people who made them aren't here now, and the memes themselves are not in fact an argument. Why should the people who are here now engage with an attack on statements they haven't actually made? This whole mode of communication is just passive-aggressive as hell.
The blue responses mostly are about this problem. I'll note that some of them are actually moving beyond that to engage with the content! That's commendable! ...And then reds are low-effort snarking at them for it.
This all would go a whole lot better without the implying implications, and just a bare statement of facts and arguments to sum up what seems to me to be a relevant and readable post.
To a moderate extent, yes. They're not binding, and some jurisdictions actually prohibit some of their policies, but a lot of US-sphere medical practices will take it as the starting point, and the extent it exists as an organization with standards makes matters more billable. Some of that's probably the dog being wagged by its tail -- pre-2010-era trans stuff did reflect a lot of contradictory and not very well-considered rules (eg, requiring three months life experience before cross-hormone therapy basically required a lot of really bad attempts at passing in public) -- but it's hard to distinguish.
Hard to tell. Simply being a member of WPATH isn't that constrained; there's something like 4k members in the US, it's 225 USD/year (with discounts for low-income countries) and open to a wide variety of 'professionals' for voting membership, so that doesn't really much. On the other hand, Johnson is cited as an author in the draft SoCv8 (though, AFAICT not past SoCs), and Johnson, Wassersug both have research cited in the SoC.
((Willette isn't listed on the current membership directory or obviously cited on the research lists; the big connection here to WPATH seems to be a link to older research or public talks, but this could be the multiple author problem.))
It could be that they've played a longer-term role behind the scenes, or it could be that WPATH decision-makers already had the answer they wanted and just pointed to the first extant member who'd published anything adjacent to their target. I think part of the Red Tribe objection assumes at least in part the former (ie, that the casual treatment of therapies for trans-women are motivated in part by liking the side effects), but I don't think the latter would a high point even by the low standards of social science.
I dunno. The fetish content is creepy, but 'people with a kink fantasize about legal acceptance of the kink' going into fantasies about a mandate isn't exactly unusual; if anything, it's bog-standard among free use and exhibitionists, and not unheard of elsewhere. On its own, I don't think it's terribly strong evidence favoring actually implementing such things, so much as it's something that the authors both desire and want to avoid the mental hoops of taking responsibility for desiring. Hypnosis kink and (among women) 'abduction' kink plays a pretty similar role, and there's even some pretty bog-standard gay furries who use a variant because they've got hangups about 'choosing' to be gay.
((That said, there's only a handful of furries that take to eunich/nullo/neutrois levels, and afaik none of them as trans-adjacent. Maybe Chris Goodwin?))
But it does raise serious questions about the strength of their research, especially given the relative lack of other researchers going after the same community (and... not exactly paranoid concerns that they've played a role in what other research that does exist). Weirdly fetishistic Q/A stories don't necessarily invalidate the same author doing conventional research, but I think there are serious data science problems with running one of these forums and using it as a data source, and that's if the author did actually disclose it.
I don't think so, and perhaps worse, I'm not sure it can. I think the minimum for Red Tribe trust would involve some sort of moderately skeptical analysis of this stuff being taken seriously in public spaces, but there's not really a way for that to exist right now; academic research isn't going to publish (and probably shouldn't publish!) a 'hey, these guys are creepy weirdos with bad understandings of physical side effects to their interests', but more broadly no one sane's going to spend twenty years of their life on the matter on the off-chance that it becomes higher-profile.
((and I include myself as 'not sane' here))
But on the other hand, I'm not sure that the Red Tribe interest is in a reasonable response. WhiningCoil's self-described framework for this post below is that "These people want to mutilate and sterilize children." That's true in the strictest sense, but it's also The Worst Argument In the World, where expanded it becomes "These people (three of a dozen experts, plus the thousands of unaffiliated and unassociated doctors and shrinks doing the work) want to mutilate and sterilize (voluntarily) children (14-18-year-olds, which we do a variety of other not-exactly-great surgeries on)", in the same way that advocates for these policies are committing the same non-central fallacy when they compare the surgeries here to orchi or prostate removal for cancer treatment.
I'd expect that both WhiningCoil and the authors here would take similarly distinct positions on the availability of endometrial ablation as an option for sixteen-year-old women with extremely severe periods and no interest in reproduction (and actually doctors do!), even though the matter is clearly separate from trans stuff and from the sexual interests here, or even any externally visible modification.
On the gripping hand, there's a fun philosophical question about whether 20%+ of the voting population can be taxiomatically unreasonably on both the right and left, but the pragmatic side you kinda need a solution.
Dunno. I'd expect it would be helpful to focus more on the object level by WhiningCoil rather than repeating the vaguries, and to actually do some of his own homework for ChrisPratt, but that's kinda on the margins. I think ChrisPratt's pretty outright focused on the literal and central examples of sexual abuse of children, while WhiningCoil's concerns are far broader.
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
this... this is insightful. It connects to a whole lot of patterns I see in a lot of much more conventional lowbrow material; fanfic, pulp stories, web fiction and so on. Sort of a desire to offload moral responsibility to one's circumstances and surroundings. Most interesting.
I think there's a bit more to it.
Reds think that a significant percentage of Trans people are actually engaging in a sexual fetish, not a mental state or some sort of deeply rooted gender identity. Certainly a lot of highly noticeable behavior by specific trans people seems difficult to explain in any other way. This is vehemently denied by Blues, whose counter-arguments start with Chinese cardiologists.
Reds think that Blues are in denial about the fetish aspect of the trans movement, along with a lot of other, similar aspects (tactical transness and pedophilia, to name two); the Red model says that Blues understand on some level that such behavior looks absolutely horrible to Normies, and they also understand that policing such behavior would mean conceding 90% of what Reds are fighting for on the issue. At a minimum, it would mean gatekeeping and skepticism about claims of transness, and the conflict between the two results in concealing the issue and attacking anyone who brings it up.
This is an example of people in the movement being pretty clearly in it for the fetish, in a way that should definately have resulted in some sort of social safeguards being activated. The absence of such social safeguards is evidence for the general Red argument: Blues cannot be trusted to think critically or act responsibly where this issue is concerned, because their social biases overrule what should be basic, axiomatic values. Their social immune system doesn't work, in short, and so social contagion runs rampant, necessitating quarantine.
Blues have a different view, of course, but as you say, we kinda need a solution.
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Plastic surgery (and other controversial elective surgeries like liposuction or bariatric surgery) exist, but they're controversial enough that they're not really good examples even if social conservatives don't really go after them with the same strength that they do (directly) sexual/sexuality stuff. Non-trans hysterectomy and endometrial ablation are similarly politically complicated, though in ways that don't break down into simple Red Tribe/Blue Tribe splits. And there are other 'cosmetic' plastic surgeries that are still pretty well-established for young patients that I wouldn't put into this category, like cleft lip repair.
But for a really outside-the-box example that isn't controversial because everyone accepts it, the current standard of care for all non-Becker's birthmarks over 20 cm, and for most other 'hairy' non-Becker's birthmarks over 2 cm, includes surgical removal or laser 'surgery' (basically high-power light therapy). This had a historic cause, since there's a small subclass of that may have an elevated chance of cancer, and historically for any birthmark in this class it was practical to remove, a meaningful biopsy was almost as invasive as the full surgery to remove it and nearby tissue.
We could now evaluate these in higher levels of fidelity without having to cut out large portions of tissue, so we could reduce the number of total surgeries being performed on minors. But the birthmarks do genuinely look pretty ugly, and they're very common targets for stigma and self-image problems, and surgery performed at younger ages tends to have better recovery and less obvious scarring than surgeries on older people (or, in the case of haemangiomas, can have less visually obvious scarring than what occurs as the haemangiomas naturally shrink and fade with age).
There seems a somewhat similar class of matters for some dental surgeries, where the results are aesthetically pleasing and have some ease-of-care benefits, but have complicated tradeoffs for health directly. I know less about that field, though.
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I see how it could be improved, but I swear it wasn't partisanship! I was expecting the story to have the same status as Jeffrey Epstein - so out there, both sides can unite on being shocked at the whole thing. In hindsight, it was naive, given how sensitive the trans issues are but I thought we could make a separation between that, and WPATH in particular.
Not exactly what I was looking for, no. I mentioned in another comment, I find the conspiracism vs "nothing to see here, move along" angle a lot more interesting.
No. If the goal is to build respect between the two sides, we can't have one side treat the other like they were babies. It's not commendable, it's expected. Imagine writing something like that in response to one of ymeshkout's posts about election fraud.
I think the thread is dying down a bit, so I don't know if I can have much impact on the conversation, but I can still answer these if you want.
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What, do you want us to die of boredom?
I for one appreciate the post the way it is: there's a hook, an explanation, and a got'cha. It's Shakespeare.
nara did a bit of redhat killjoying, but in the proper way that I enjoy about this place. Also, I see one meme reply so far, not a bunch.
Thank you, it made my day to hear someone enjoyed it! I'm not much of a writer, but I'd lie if I said there wasn't some amount of artistic expression going into this.
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I think the biggest takeaway here is exactly how little evidence is required for WPATH to declare something a "gender identity" requiring "medically necessary gender-affirming care". I've read academic papers from forum posters talking about their forum buddies before, but I've certainly never seen a case where the resulting paper was considered notable, let alone sufficient basis to create a medical standard of care. I previously wrote a post about otherkin/transracialism/plurals as a control-group for gender-identity, in the same way that parapsychology can serve as a control group for science. This serves a similar function, but on the medical institution side of things.
Also, take a moment and consider exactly how big the gap is between the quality of evidence and the boldness of the claim. Presumably the author thinks gender identities are fixed/inborn:
So apparently for all of human history some people have been born with a eunuch gender identity (separate from actual eunuchs who generally had no choice), and we're only now finding out thanks to the guys writing the WPATH standard of care happening to post on a related fetish forum. And that's just it as a scientific claim, but this isn't even about whether a hypothesis has a 51% chance of being true, it's about medical care. Medical care carrying severe and permanent side-effects demands use of the precautionary principle and very strong evidence that it will benefit the patient. But it goes beyond even that because of course this isn't him treating a specific patient he has met, it's him establishing a medical standard of care. His internet surveys of his forum buddies are sufficient for WPATH to declare that patients diagnosed as having a eunuch gender identity (which is presumably any patient who claims to identify as a eunuch, which I suspect would go up orders of magnitude if psychiatrists started telling patients about the idea or the it got any cultural traction) will benefit from "gender-affirming care".
This tells us very little about eunuchs, but it tells us a lot about WPATH's decision-making processes. It also tells us important information about the institutions that continue to reference other WPATH recommendations as if they're significantly more meaningful than a sheet of paper with "Yes X is a gender-identity, prescribe gender-affirming care." printed on it. Or for that matter institutions 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.
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It’s unfortunate that discussing the link between transgenderism and sexual fetishism has been made taboo in public discourse. If you spend any amount of time in online transgender communities you’ll see that the fetishistic aspects are clearly a huge component of it.
You can't call it a fetish, because if it's a fetish, then I get to say "keep that shit away from me, don't involve me in your fetish."
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That's the angle I find the least interesting. Even if true, it doesn't say much about where we should take the discourse on trans issues.
What I find absolutely fascinating is the entryism aspect, or laundering ideology through respectable-looking institutions, and our system being either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
Yeah, that's the thing. Ordinary trans people have been used as the stalking horse for the fetishists and the grifters taking advantage of "hey, if I say I'm a woman, I can get sent to women's prison not men's prison".
Few years back, when I was discussing the trans rights stuff with other people on another site, I and those who were dubious about the whole thing like I was were being assured that "What you fear will never happen; no man or boy is going to go to all the trouble of saying they are trans simply in order for some peeping tom opportunities". A little later, after the first offences by individuals claiming to be trans, the line was "they're not really trans, they're ordinary perverts/criminals" (this, despite the simultaneous line that "you're trans if you say you're trans, no gatekeeping").
I think people have nailed their political colours to the mast and invested too much time and effort, often for personal reasons, into trans rights activism so they feel any backing off or accepting the cases where conservatives were right are going to mean giving up everything, so they grit their teeth and ignore this stuff and if they have to, they come out and support it. Because otherwise, the right-wingers were right about the things they said would happen if trans activism got its way about social normalisation, and that undermines everything they've fought for.
I feel like there's an interaction with the binary oppressor/oppressed model here. I've seen similar contentions, where the premise is that nobody would ever claim a marginalized identity falsely or lightly, because the experience of the Oppressed is categorically worse than the experience of the Oppressor. There is nothing that could possibly be worth the agonies of the soul one would be taking on to claim an Oppressed identity, save the pure truth of the matter itself.
The binary model cannot permit any recognition that it is ever, under any circumstances, in any way, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor; the binary all-or-nothing thinking would make such an admission tantamount to claiming that it is always, under all circumstances, in all ways, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor, in which case you're claiming that their real statuses are reversed, and are attacking the moral justification of the Oppressed group. Attempts at nuance or complexity or using one's head instead of one's gut will feel, on that gut-level, like nothing more than a direct enemy attack.
Does this really happen or am I just making this up? Well: have you ever heard someone say "[so you're saying that Xs are] the real oppressors" or "...really oppressed", when the matter of a potential advantage to belonging to an oppressed group is discussed?
I have.
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Certainly knowing the etiology of a phenomenon is an important step towards developing a holistic understanding of it.
I'm not saying that all cases of transgenderism can be reduced to a fetish, but, it's still something to keep in mind.
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How /d/are you >_>
In seriousness, one major problem is actually having to talk about the subject knowing people are going to reply "ok, let's see your open tabs Kurt Eichenwald."
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I was familiar with the EA and the mentioned posters back when they enforced the rules about not supporting this stuff on minors. Honestly, I participated in some of Jesus's research threads (never knew he posted in the stories section. The others don't surprise me.) Seeing them going from careful and professional to doing cartwheels down the slippery slope is ... disappointing, to put it mildly. I remember when people got modded for seeming too enthusiastic about the new policy recommendations. Heck, mods there provided plenty of information in agreement with the prevalence of both desisting after puberty and fettish-driven fixation on castration. And that's just what I got from the handful of boards I bothered reading (Eunuch Central, the general health board, and occasionally the surgical/chemical castration boards. I once poked my head into the stories section, read the titles, and noped the f out of there.)
Wow, thanks for talking about it. Didn't expect we'd have any firsthand experience here. Do you have insights into the board culture you think would help explain the whole thing to people, if you're comfortable talking about it?
Think I kinda recognize some things by analogy to niche groups I've been in. Is there like this undercurrent of equivocation between an official community slogan of "haha imagine not being able to tell the difference between fiction and reality", and very active community leaders obviously taking it uncomfortably seriously?
I'm not sure I was ever involved deeply enough to give a meaningful response, but to the best of my recollection...
I was most active around 2008-2012. At the time, there was a very sharp divide between the different sections of the forums (and there were quite a lot of sections, organized into categories). It seemed like most of the active participants in the sections I visited were middle-aged men/eunuchs, with a smattering of 18-50s filling things out. User motivations ranged from fettishistic and body modification (I recall a frequent poster whose username was "splitdick"), to gender identity and BIID, to medical issues requiring castration (prostate/testicular cancer or injury, etc), to autistic or religious people citing a desire to remove the distraction/temptation of sexuality to focus on what they really cared about. There were lots of personal anecdotes, and Jesus et al (but mostly Jesus) provided academic references when appropriate.
The general pattern was to always, always discourage rushing into castration, even though there was frequent lamenting the lack of support from the medical community. One young, fit christian poster kinda scared most of the active members by confidently skipping the recommended preparation and getting surgically castrated very quickly after opening discussion. On the other hand, there was a middle-aged autist who spent many years trying to convince doctors to help, and wound up bringing an elastrator to an appointment to demonstrate the ability to castrate himself if no surgeon would do it in a safer way (this was apparently when the doctor in question was utterly terrified of anyone discovering that he gave in to the threat).
There were threads about castration of minors, and the mods seemed to watch those closely and take action if anyone seemed too supportive of castrating minors IRL. I think there were also serious concerns about doxxing (one poster apparently had direct experience with at least one-three teenagers who were castrated in the Netherlands for non-trans medical reasons, and had a habit of revealing more detail than was necessary, and got modded for it). One of the admins not mentioned here (Palo, IIRC) had plenty of stories about boys expressing interest in castration prior to puberty, then changing their minds almost immediately afterward.
And as I recall, there were lots and lots of origin stories involving boys observing the castration of livestock.
Now that I'm trying to remember everything I can, I do recall a discussion that got uncomfortably positive toward sexual experiences for boys, particularly between 10 and 14. I recall someone (I forget who) posting large chunks of an article about various men's experiences when they were underaged, to which some posters replied with fond recollections of being 10-14 and getting molested by older teenagers.
Ultimately, what I got out of it was a lot of medical information, and a confusing mix of support for wanting to escape sexuality and also so much explicit sexuality, that I really couldn't say much about what was really going on. In the bits of the forums I read, Jesus generally posted in a very dry, academic manner, and Kristof came across as a grumpy old vet who was getting too old for this shit and really just wanted to be a nun. I kinda got the impression that some accounts, like Kristof and Palo, were often held by older people in the community, and might have changed hands when the original user died, but I never confirmed that. Palo came across as both the top mod and the one who took moderating for safety most seriously (though, there are mods I don't remember so well, so take that with some salt).
Oh, and the pushing for a male-to-eunuch identity thing was always there. Jesus was pretty open about trying to publish research to encourage medical recognition of such an identity. I'm more surprised that the others got involved in the publications and such, since they always struck me as more oriented toward the community than being involved as researchers directly.
I feel like I have not answered the question. :(
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This has been out there for months without gathering any attention outside of fringe right wing press like The Economist. It's been labeled a conspiracy to be ignored and sneered at, as it will be here. You don't have the power to confront them with it, so they can just pretend it's not happening until it's time to say "and it's good!"
Unsurprisingly, kiwifarms has all the deets and complete archives of their "research," which decisively answer all the deflection being done in this thread.
It is the first I'm hearing about it as someone quite online, I think it's worth bringing up.
It's really amazing how flaccid the response was, isn't it? You'd think people would be screaming it from the rooftops, but it's like everyone's too demoralized to protest even the most deranged things being done to their children any more.
The most common response I saw on Twitter was saying "well, obviously this was the next step. We all saw it coming, but what's changed to make anyone listen this time?"
We (as in society, because I sure as hell haven't) accepted that sex was a private matter and what people did in the privacy of their bedrooms, or their imaginations, was no business of anyone else and certainly not the government.
We accepted that any and every sexual orientation was as legitimate and normal as default cis-heteronormativity.
We accepted that kink-shaming was bad, and fetishes were healthy expressions and explorations of sexuality.
We accepted that trans was real woman/real man and anyone who thought otherwise was a transphobe who probably engaged in the worst sin of sins, misgendering and deadnaming.
We accepted that kids could be and were sexual beings too, so contraception and abortion where necessary.
We accepted that kids could make informed decisions, just like adults, about their sexual orientation and gender identity.
We accepted that only religious zealots, bigots, haters, and slavering right-wing fascists objected to any of the above, and wanted to put limits on it because they hate women and minorities and want to control them.
So yeah, eunuch-identity as one more letter for the LGBTQ2+/LGBTQIA+ acronym is just the next step. There will probably be a new flag for them for next Pride. And yeah, eunuch-identity for trans kids, because what are you, some kind of hater? Don't you know about the 41%?
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Not exactly an original notion, but I'm always amazed at the power of the label "conspiracy theory" and the ineffectiveness of responding, "yes, this is a theory about a conspiracy".
Calm down, it is not conspiracy when everything is in the open.
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Yeah, I know it's old news, but I don't remember anyone bringing it up here. And if someone wants to call it a conspiracy theory, I'm very interested in their reasoning.
I think the only way you'll even get that response is by posting this as a direct reply. Otherwise it's just the usual tactic of "ignore, except to subtweet about the stench of evil right wing bare links posts getting worse"
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Can we not? Discuss the culture war not wage it is our raison d'etre. Your whole spiel would be much more fitting without the feigned Hey guys rhetorical device. State your point clearly. This might be interesting to discuss but with the partisan trappings splashed all over it why bother?
Both the ending, and the rhetorical flourishes were meant to be a bit of harmless fun. For whatever it's worth, this was not aimed at your tribe, or even trans people, if anything I was poking fun at habitual conspiracy-deniers.
To be clear, I am not even sure about what your accusation is supposed to be. That's the point of the state clearly rule. I assume you're saying that these people are driving trans changes because they have an eunuch fetish, but it might be because you think they are mentally ill or because you think they are evil. I certainly didn't get you were poking fun at conspiracy deniers.
I'm not clear on what your specific point actually is. Which is why stating it outright somewhere would be helpful, even if you have to keep the rhetorical flourishes. Just a suggestion.
You think my post would have been better if I called them evil or mentally ill? I didn't say any of that because I don't know, and it doesn't matter. The factual part "these people are driving trans changes because they have an eunuch fetish" is enough to stand, and be discussed on it's own.
A common trope in dismissing conspiracy theories is calling everything a coincidence, and dismissing any personal connections as playing "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". The point of the other rhetorical flourish - "well, I suppose" - was exactly the point of making fun of that, right up until you see the SOC document literally citing the fetish forum.
Duly noted, but it sounds like you got exactly what I was saying, it's just that you were expecting there's more to it.
I think your post would have been better if I was sure what your point was. What specifically was the conspiracy you are making fun of the deniers denying. Who denied it and when? What is the light that would come from the discussion?
Yes I got that part. Sadly, I couldn't know ahead of time what you'll be able to catch, and what you'd find confusing.
Any one that's plausible but lacking smoking-gun evidence. The one that's the most analogous is woke entryism into institutions with cultural influence, but any one will do - from Epstein running a child-prostituion Ponzi Scheme (before the evidence was released), Epstein not killing himself, to the COVID lab leak or Big Pharma collaborating to discredit ivermectin.
What would be accomplished by listing all the times and places a specific conspiracy theory was denied?
That to move past shady thinking, I think we need to stop dismissing any hypothesis just because it's a conspiracy theory.
That we might need to increase scrutiny on our institutions, because they seem the be very vulnerable to manipulation by malicious actors.
Well if you want us to talk about whether it is a conspiracy or not (as opposed to just making fun of people who think it is) then that would be helpful, no? If your post was just to make fun of those people, then what is it's value here?
If your point is
Then why not just say that specifically? Those are good points and worth discussing. But you didn't actually mention those things in your original post. Are the eunuchs malicious actors? Are they manipulating the situation? If those are your factual claims then make your point around that. But your post doesn't say that. It kind of gives a wink wink nudge nudge in that direction. Which we should avoid in my opinion here, at least.
Is your position that these people are malicious actors? If so just say so. If not, then say that instead.
No? I don't see how citing every time someone denied these conspiracies would bring anything to the discussion.
The story in itself is pretty out there. I wanted to see what people think of it, before moving on to any big-picture ultimate conclusions I might have about it.
Malicious in the sense that they're driven by their fetish rather than finding the best standards of care, yes.
Ok, and from my side: if something in what I wrote is unclear, can you just ask what I meant, so I can clarify it, instead of complaining about the original post 9 comment levels deep?
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But at least he did get you to acknowledge the post, if not to address the evidence in any way. That's better than the usual outcome.
Straw that broke the camels back. Nothing especially bad about this post compared to a number of other norm eroding posts I am seeing.
I guess we're on to the "ignore except to subtweet about the stench of evil right wing bare links posts getting worse" step already.
It's sad how predictable it is. Could you actually address his post, as a favor to me?
Nope. Nothing you are saying in anyway makes me think that is a good idea. Perhaps reconsider your approach?
No need to change my approach: you've already explained more than enough about your reaction to the evidence. All that's left is waiting for the "and it's good!" step in a few months.
It's amazing that the same tactics work for you over and over again, but why change what works.
I've explained exactly nothing about my reaction to the evidence. The only thing I have talked about is my critique of how the point was made. You are familiar with the Motte yes? This is very much our bread and butter. Nearly any point can be made, but we have rules and a culture around HOW the point should be made.
It should be plain, it should be written as is people you disagree with are reading and you WANT them to read. It should avoid Boo Outgrouping and should optimize for light and not heat etc. etc.
Could you help him rewrite his post so that people with a fetish for castrating children felt more included in the conversation? That would be a very helpful and productive alternative to complaining about his tone, and double as active engagement with the evidence.
You two could even do an adversarial collaboration on it!
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Perhaps address what they were writing?
Or if it's not for you, maybe move on?
What are you adding here, except for style policing?
Style policing is a valuable part of building a discussion community like this one. That was the entire point of my comment! We have very specific rules and norms around tone and style, entirely separate from the content.
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Mentioning this at all is very partisan. I liked how it was styled. What did he get wrong
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This reminded me of... this story. But here, author does make it clear that she'd really like it to happen. (especially in the comment section)
From "Author's note":
And it's not just this story.
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This is obnoxious, don't do this.
You've managed to garner a pretty impressive array of reports (nine so far) including AAQC nominations and "boo outgroup" complaints. The tone of your presentation is... excessively smarmy, I guess I want to say. It doesn't invite discussion. And yes, some portion of that may be the natural result of you Noticing things you're not, on some views, allowed to Notice. But this is not a space where you get modded for Noticing, this is a space where you get modded for not speaking plainly. Don't connect a few dots and then dangle implications, here. Make an argument. Tell us what you think the evidence on offer tells you.
People with specific sexual fetishes centring on castration of minors are now being accepted as experts when it comes to setting policy dealing with minors engaging in decisions about medical treatment including hormones and surgery?
That seems to be the OP's argument, but it's just made in an obtuse and somewhat annoying way. It could have been shorter and more direct. Write for clarity, not amusement, and all that.
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I get modded every time I outright say "These people want to mutilate and sterilize children." Now he's getting modded for provided reams of evidence for any reasonable person to come to that conclusion themselves, cheekily hinting at it. Possibly because he saw me modded for saying it directly, who's to know.
You say you won't get modded for noticing, so people don't need to play coy. I don't believe you.
You were most recently moderated here. Let's take a look at what Zorba said about it:
This does not quite fit your interpretation of why you were moderated. In your case, you stated your view without bringing evidence. This post did the opposite--brought evidence, of a kind, while failing to state a view. The best way to avoid moderation on high-heat issues is to carefully bring both evidence and argument, along with a heap of charity for the outgroup.
I'll plead guilty to not keeping with the rules or their spirit, but I think @drmanhattan16 above explained the issue much better:
I do like a good horror story, and I think I got carried away writing this post.
I guess this also means I never get to make fun of wannabe writers, who pour out their frustrations onto news articles ever again.
For what it's worth, as a horror story it's pretty good - it does a great job selling the mounting sense of dread as new information is presented.
Just that's not what The Motte is for.
Maybe we need a The Motte Horror Story Hour thread, where we can post purely facts-based horror stories.
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You really read through all of that to find the one thing you don't like?
They were trying to express frustration... And did it effectively.
As a reader of the site, please don't do this.
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There's currently a Request for Comment on the talk page for the Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People regarding this issue.
Thank you, it's an incredible read.
It looks like the No's are going to win using all the usual tactics.
Clouds of ink, browbeating, veiled and open threats, constantly changing the definition of terms and moving goalposts, demands for impossible evidence, hordes of supporting partisans rushing in to gang up on people. It's amazing to see the party struggle session perfected and enacted so casually at the slightest hint of Wrong Opinions.
And all the same things being done here. Is there any explanation for the reflexive denial other than blatant support for the pedo-castration fetishists?
Remind me again how the old sweet song goes: "there is no such thing as the slippery slope, that's a fallacy".
So now transgender activists of a certain stripe have moved on from "all we want is to be able to use the bathroom we feel comfortable using" to "eunuch identity is totally an orientation that should be recognised under the LGBT umbrella".
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Now come on, you know it's only a few odd people on Twitter, or a few kids on college campuses, and it never ever happens in reality, and if it does it's only very, very rare and it's conservatives blowing up a few incidents into a big conspiracy...
... and if it does happen, then they deserved it/it's good and normal
I know it's being made fun of often, but what exactly is per se inconsistent about a combination of views that amounts to "you are pretending (your positions) to be losing when you are actually winning, and I actually wish you were in fact losing"? In a culture basically hardwired to support underdogs (ceteris paribus), the most reliable way to drive home a win is to maintain the narrative of loss, thus overcoming the bias towards balance that starts working against you once you cross the fifty-fifty mark. If you are a right-winger, you would do well to feel exactly the same about the left's response to any minuscule win that you consider to be yours (a bunch of people coming out to protest for a nativist party, Elon Musk taking over Twitter, Trump and allies actually implementing a "Trumpian" policy for once...).
Well yeah, we know it's rational to use that tactic, and we know you know it's rational. That's why we read that message into e.g. smirking denials that child mutilation fetishists are writing their pedo fiction into public policy. You can't read it any other way once the tactic is common knowledge.
That's why I've been begging any of you for the love of God to oppose it instead of just denying it, to no success.
I don't think the duplicity you are implying is actually part of it, though, at least consciously. In my estimation, the typical left-wing activist really does believe that the forces of society are arrayed against them and attacks on some sexual-politics NGO like this one are an instance of the way in which the overwhelming forces of society assert themselves the moment they attain the smallest victory.
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Contribute something more than snark, please.
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Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic, or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot? You allege that they themselves are fetishists:
and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case. This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration. The article you linked describes it as (bolding mine):
which again makes it sound like those usernames weren't actively posting erotica. I assume if they were, the news article would be pasting that front and center. I'm not personally going to make an account on that website myself to investigate (look at what happens to people who 'associate' with such websites 20 years later) but I'm curious to see the results if someone else does.
From the original post:
.
Can you link the post where I say anything like that?
All 3 had active forum accounts for over 20 years. Johnson was apparently a founding member of the site. That's a looot of research.
If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.
Did the Freakonomics guys go on to recommend policy that goes easy on drug dealers, or something?
I said I'd be curious to see the results if someone else tracks down the rest of his stories. Compared to how inflammatory your OP was, my response was fairly measured and I'm trying to engage with you in good faith.
Here's a list of potential evidence you could provide, and how it would influence my thinking. I think you might find it disappointing though:
Spicy, blatant erotica around orchiectomy from Johnson -> Dude's fantasizing about cutting his balls off and maybe has a bit of a...conflict of interest when it comes to providing guidelines for trans teens.
Blatant pedophilic content from Johnson -> Dude's probably a pedophile. No bueno. I assume he'll get canned if you or others circulate those stories.
All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.
Survey (or other data) of WPATH members or other academics involved in treating trans teens that X% of them are fetishists along these lines -> X% of these people are fetishists and if X is > than...I don't know, maybe 1-5% depending on how bad the fetish is, I'd probably find that disquieting?
I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?
Sorry to single you out, but this is exactly the sort of response mindset I was addressing with they "well, I suppose ... Hey guys!" rhetorical flourish that bothered @SSCReader so much.
My claim was simple: castration fetishists managed to get positions of influence in a fairy impactful organization, and are using them to push their fetish into the standards of care for transgender people. To prove my claim I:
Pointed to a forum where castration fetishists gather.
Showed that some of it's most veteran members of the WPATH, who were invited to several conferences where the standards of care are debated.
Quoted an excerpt from that standards of care that is directly to the fetish.
Pointed out that the chapter cites the very forum these members regularly post at, and have been active for over 20 years.
If my post was limited to the first 3 points, I could understand dismissing it as a run of the mill conspiracy theory. I'd disagree, but I could understand it, as this is how the conspiracy discourse has gone on for the past several decades. I'm not going to call the fourth point the final nail in the coffin, but we are getting to the point where it's going to be quite a bit of work to reopen it again.... I was expecting pretty much everyone to agree, that at the very least this raises several red flags.
What I got in response was:
"Move along, nothing to see here...". Then I was asked:
whether the academics attending the WPATH conferences actually wrote any stories (addressed in the OP)
whether they were fetishists, or just academics studying them (addressed in the article I linked, and was quoted to argue against me)
to provide examples of more "blatant" and/or "pedophilic" content, because evidence that at least one of them wrote stories there suddenly wasn't enough (and if I managed to do that it would "slightly" updated towards my original claim, and all it would conclusively prove is that 3 out of over 4000 WPATH members are eunuch fetishists, which is not relevant to my claim at all).
to provide survey data about the fetishes of all WPATH members?! Which... how am I suppose to that to begin with, and what does it have to do with my original claim?
This is just reflexive denialism, and exactly what my rhetorical flourishes were poking fun at. I'll plead guilty to not staying with the spirit of the forum, but I hope it's clear now that it wasn't a broad attack on the blue tribe, but at a certain epistemology.
I tried to engage you politely and in good faith, but since you disagree, I apologize for the offense and I'll leave you to your more productive conversations with other folks.
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I don't think "republican politicians" are experts on anything other than their own beliefs, nor do I present them as disinterested authority figures.
But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.
Well, I've been asked to detail the evidence that would support a change in my beliefs. You (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) think that some significant fraction of academics have conflicts of interest based on their sexual preferences. What evidence would convince you that a robust majority (say >95%) of these experts are, in fact, coming from a place of wanting to do what's best for the youth rather than pursuing their own sexual fantasies?
I wouldn't go so far as to say 'disinterested' as the criticism that these academics believe in a broader trans rights agenda independent of their research or data almost certainly is true for a majority, and it's not clear to me at least that the data warrant some of the claims that are made.
Depends on the field and generation. At least in the life sciences/medicine, there seem to be an even mix of altruists and ego monsters, but no conflict of interests in the same way that I could see in the humanities. I expect it's similar in the harder sciences. Maybe you're right for the humanities, although it would be interesting to see, for example, the breakdown of cis vs. trans academics in WPATH.
In a highly unscientific poll, I picked 8 profiles at random from WPATH and of the 6 I could track down 2 were transgender. So you're probably right that a significant fraction are trans. As (I think) you gesture at, they may well punch above their weight in terms of influence.
So, what's to be done? Are we just going to be partisans poking each other in the eye for eternity? When we reach an impasse without the data to get an answer, do we just shrug and lower our guns for the time being and move onto other things?
Well, at the risk of people complaining I'm not doing my homework again, why do you think she's a creep? Because of the way she advertises to minors on tiktok, or glamorizes plastic surgery? Ah, I see your edit. So you think she gets off on removing body parts from healthy people?
Surgeons have been doing radical mastectomies for breast cancer for decades, and it was quite controversial for a while. If I remember the section from Emperor of all Maladies correctly, common practice in the early days was to take all of both breasts regardless of the stage or size of the cancer. Do you think cannibals and fetishists were/are overrepresented among surgeons as well? Or do you think she's specifically into the pedophilic aspect of it?
To clarify, you want pushback against the three individuals from OP and Dr. Gallagher from within WPATH?
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It's hard to find information for the more recent stories, but this seems to cover up to 2008. Of the three named accounts, only "Jesus" has pieces listed. Of those two, "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?" could be arguably just academic and medical discussion, if somewhat overly optimistic about its frameworks, but "Making of the Modern World" is the sort of 'world-building' that makes the gay stories with 'and all the women went on a vacation/died of irrelevance' seem like high art. And it does include some material focused on young people :
The piece starts with a foreward openly inviting other authors to write about:
This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories. On the other hand, I do think it dramatically reduces my confidence that this paper is meaningfully useful: there are people who can describe a fetish community from the inside, but there's remarkably few who can do so in a sphere with policy ramifications hitting their interests without putting a thumb on the scales. Worse, having the same persons also involved immediately with the SoC8 draft allows and encourages a lot of citation massaging: that paper is summarized at one point to "As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care."
"Eunuchunique" and "Kristoff" do not seem to have published stories under those names, at least as of copies of the story archive I can find, and the forums a) seem to have been nuked a few times and b) don't seem to be publicly available, so it's a little hard to talk on that side.
Thanks! That was a wild ride.
It's hard to say, no? The eugenics angle from the second story alone is probably enough in today's climate if he weren't already emeritus. The passage about castrating children certainly seems like some kind of disquieting fantasy, to @arjin_ferman 's point. I think it might be different if it were more personal in nature, but these weird, bigger-picture fantasies about redesigning society that don't seem particularly sexual in nature? It's all utterly bizarre. Mr. Johnson certainly seems to have some kind of castration fetish, and I'm skeptical of his opinions on the treatment of trans children.
As an aside, many moons ago, a group of my friends discovered and passed around the pain olympics for shock value. Funny how these things come around. At least (to my knowledge) none of the youth of Athens were sufficiently corrupted to castrate themselves.
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Generally when the Republican Politicians and Catholic Priests are caught doing unspeakable things, they've made some effort to hide the behavior. These guys were pretty open about their unspeakableness, and nobody at WPATH seems to have had a problem with them. Elsewhere in the thread, people are linking to claims that Wikipedia's staff likewise doesn't seem to have a problem with them. I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?
If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?
...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities. Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?
To be fair, all of the papers I can access skip over the question of how Johnson/Wassersug developed a relationship with the eunuch forums, in favor of summarizing how the survey specifically was performed. Johnson didn't do a great job of obfuscating his identity, but it's both plausible and likely that it's only obvious in retrospect or if you were already following the community extremely closely.
The academic papers and citations aren't great, but on their own they're not clearly malicious rather than just weirdly amoral.
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I confess, I'd never heard of WPATH or those three academics until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the academic side of things. Most of my exposure to the trans community is just real life friends that I have; we don't spend a whole lot of time haggling over DSM-5 definitions or whether they're mentally ill or fetishists. We're just friends who play sports together, or video games, or go out dancing. I don't misgender them or discriminate and it doesn't come up aside from some snark about nasty conservatives now and then, but my trans friends are hardly unique or outliers in that regard.
My (our?) generation sidestepped this issue as all of these people transitioned as adults.
So, say OP is right and the medical field is run by a freewheeling cabal of pedophiles and/or castration and/or autogynephilic fetishists who get off on, as I think naraburns put it, mutilating children. Then, uh, probably WPATH or whatever the other relevant orgs are delenda est. Say the first bailey to that motte is correct, and some higher-than-background level of pedo-castro-autogynes are members of WPATH, what do we do? I don't know. If it's 40% and they're swinging votes, probably delenda est. If it's 5% and the majority of the decisions made are still coming from a place of medical opinion rather than fetishism, it's a bit of a tough call. If it's background level (on par with Republicans or Catholic priests) should we do anything at all besides fire the people who get found out?
The better analogy would be the Republican himself is the gay prostitute, no? But then, everyone does this. If a Republican gun-owner gives a speech on the floor about gun rights and decries non-gun-owners who don't know an AR-whatsit from a bump-stock-shotgun writing gun control legislation, do your eyebrows go up? Or the wealthy Republican business-owner pitching lower business tax rates, or union busting, or axing parental leave?
The steelman is that gun-owners understand guns better than liberals, Black people understand the struggle of the inner city better, trans people understand trans youth better. The critique is that all of those people have potential conflicts of interest.
Someone with a castration fetish writing guidelines for trans youth is probably a bridge too far for the majority of people though, no?
Having read the actual writing thanks to Gattsuru, it seems pretty likely that the eugenics is enough to give him the boot, although he's already emeritus. The optics alone are probably enough for the University to cut ties. The fact that a medical professional is fantasizing about castrating people certainly seems to present a conflict of interest around treating trans (or eunuch?) identifying children. I'm sure elements on the left will say 'blah blah personal life doesn't affect medical opinion' but I don't think your average suburb-dwelling normie will be buying it.
The fact that he was so bad at opsec is what made me assume he was doing it purely from an academic lens. Yes, it's worth discussing, although I'd hesitate to call the gender studies department at the University of Chico high-status.
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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.
Based on your other post, I'm curious how you account for people desperate to castrate themselves if not some odd innate quirk, but we can set that to the side for the moment.
That's a fair point on the influence of those three, although it also depends on the broader argument you're trying to push. Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation? Because that was the sense I got from OP, and I still largely don't believe that (although I'm open to more evidence). Moreover, only Johnson is listed as an author for the WPATH guidelines, not the other two (only cited). I'd wonder whether other people worked on it as well, editorial oversight, etc.
But your point that I was too dismissive of their influence is well taken.
I'll grant this too. I don't mean this as a gotcha, but what would you prefer instead? It seems unlikely to me that trans-skeptic (? not sure of the term) people will do gender studies for 6 years of a PhD in order to represent their side in professional organizations, and moreover, that conservative spaces are just as hostile an ideological milieu to any evidence that would purport to find benefits to accepting trans folk as their chosen gender (which I've seen cited numerous times; whether they actually hold water, I've never tried to figure out). I find it hard to believe that in some fantastical world where some unbiased body did publish such a study that conservatives would read it, shrug their shoulders, and the issue would die.
You might argue that I'm comparing apples to oranges by juxtaposing a body of PhDs and MDs with 'Cletus from Alabama' (as other people have said when making this criticism). But with the legislatures getting involved, Cletus be flexing his muscles whatever the eggheads at WPATH say and his opinion is making decisions in this arena.
Thanks for the links, and taking the time to lay out your argument. Appreciate it.
This is Kiwi Farms line, that is now official conservative line on which the "groomer" campaign is based.
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/eunuch-community.13954/page-4
Is this really all what is it all about? Is small group of people dedicated to one bizarre fetish really the greatest secret manipulators and masterminds in history?
David Cole from Takimag (someone known as Jewish Holocaust denier is not someone expected to be too woke) strongly disagrees.
https://www.takimag.com/article/doom-and-groomer/
...
Of course, they are talking about different people, leaders and common soldiers.
Still, why this particular fetish was normalized?
Follow the money. There is no profit out there. Look, for example, at furry fandom - even the most dedicated fans could not spend more than low four figures on fursuit, and exit is easy - just put your fursuit in wardrobe and let it here.
Transgenderism is for life, and it is unprecedented money maker for big pharma and big medicine.
If people were rationally following their interest, we would see them support T cause, and we do.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
https://archive.ph/XH5v5
These are the three sources of movement that changed the world.
This is a little hard to believe, because the "for life" parts (i.e., hormones) are generic medications and they're dirt cheap.
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I'd agree that the evidence in this post is lacking, and this is a perfect example of the exact sort of question the OP should have concluded with. The articles I heard of this from very clearly portrayed Johnson, Wassersug and Willette as enthusiastic participants in the castration fetish scene, along with evidence that seemed to back their assertions reasonably well, but I likewise did not check primary sources, and the source I found it from was fairly partisan. I did google the names and found the papers they'd written drawing on the fiction archive as a research resource, but that doesn't answer the question.
I'd readily agree that dispassionate researchers engaging in some niche anthropology is very different from extreme-fetish enjoyers smuggling their thing into academia, and then into actual policy. If the former is the case, I'm pretty sure I still have some pointed objections, but would agree that this instance isn't directly relevant to the larger issues. The same would go if it could be argued that these guys weren't actually relevant to the WPATH drafting, or that WPATH isn't actually influential to policy. That chain is the actual story the above is hinting at, and the fact that it's hinting rather than laying it out is my objection to the post as a whole.
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Rather than asking questions you don't want answered, how about you do a little background reading?
One of those three people is administrator of the fetish website. If you want to claim that the persona administrating the website itself is doing so merely out of academic curiosity, then go ahead and make that claim, but the far likelier claim is that the guy who administrates, and participates, in the fetish website is himself a fetishist.
https://reduxx.info/top-trans-medical-association-collaborated-with-castration-child-abuse-fetishists/
https://reduxx.info/top-academic-behind-fetish-site-hosting-child-sexual-abuse-fantasy-push-to-revise-wpath-guidelines/
Unkind. The background reading doesn't really answer the question to my satisfaction. This is a case where the words written down are projecting an image to the reader that they don't actually, specifically support. I happen to be fairly confident that the image projected is, in fact, quite accurate, but these sorts of ambiguities drive a lot of our worst conversations here.
Not very, and absolutely warranted. Asking questions that were answered in the OP, or in the article he quoted, is not an indication of someone wanting to find the answer.
Sure. Since there seems to be a lot meta-talk about form in this thread, I'd also like to ask: do you think it would kill him to say something like "Wow, that's pretty wild! But do you think you could clarify these questions for me..."?
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Did you read the post? The article with the reader's digest punchline is noted as written by Jesus, the purported username of one of the doctors.
I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?
What's the rest of the story? Also, what about the other two accounts?
It is fictional story set in utopian (for the author) far future, I think it was clear from the context.
The shining future predicted by the author indeed came true, we are all wearing mirror shades and we love it.
Was it a conspiracy, or just people working together to achieve their dreams?
Many cases of fiction influencing real life - just remember all the science fiction fans who worked on real space program and helped to make their vision a reality.
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See, what happened there is that this was a story, a work of fiction, set in the future. So, while the story itself was published in 2002, the internal elements included things like "this is a Readers' Digest article from 2017". You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?
I agree, it's very odd to think Readers' Digest would still be a thing in 2017, maybe that is what confused you?
Wait, but how did he know what would happen in 1984 if (as you claim) he was writing the book in 1948? How did he avoid getting in trouble for misinformation by, like, the 1948 version of facebook mods?
Shocking, I know, but they didn't even have mods back in 1948! Can you imagine?
It's official, Hitler happened because they didn't have mods.
Fortunately though we got mods in the fifties, eventually culminating in the greatest mod of all time, Mick Jagger.
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The reader's digest 2017 citation was the punchline within the story, the joke being (on EA in 2002) that by 2017 becoming a eunuch will be a normie, reader's digest type activity.
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The "2017" was part of the story posted in 2002 about castration being normalized in (then) future year.
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This tweet by UN Women.
I am still confused as to whether this tweet is a sincere sentiment felt by someone somewhere or an A/B tested string designed to be maximally infuriating/alienating to the largest number of people.
Here is my dissection as to why this tweet is especially infuriating.
No mention of base rates. Which would be a crucial piece of information to parse such a statistic. FYI, women tend to make up ~40% of journalists.
(Probably intentionally) misleading the usage of a ratio instead of a percentage. A percentage is a meaningful statistic when comparing a rate change of something. If x journalists were killed in t year, and x+a journalists were killed in t+1 year, you could say that the "more journalists were killed, a increase of b %"
Instead have a look at the numbers.
2020: 62 journalists killed (58 men, 4 women).
2021: 55 journalists killed (49 men, 6 women).
This is textbook 101, lying with statistics. Less JOURNALISTS were killed. Unless you don't care if male journalists are killed. Bonus: They calculated the percentages wrong (: - They rounded down so.. thanks for the fig leaf?
No regard for as to whether this change is "statistically significant" (FYI, well within less than 1 stddev).
Just goes without saying, the tone-deafness of it. Why not "𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐏 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐉𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐒"?
The childish assumption that people who LITERALLY KILL JOURNALISTS will be swayed in any way whatsoever even with a LOUD proclamation of "Don't do bad thing!".
Now jaded you might say "but this is the CW, this is what always happens and will continue to happen". I agree.
In the landscape of twitter/msm only the most ragebait of headlines grab any attention, however I would say that a lot of that ragebait can be just made by applying the principles of making the best clickbait, and they might occur to someone with a certain creative bent naturally.
This tweet on the other hand isn't mere creative distortion. It has all the trappings of being intentionally crafted. Think of it this way. Someone had to go through the statistics of various professions deaths by gender, probably something like;
SELECT occupation FROM occupational_deaths WHERE 2021 > 2020 AND gender LIKE 'Female' GROUPBY occupation;and "journalist' was the only field that returned.
That is just especially hilarious to me.. The best trolls of our generation might not be 4channers but instead working for various corporate activist organizations.
As to whether this tweet is a product of gross incompetence or malicious competence is going to remain a great mystery. Duck test is certainly not working here.
Duck test?
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
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That's about what I would expect from UN Women, I assure you they're quite sincere and behave with similar intellectual rigor in more consequential ways than just tweets. Off the top of my head their responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak comes to mind, a search finds this blog post summarizing it. Archive of their report:
Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority, you can count on that being their conclusion regardless of situation. Some news articles reported this as if they were more medically vulnerable, but mostly UN Women meant they were vulnerable in some vague social sense, along with implying they might be more medically vulnerable based on some dubious early data (ebola deaths by gender ended up being around equal). That blog post also has some links regarding the UN's decision to only distribute food to women after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good luck getting food if you don't have any living and friendly female relatives.
On a lighter note, the "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls" report from the UN Broadband Commission with "editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU" was laughably terrible. Most blatantly regarding the citations, which ranged from "literally blank" or "citing a file on your own hard drive" to referring to "Recent research on how violent video games are turning children, mostly boys, into ‘killing zombies’ 118" based on citing a 2000 article published on a LaRouche website raving about "killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style games, such as the game Pokémon,", "satanic video games", etc. For whatever reason feminism within the UN seems unusually incompetent and written without considering potential criticism, the tweet doesn't seem too surprising with that history.
Yep, beat me to it. The UN has a history of gender-discriminatory policy favouring women, and justifying these policies with sophistry and extremely flimsy arguments. In Haiti, the UN's justification for distributing the food to women was to claim (without a shred of evidence) that women were more likely to distribute food equitably, and also that most men had women who would give the food to them. Here's a CNN article reporting on it and laying out some of the UN's justifications.
For my part, I would say it's incoherent to justify this policy with the idea that most men have women who will distribute the food to them, since it's not as if women don't also have men who will distribute food to them too - it can be used to justify it both ways. I for one also think it would have been infinitely better if they distributed the food equitably themselves instead of crossing their fingers and hoping the women would do it for them - maybe they should consider completing their job instead of only doing half of it. But it's mainly covered in a positive manner, with the gender discrimination brushed over as an afterthought or even justified. Even the CNN article approaches it from that angle, despite indications that there were men who were excluded from necessary aid (quoting one who stated "What about me? I didn't get anything. I need food. ... Many people could not participate", completely in contrast to the UN's lip-service claims that they would try to make sure no one in need was excluded).
Additionally, as this blog post from the same author notes, a lot of their already tenuous justifications for women-only food aid in Haiti might have actually been even more questionable in the context of that specific disaster because "due to the timing of the earthquake at 4:53 pm, a high percentage of casualties were women who remained in the household, while men and children were at work or in school, leaving a high percentage of single-male headed households and households with only one, or no remaining breadwinner."
Other mental gymnastics that the UN offered up to justify their actions in Haiti was to claim (again without any substantiation) that women were being pushed out of food lines, but even if we are to charitably interpret the UN and the WFP's statements and assume women being pushed out of line was actually a problem instead of a rationalisation created by an organisation desperately trying to justify their actions, they could've solved this by establishing different food distribution centres for men and for women instead of prioritising women, thus reducing clashes between men and women through sex-segregation while creating no such gender discrimination against men when it came to their food distribution. This is such an easy solution it's hard to imagine them not thinking of it unless all their staff and policy-makers are mentally challenged, and so this is not a satisfactory justification or explanation for the policy.
Rather, I think this is a blatant example of the UN's gender ideology bleeding into their aid programmes. Placing food in the hands of women is part of their attempts to Empower Women. In this 2001 discussion here they talk about the prospect of utilising humanitarian crises to push their gender agenda - and in it, specifically targeting women for the distribution of resources is touched on as one of the possible methods for "empowerment". The concept of using disasters to promote a gender agenda has existed in the UN for a very long time, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2014 Ebola outbreak were just the instances which the mainstream reported on.
EDIT: clarity
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I think this may be a utility monster in the wild. That is, due to a group's vulnerable/marginalized/oppressed status, their situation as a whole is more tenuous, and so every harm hurts worse and every help helps better. Therefore they ought to be prioritized for protection from harm and allocation of benefits, because for them, every unit can do more good.
Sort of a triage situation: you want to help the ones (who can be helped and) who need it most.
The tricky thing is that sometimes, this may be true, but it is also something advantageous to get away with claiming whether it is true or not. See, in inverse, "privilege."
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It's a UN entity working for the "empowerment" of "women," safe to say absolutely nobody who doesn't work for it gives one shit what they do, including those who fund it. If it's an entity that only exists for the benefit of its own members, I would expect it to become dumber and dumber over time. Women do not like hiring other women who are smart or disagreeable.
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This is very strange, and I feel like to any normal person this should sound strange to them, even without knowledge of base rates. I think anyone looking at this would immediately say "wait, doesn't that mean that ~90% of journalists killed each year were men?". I also think that most people would make the assumption, if not stated otherwise, that women account for 50% of journalists and men account for the other 50%. And for it to seem like women journalists were being disproportionately targeted, women would have to account for less than 11% of journalists on a year that 11% were killed. So according to how I believe a normal person would think, anyone should look at this figure and either not care, or get outraged by the fact that they interpreted these figures to indicate there's some sort of epidemic of women journalists being killed or something.
This is one of my big issues with those do-gooder «world government» type organizations, whether incumbent or aspiring like the Effective Altruism blob. «Frightfully distant they are from the people»; they aren't just echo chambers as a result of their evolution, but they are born out of the disconnect with the hoi polloi. Their attitudes and aesthetics turn out alien to most of their subjects and one must wonder whether their values – not just formalizations, but deepest moral intuitions – are as well. They are unaligned collective intelligences.
I don't think this in particular is alien to most of the people. Male expendability is mainstream, and maybe apolitical.
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UN Women is just what you get when there are no
menadults in the room and funding is guaranteed. Just a bunch of ladies trying to out-left each other.EDIT: To elaborate, when there is zero external feedback, the organization's activities are purely internal status games. Whoever came up with the Tweet may very well have been daring some colleague to criticize it to give the author pretense for an attack.
That very well could be the case. However, I am not entirely sure if lowering the sanity waterline for office politics is any better than doing it for the express reason.
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You're giving me flashbacks to Angelina Jolie's campaign to stop rape in war zones. I mean why not just stop war itself while you're at it?
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I'm guessing women are a much smaller proportion of journalists that report from war zones, piss off mob bosses, etc. It's possible they might get killed at higher rates than men when exposing themselves to such dangers.
However, agreed, this tweet is absurd and smells of p-hacking.
It's also possible that female journalists on average are getting more bold/desperate as the whole industry goes deeper and deeper into shit, and these are more likely to get clipped.
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Shouldn't the call to action be to target more lady journalists, for equality?
I would have thought women would be as capable of dying as a man.
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I doubt someone went through various occupations. I think the occupation being journalists is definitely part of the rage. If the statistic was over an increase in number of woman welders who died, that wouldn't spark the same response in the intended audience.
The tweet is a little confusing though, because these small percents really highlight how many of the killed journalists were men, so I'm not sure most people who see this will feel outraged at the dead journalists.
E: cursory glance at comments shows yes most people are a little annoyed it is about women, as opposed to just journalists. If this was crafted bait, it specifically was crafted to have a very slanted gender ratio. If nothing else, this is an effective way to talk about the number of journalists killed.
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Out of context my first instinct would have been to assume this is a smear campaign designed to make feminism look daft. But I doubt such a smear campaign would have been authored by @UNWomen, unless there is some serious levels of internal fuckery going on.
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The violent death of women (and, in this case, presumably most of them are young and single) normally elicists an emotional response the violent death of men doesn't, so I think the sentiment is sincere in this case.
That's a context dependent ingroup justification for why we, the ingroup, happen to deserve our privilege. These arguments don't fly in any context where women are getting the short end of the stick.
The only sentiment that is sincere from feminism is that women are the ingroup and men are the outgroup.
That's basically the same thing. Whoever posted the tweet rather obviously starts from the assumption that the percent of female journalists getting killed in a normal world is 0.
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this tweet seems aimed at, like, trump supporters on twitter, when the people who have journalists killed are mob bosses in foreign countries. just very out of touch.
Uh, what? How do you get 'aimed at Trump supporters' out of this?
We know it's aimed at Americans because Americans represent (a) most people on Twitter, and (b) the cultural / financial hegemon, by that token capable of actually doing something about it (like giving the UN money)
We know it's not aimed at Blue Tribers because Blue Tribers already handle "minority groups" (like women) with kid gloves.
QED, Trump supporters on Twitter
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Does this dissection mean you’ve taken the bait?
Assuming that it’s trolling, writing a detailed takedown is a bit silly. If it’s serious, well, Twitter delenda est.
It is the UN (Women's) official tweet. That gives it some gravity_.
Yes, I know that channel has posted other braindead things (is it weird that I can probably write that on reddit, but not 'retarded'?), but it's still kind of shocking to me that something so clearly bad got posted.
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My argument is more along the lines of this is scientifically crafted bait, because you can't make up bait this good without effort.
The cynic in me says it could be serious. It's not like there aren't any priors for the woke coming to absurd conclusions in the past.
It seems likely that this is crafted bait to elicit a reaction that they can use to argue that the problems facing women stem from ‘misinformation’ or ‘lack of awareness’ or something else where the solution is hiring college educated women in first world countries to ‘advocate’.
Yes. From the companion Guardian article pimping the report:
TL;DR, journalists report that criticizing journalists should be a crime, and you criticizing this proves it.
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I've been pretty obsessively playing around with AI image generation the last 3 or so weeks, and after learning what I have in that time, it's struck me how the culture war arguments seem to miss the contours of the actual phenomenon (i.e. like every other culture war issue). The impression that I got from just observing the culture war was that the primary use of these tools was "prompt engineering," i.e. experimenting with and coming up with the right sets of prompts and settings and seeds in order to get an image one wants. This is, of course, how many/most of the most famous examples are generated, because that's how you demonstrate the actual ability of the AI tool.
So I installed Stable Diffusion on my PC and started generating some paintings of big booba Victorian women. Ran into predictable issues with weird composition, deformities, and inaccuracies, but I figured that I could fix these by getting better at "prompt engineering." So I looked at some resources online to see how people actually got better at this. On top of that, I didn't want to just stick to making generic pictures of beautiful Victorian women, or of any sort of beautiful women; I wanted to try making fanart of specific
waifuscharacters doing specific things (as surprising as it may be, this is not a euphemism - more because of a lack of ambition than lack of desire) in specific settings shot in specific angles and specific styles.And from digging into the resources, I discovered a couple of important methods to accomplish something like this. First was training the model further for specific characters or things, which I decided not to touch for the moment. Second was in-painting, which is just the very basic concept of doing IMG2IMG on a specific subset of pixels on the image. (There's also out-painting which is just canvas expansion + noise + in-painting). "Prompt engineering" was involved to some extent, but the info I read on this was very basic and sparse; at this point, whatever techniques that are there seem pretty minor, not much more sophisticated than the famous "append 'trending on Artstation' to the prompt" tip.
So I started going ahead using initial prompts to generate some crude image, then using IMG2IMG with in-painting to get to the final specific fanart I wanted to make. And the more I worked on this, the more I realized that this is where the bulk of the actual "work" takes place when it comes to making AI images. If you want to frame a shot a certain way and feature specific characters doing specific things in specific places, you need to follow an iterative process of SD-generation, Photoshop edit, in-painting-SD-generation, Photoshop edit, and so on until the final desired image is produced.
I'm largely agnostic and ambivalent on the question of whether AI generated images are Art, or if one is being creative by creating AI generated images. I don't think it really matters; what matters to me is if I can create images that I want to create. But in the culture war, I think the point of comparison has to be between someone drawing from scratch (even if using digital tools like tablets and Photoshop) and someone using AI to iteratively select parts of an image to edit in order to get to what they want. Not someone using AI to punch in the right settings (which can also be argued to be an Art).
The closest analogue I could think of was making a collage by cutting out magazines or picture books and gluing them together in some way that meaningfully reflects the creator's vision. Except instead of rearranging pre-existing works of art, I'm rearranging images generated based on the training done by StabilityAI (or perhaps, the opposite; I'm generating images and then rearranging them). Is collage-making Art? Again, I don't know and I don't care, but the question about AI "art" is a very similar question.
My own personal drawing/illustration skills are quite low; I imagine a typical grade schooler can draw about as well as I can. At many steps along the process of the above iteration, I found myself thinking, "If only I had some meaningful illustration skills; fixing this would be so much easier" as I ran into various issues trying to make a part of an image look just right. I realized that if I actually were a trained illustrator, my ability to exploit this AI tool to generate high quality images would be improved several times over.
And this raises more blurry lines about AI-generated images being Art. At my own skill level, running my drawing through IMG2IMG to get something good is essentially like asking the AI to use my drawing as a loose guide. To say that the image is Artwork that 07mk created would be begging the question, and I would hesitate to take credit as the author of the image. But at the skill level of a professional illustrator, his AI-generated image might look virtually identical to something he created without AI, except it has a few extra details that the artist himself needed the AI to fill in. If I'm willing to say that his non-AI generated images are art, I would find it hard to justify calling the AI-generated one not art.
Based on my experience the past few weeks, my prediction would be that there will be broadly 3 groups in the future in this realm: the pure no-AI Artists, the cyborgs who are skilled Artists using AI to aid them along the process, and people like me, the AI-software operators who aren't skilled artists in any non-AI sense. Furthermore, I think that 2nd group is likely to be the most successful. I think the 1st group will fall into its own niche of pure non-AI art, and it will probably remain the most prestigious and also remain quite populous, but still lose a lot of people to the 2nd group as the leverage afforded to an actually skilled Artist by these tools is significant.
Random thoughts:
I didn't really touch on customizing the models to be able to consistently represent specific characters, things, styles, etc. which is a whole other thing unto itself. This seems to be a whole vibrant community unto itself, and I know very little of it first hand. But this raises another aspect of AI-generated images being Art or not - is it Art the technique of finding the right balance when merging different models or of picking the right training images and training settings to create a model that is capable of generating the types of pictures you want? I would actually lean towards Yes in this, but that may be just because there's still a bit of a mystical haze around it to me from lack of experience. Either way, the question of AI-generated images being Art or not should be that question, not whether or not picking the right prompts and settings and seed is.
I've read artists mention training models on their characters in order to aid them in generating images more quickly for comic books they're working on. Given that speed matters for things like this, this is one "cyborg" method a skilled Artist could use to increase the quantity or quality of their output (either by reducing the time required for each image or increasing the time the Artist can use to finalize the image compared to doing it from scratch).
For generating waifus, NovelAI really is far and away the best model, IMHO. I played around a lot with Waifu Diffusion (both 1.2 & 1.3), but getting good looking art out of it - anime or not - was a struggle and inconsistent, while NovelAI did it effortlessly. However, NovelAI is overfitted, making most of their girls have a same-y look. There's also the issue that NovelAI doesn't offer in-painting in their official website, and the only way to use it for in-painting involves pirating their leaked model which I'd prefer not to rely on.
I first learned that I could install Stable Diffusion on my PC by stumbling on https://rentry.org/voldy whose guide is quite good. I learned later on that the site is maintained by someone from 4chan, and further that 4chan seems to be where a lot of the innovation and development by the hobbyists is taking place. As someone who hasn't used 4chan much in well over a decade, this was a blast from the past. In retrospect this is obvious, given the combination of nihilism and degeneracy you see in 4chan (I say this only out of love; I maintain to this day that there's no online community that I found more loving and welcoming than 4chan).
For random "prompt engineering" tips that I figured out over time - use "iris, contacts" to get nicer eyes. "Shampoo, conditioner" seems to make nice hair with a healthy sheen.
What really boggles my mind about the current state of AI content generation is that we've basically looped back around to how I thought computer programming worked (or should work) when I was like 12.
My naive version of computer programming back then was "tell the computer in a somewhat specialized version of English what you want it to do, and it does its best to produce an output that matches that request based on its understanding of the terms in the prompt." This was somewhat informed by Sci-Fi media of the era as well, wherein AI-as-servant was probably the default assumption ("Computer. Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.").
And in some cases this model felt vaguely correct. A Google search was basically putting in instructions or a descriptor into a text box and demanding the computer show you things that match those instructions. Or if you interfaced with one of those automated phone receptionists that understood voice commands, or played a text-based adventure game.
Then I learned a bit about how computers actually work and then I realized how miraculous it is that they function at all, much less that they produce results that are even vaguely like what you expect. It was in a sense just a refined version of my previous model (describe in a VERY specialized language what you want the computer to do, and if you are precise enough it might actually do that!) but it demonstrated that one couldn't just expect a computer to accurately discern your intent from a simple sentence or two.
So I resigned myself to fumbling around with the relatively crude tools that smarter programmers put together to achieve results that take a substantial amount of technical skill to really perfect. In a sense it felt underwhelming that computers weren't really doing the work for you, just streamlining it a bit.
And now, out of seemingly nowhere, the ideal computer interface has become "tell the computer in a somewhat specialized version of English what you want it to do, and it does its best to produce an output that matches that request based on its understanding of the terms in the prompt."
Amazing.
Well, not out of seemingly nowhere, is it? Siri and other similar applications came out like a decade ago, and it's clear that both the industry and academia have been working on improving that sort of technology ever since.
There was indeed a seeming golden era starting around 2017 where voice assistants became actually effective at assisting.
But anything more complex than "Add [x] to my grocery list" or "give me directions to [address]" tended to elude them. Multi-step instructions were right out.
GPT-2 was the first indication that we might be able to overcome that limit, and GPT-3, to my understanding, was the necessary precondition to everything we're seeing now.
Although perhaps I should say its less that the capabilities weren't foreseen/foreseeable based on the tech of the time, and more like they improved much faster than expected in quick bursts.
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The best video concerning this issue is still on the metaphor of Lace.
Or as Kasparov said: let us become centaurs! Let the computer handle tactics, and I'll oversee the broad strokes of the Strategy! He has always been arrogant.
But this metaphor is lacking, isn't it. Because there's only so much you can do to make lace fancy. It's always been a pure show of skill. Art is deeper.
What you're discovering with Stable Diffusion is that it's a low-level skill prosthesis: very good at rendering, silly at composition, near completely unable to work with concepts. This is the rough pattern of automation in a given field: the technology begins with eating the routine technique. Abstractions follow. Technique on the level that is aesthetically pleasing is so hard for humans to master, it's the subject of such envy and crab mentality, that the development of style (in gwern's definition, «some principled, real, systematic visual system of esthetics») is, among serious artists, from what I can tell, roughly synonymous with the mastering of techniques, and artists have come to scorn «idea guys». For the most part I believe they're stupid doomed crabs who struggle to trace coomer "art" over photos of their onlyfans colleagues of the opposite gender, Stable Diffusion is the great equalizer, and ideas matter a lot more than technique; but with passage of time, the role of centaurs and chimeras and man-machine collaboration will shrivel up, as stronger models master radically more abstract and large-scale skills – from rendering technique to composition to coloring to «taste» to... As in chess and go, so in art: at some point, one machine makes the Move 37 and that's it.
So in writing. I've read this today, a work of greentext prose by GPT-3, prompted by Connor Leahy (h/t gwern). It's perfect «metamodernism», oscillating from clownery to sincerity, scarily compelling, at times haunting. At times painfully lame – but I've seen flesh-and-blood writers fail harder, especially in sci-fi. I recommend you check it out.
...it's crucial, though, that real ideas aren't «options». They aren't even «choices». They are, to put it naively, transcendent events, grasping entire insights from beyond the distribution. Artists have a point. There is a difference between pro-consuming, deigning to snap together a minimal viable element of novelty, a medium-tiddy anime PLUS impressionism DOG! girl with BURGERS in some harder pose, like most anons on 4chan are content to do, – and a creative act, even if expressed in largely the same behaviors. Perhaps creative acts can be mastered starting with this play. Perhaps artists are right and you need the pain of the grind to earn the key to creativity. Perhaps it's only given to some, but is given irrevocably. This almost feels Gnostic. As an Idea Guy, I'd like to believe the latter. But even if I arrive at a visual idea – how do I prompt it? How does one summon into existence this, before it is drawn by Syd Mead? Is spoken language humans can realistically use even expressive enough?
Most «artists» are illustrators, and most illustrators can be replaced by a guy who's mastered Stable Diffusion (realistically, SD+ that's been pumped to Midjourney V4 level) plus a couple of inpainting/img2img/prompt2prompt techniques, like me and you, because most illustrations are trash. But that's not very interesting. There does exist original art, it's qualitatively different from this, and it remains to be seen if AI tools will reveal any Idea Guys as real artists who have been merely technique-deficient. As far as patterns go... The prior art is not encouraging.
(Both «Idea guy» and «creative choice» are terms @FCfromSSC has used a couple of weeks ago. I've written half a post, been procrastinating to respond to him and now it's probably too stale.)
Credit where credit is due, I got a full two - three dozen lines lines into the story before the uncanny valley effect killed it. I feel like that might be a record for GPT-N generated text, though part of it might be the performative inhumanity of the green-text format masking the inhumanity of the machine.
Regarding the rest, I think that one of the great triumphs/tragedies of modernism has been the shift in emphasis from message to technique. IE once upon a time it was widely understood that the mark of great art, was the ability to convey complex messages to as broad an audience as possible. But lately the consensus has shifted towards esotericism. the more inaccessible and obscure a work the greater the value. I'm remain deeply skeptical of current machine-generated art at least at this stage in large part because it's pretty clear that it has nothing to say. But I have to thank you because reading your description here I think I am beginning to grasp why so many people are freaking out about it. To the degree that ML enables laymen to duplicate previously difficult techniques it completely upends the modern artist's entire worldview/business. They're mid level portrait painters suddenly recognizing that photography is about to make the jobs of all but the most gifted portraitist obsolete. After all, Why pay [deviant artist] for colored pencil drawings of different characters from Harry Potter fucking each other when you can roll your own.
Those sorts of ideas are considered old-fashioned (and elitist! and racist!) in the high art world now.
In literary circles, it's all about elevating previously marginalized voices, writing about the sorts of things that marginalized people like to write about, in a language that marginalized people can easily understand. Just look at who's winning awards, who's getting positions and grants from universities, and who's getting assigned on college syllabuses.
As for visual arts, this year's Documenta was more akin to a street festival than a traditional art exhibition. Imposing and inscrutable works of high modernism replaced with food stands, half-pipes for skateboarding, and graffiti murals.
Certainly even the "high" art world isn't a monolith, but pursuing obscurity for its own sake is generally considered suspicious now; it's an abdication of "social responsibility".
:doubt:
They might make pleasing mouth noises about "elevating marginalized voices" but what does the high art world do? what is their nature?
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I'm not really sure what you're suggesting here. Are you envisioning a future where you just tell the AGI "make me something" and it handles everything from conceptualization to planning the story beats to the final rendering?
There is some limit, somewhere, to how much visual information you're able to encode in text. Otherwise, it seems plausible to imagine that a written description of an image would be an acceptable substitute for the image itself. But, it's not. You have to actually look at the thing to know what it looks like.
The appropriate thought experiment here is to imagine that you have a true AGI, and it can draw better than any human artist. Your own personal artist-slave at your beck and call, 24/7. Could you truly communicate to it everything that's in your head using only words, no images? Not even crude MS Paint sketches to indicate the sort of composition or mood you want? I suppose that's partially dependent on what's in your head and how much specificity you desire, but I think plenty of people would still find reason to communicate with the AGI in images and sketches, and not just purely in words.
Many years before AI art existed, I would see game programmers say things like "I just want to be able to draw well enough to get my ideas across to an artist, so he can finish them". It seems they also had the intuition that they wouldn't be able to fully communicate their visual ideas in words alone.
Seems like as good a time to ask as any.
I know you've talked in the past about how you're excited about the possibility of SD to level the playing field of visual expression, and enable people to express political and philosophical messages that they weren't able to before. Do you have any projects in mind that you want to accomplish with SD? Have you been playing around with it?
This will be done at some point, assuming no political hurdles. Taken literally, this will amount to a gacha roll, hardly any different from current prompt combinatorics. «Make me something with the quality of Netflix slop, but a better fit for my data-mined profile» plus a few tags to taste – I'd say it's more commendable than consuming Netflix propaganda, but it's not an artistic act on your part, indeed any more than ordering a dish and asking for it to be extra spicy makes one a chef.
Technically there isn't; after all, images are 0s and 1s as well. But my point is more that natural languages do not lend themselves naturally to describing very specific visuals. Imagine Syd had his hands crushed in a road accident, but was otherwise intact. Would he be able to create an equal piece of art using an «art slave» as you put it, or simply a very responsive AI, talking about tones and shapes and reflections and such, especially not referencing prior work? I get that text is the universal interface, but eh... sounds bothersome. And leaving aside subtleties lost in translation – how much of the original image even was in Syd's head, imagined ex nihilo, versus discovered serendipitously through actual work of drawing the piece, stroke by stroke, both «at inference time» and over the decades of «training the network»? Also, how well could that iterative process be substituted in collaboration with a command-interpreting «slave»? Great painters offloaded much of their work to assistants, but they could do the job of any given assistant even better… Then again, high-level imagination can be lost in the work, or perhaps exposed as a half-baked incoherent dream…
Those are not obvious questions to me. I do not wish to look down on manual technique, no matter how much /ic/ type artists beclown themselves with shitty arguments. It's a travesty that humans have to do art in such an inefficient manner (animation is the worst sort of bullshit – 1D acts to construct a 4D object!), but in practice it appears to be either very important or fully necessary to build one's creative ability.
It isn't sufficient, though, so some crabs clearly have no legs to stand on while they bash prompters.
I have, but playing around is the right way to put it.
My excitement was vicarious, on behalf of young people who haven't had the time or the insanity to acquire technique, yet believe they have something to show. It'll be more than a bit ridiculous to ape being a Creative now. This was a self-deprecating use of the term; I used to be an Idea Guy, but my Ideas are shriveled up and dead, visual or otherwise, just a dust-collecting folder with drafts. I'm not good at technique either. Sometimes I test it. For example, two months ago when I was dining out and saw this writingprompts thread «When humanity went extinct... Earth is now dominated by sentient trees» obviously baiting environmentalist nuts, and quickly wrote this , in the dry style of gwern prose.
It'd be relatively easy to expand my sketch into a larger-scale story, and illustrate with SD or Midjourney; I can envision most separate pieces. It'd communicate some of my politics and philosophy too. What would be the point, though? Even for better concepts of my own invention – who would need it? This tech is wasted on me, I admit it freely.
But there are other people.
What's the point of writing posts here? Communication and creation are their own rewards. Making something that you and others can enjoy is a delightful thing.
I find myself in much the same position. My head was once full of fascinating ideas, mostly abandoned now that I have an actual job. But it still has some of them, and I still grind a bit now and again trying to express them, and derive enjoyment thereby. Maybe I'll get around to pushing them out someday. The future is not closed until we are dead and gone.
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I know that feel. You should finish it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
A big advantage of the grind is that it works from both ends of the chasm. Working problems gives you a clearer, more systemic understanding of their solutions, and also a language with which to communicate those solutions, while also increasing your ability to actually implement solutions yourself. Ideally, you end up in an area where you can both show and tell, and both the showing and the telling cover for each others' deficiencies. Frequently, there's a problem that I'm having trouble putting into words, so I make a quick sketch. Or the opposite, there's a sketch I can't get right, but I can describe what I'm going for. The grind gives me a deeper understanding of the structure of art, a whole multitude of hooks to hang different concepts on so I can think about them in an organized fashion.
I think that Syd Mead picture is in fact expressible in words. But it would take a whole lot of words, where some form of meta-collage would be vastly easier and clearer. The video you linked of the guy doing step-by-step infilling and editing, we both recognize that's baby steps. Something more mature would be a 3d-volume with a camera, where you can position elements, each of which have their own prompt-identity, and then apply an overall prompt to the scene as a whole. fine control over elements and composition, blending to overall control of the style, lighting and so on.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, but I enjoyed your plantae story below quite a bit more. I think you sell yourself a bit short, sir.
I think you need the pain of a grind. I'm not sure it matters much what you're grinding. You need to learn that there's good ideas and bad ideas, and to gain the ability to discern between them. And to do that, you need an understanding of the underlying mechanics of your chosen medium, so that you can think and talk meaningfully about it. I have zero doubt that AI tools can provide this grind, because the core questions remain the same: "is this good? Why or why not? how do I make it better?" If you're asking that, you're an artist already.
I'll leave aside img2img and inpainting and other gimmicks, because ultimately they do not allow fine control of pixel values of the finished product, and using a normal editor to get there is just the stone soup route.
To the first approximation, promptgrinding and drawgrinding are similar in that one internalizes reproducible patterns of affecting the medium, and with any luck, gets closer to transferring imagination onto the canvas. But under scrutiny this charitable analogy breaks down, which is why /ic/ crabs feel in their gut (but can't explain without appealing to SOVL and bashing pajeets etc.) that «this is not art» as normally conceived, not even digital illustration art.
The thing is simply that drawing is the realm of continuous effects, iterating over a smooth isomorphic fitness landscape towards perfection; one can make a gotcha with pixel art, but usually digital environments emulate the truly continuous traditional medium. This is how we learn, this is how we perceive getting better, minimizing the deviation. Prompting, like text generation, are discrete procedures. It's not an accident that «AI art» tends towards gacha rolls: there's the ease of getting good-enough stuff, there's the low bandwidth of prompting, but the fundamental issue is that combinatorics of token interpretation are inherently jumpy, so the feedback is discontinuous, and such a surface is qualitatively much harder to master on a level that's deeper than memorizing cheap rules of thumb – for our natural learning algorithm, at least. And perhaps for any learning algorithm, seeing as image diffusion generation (continuous process) runs circles around autoregressive next token prediction in terms of wow effect per FLOP.
We're making progress in diffusion for text, though – perhaps making text gen more human-like (at least I sort of feel the diffusion of meanings when I write). And we're making progress on interpreting the black box gacha mechanic and controlling its attention maps. With a few more tricks, such as bringing back latent space exploration (that was developed for GANs), I hope to see a qualitative breakthrough in interfaces that will finally fit like a glove and improve on traditional continuous-effect GUI editors, rather than on CLI programs with output to a GUI plugin.
But it's a serious ergonomic design challenge, maybe on par with creating GUIs as a concept, so for now it's fair to say that prompting is not a human-worthy way to learn to do art, even if it's a great shortcut to illustrating concepts.
Then again, I take issue with drawing too. Prompting is unnatural bullshit in a whole another dimension.
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I agree, and I think the time scale is more likely to be in months than years at this point. But "drastically less manual fiddling" is still likely to be a lot of manual fiddling I think, because of just how imprecise the language model is. Perhaps I'll be able to easily generate an accurate and error-free image of, say, "a short white man wearing a blue collared shirt standing in front of a bus stop with a sneaker advertisement that has an accurate Nike swoosh with 'Just Do It' in comic sans font on it" in the future, but when the AI generates the image, it will be left out of my hands where on his shirt the wrinkles are, or the exact shape of a weed that might be growing in the sidewalk or the way the light reflecting off the man's cheek onto the bus stop causes the bus stop to have a slight warm sheen or etc., and these would require manual fiddling to get it to match one's initial vision. Eventually eventually, even all those details might be able to be figured out by an AI, but I'm not sure how, in principle, an AI could get that level of specific information without some sort of brain reading technology. At which point the technology involved is something very different from the AI image generators of today.
Of course, there can (will?) be AI tools to further help along the manual fiddling. I see this as further increasing actual skilled artists' leverage, since they're the ones who get to start with good images due to their skills, while unskilled folks like me have to start with crude drawings or just latent noise.
Yes, that sounds like it'd be quite doable and unsurprising to have within the next few years at most. That seems like it would be largely the oral version of the manual fiddling that's going on now.
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That manual fiddling iteration cycle you're getting at is one of the hardest problems in contracting. Accurately communicating desire is something people are really bad at. You will never find a programming language that will free you from the burden of clarifying your ideas, the tree swing meme and all that. Some customers get rather annoyed if you start interrogating them to the degree necessary to disambiguate vague requests. If time/cost per concept/sketch is less an obstacle it can sometimes be better to generate several variations on a theme and let the customer narrow down what they like and refine from there. AI generation can be really good at that on the cheap and it should be possible to have it present variations, then reiterate based on selections.
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I am not a historian, but I can see parallels between your art-cyborgs and computer programmers through the history of programming. I am told, through peers, media, professors, and culture, that in the beginning days all programs were made by hand; every operation scrutinized and thought out. But as computer-time because cheaper and programmer-time becoming more expensive, other programming languages were created as abstractions over the previous languages. C simplifies the construction of loops (which seem horrible in assembly). Python removes pointers (which are a pain-point for many programmers). Github co-lab and GPT-3 can remove a lot of boilerplate code with good prompts (though I've never used them, so they may not be that wonderful). Matlab, SPARK, lisp, and others can probably fit into the progression, but I am unfamiliar with them.
It seems that, inevitability, programming will be further and further abstracted away from the origins of programming and what the computer is actually doing. People of course still do some work in assembly (but it is usually niche from my understanding). People still use C (sometimes the problem really is a nail). And programming in general hasn't been overrun with computer generated functions that can generate complex elements from plain english.
I expect though, that the next wave of programmers are going to be like the art-cyborgs. They are going to be adept at automating 80% of the work with AI and then the rest is going to be manual work to fix errors or edge cases and combining multiple functions to form a complete program. This AI automation is just another layer of abstraction for the programmer from what the computer is actually doing. If programming used to be the translation of English to machine instructions, and now it's the translation of English to code, eventually we will have the machines translate for us and programming will be the art of typing the right words into the computer machine.
i.e. The next programming language is English and programmers are just the ones skilled at putting the right words and symbols into the computer to get the right answers out.
But to not wander too far away, I feel the same thing about art or whatever previously unfathomably inherently human skill is done in the realm of AI (perhaps music?). AI generated images are a tool that future artists might use to enhance or speed up the translation of idea to canvas. Not too dissimilar from the transition of physical to digital art (but as I said, I'm neither an artist nor a historian). Even if the art is purely collage-style, I don't think that makes them have any less art. Making a collage still requires skill, and given a magazine with scissors it is hard to stumble into a good creation by pure chance. Even still, can a sufficient description not be art by its own merit? Books have the ability to paint wondrous pictures leveraging your imagination (unless you suffer from aphantasia). Maybe it's not fair to compare writers to painters and illustrators, but that is a different argument than saying it's not art.
To summarize because I need a conclusion and am not a writer: AI art is a tool that will be used by artists to quickly iterate on ideas. This parallels computer programming which used more abstract languages to help programmers quickly iterate on ideas.
This isn't hugely relevant to your point, but loops really aren't that bad in assembly. Basic for loop from 0-100 in assembly will be something like:
That really isn't particularly bad, though certainly not quite as nice as C or another higher-level language.
hey now
Our power (and income) relies on the kids trained on Java and Python viewing assembly as some sort of dark magic, I can't let you just hand out eldritch knowledge willy-nilly ;-)
The new programming literacy test: Write Fizzbuzz. In assembler. 6502 assembler. And it has to accept values up to 100,000. You may output a character by calling a subroutine at 0xFDED with the character in the accumulator, after which all register contents are lost.
(it will surprise nobody familiar with the subject that Fizzbuzz in 6502 can be found on the net)
While you're at it, mine your own silicon for the CPU.
PrimitiveTechnology has entered the chat.
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6502 is one of the instruction sets that were actually kind of nice to write by hand, though. I guess you'd do something that amounts to keeping your loop counter mod 15 in the low 4 bits of X and then use the remaining 13 bits in X and Y plus some flag you don't touch to get to 100k? I'd rather do this exercise than MIPS or some nasty SIMD and/or RISC special-purpose core...
Yes, all the 8-bit processors were pretty easy to write for by hand; the trick is they don't have multiplication, division, or 24-bit numbers. (Most can do limited 16-bit arithmetic). Getting that right isn't hard but it probably requires you've done low-level work before.
MIPS isn't hard either, provided you just throw a no-op in the delay slot.
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I'd rather use 68k which had a bit more to work with (and I still have a physical reference manual) and it had more consistent behavior rather than the fun quirks of 6502.
Yeah, the 68000 series was probably the peak of hand-writable assembly language. But it's a 32-bit processor with multiplication and division, way too easy.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to let guild secrets out into the open like that.
Honestly I find it kind of depressing just how many of our new hires now seem to view even C and basic command line functions as eldritch knowledge. Like come on, what do you guys even do in school these days?
Given that I just spent two days dealing with Linux kernel driver conflicts even though that is obstensibly not my job I think you're right ;-)
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^ Is doing all the heavy lifting of "isn't particularly bad".
Nah, not really. Sure, whatever you put in the loop body will certainly be more verbose and harder to write than if you wrote it in C. But that isn't relevant to the notion that loops are hard to write in and of themselves in assembly. That's why I didn't include anything inside the loop, to show that the loop itself isn't hard to write.
Now, if we're saying assembly in general is harder to write? I will totally agree. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's super horrible or anything, but it is harder for sure. There is a reason we invented higher level languages. My point here was simply that loops are not particularly bad.
Maybe loops were a bad example. To be fair, I never wrote anything more than the bare minimum in assembly. I don't have deep knowledge of it and went for the first thing I could think of. The main point was C provides a bunch of niceties on top of assembly. And Python provides a lot of niceties over C. My mathematician peers would probably love to write their for loops in the style of
for i,j,k ∈ +Z^3; i,j,k <= 10 { }which is a lot more abstract than loops in previous languages. Eventually it might becomeFor all positive integer 3-tuples each value less than 10 { }. Heck maybe evenFor all the points in a cube with side length 10 { }. We lose some specificity, choosing which direction to iterate over first, but we are rewarded with reduced conceptual load.More options
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Maybe what you mean is "assembly is bad at scopes" (in that the "whatever you want to do in your loop" has to remember which registers you've already used for other purposes outside of the loop; the same problem arises for procedure calls)?
Seems fair, but I agree with @SubstantialFrivolity that it's weird to characterize that as assembly being bad at loops. It's bad at naming. And getting the name of your complaint right is half the battle -- the other half is cache invalidation and the other half is off by one errors.
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Just to nitpick this sentence and say nothing about the rest of your essay, Python hardly removes pointers. It just removes the ability to do pointer arithmetic, just like Javascript, go, c# and many other newer languages do. The essence of pointer, having a cheap way to refer to a load of data elsewhere, is still there. If anything Python removes the ability to refer to data in any other way. You pass a class instance by value and you can't inline a struct inside another like you can in C.
And Python even gives you a new way to subtly shoot yourself in the foot over pointers, which is the
isoperator.5 is 5andTrue is Truebut5**55 is not 5**55(on my system). In fairness the only real use case for this is to check forthing is not Nonewhen dealing with optional arguments, or perhaps more nichea is bchecks when you're absolutely sureaandbcome from the same finite pool of objects, as a way to optimize away a more expensive deepa == bcheck.More options
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The programming parallel makes sense to me, and there are plenty of similar parallels throughout history. Humans using technology in order to make arduous processes easier, leading to each human having much more leverage leading to that level of leverage being the norm, with additional technologies built on top of that to make those processes easier, and so on and so forth. In the past, it might have been the wheel or a cart or a bow or a plow or a car, right now AI is one of them.
And at each step in the process, it seems like there have been people who were accustomed to the old norm decrying the new one as some abomination that lacked the "soul" or "essence" of the thing. A digital artist today is standing on the shoulders of giants, relying on the hardware and software development of engineers to contribute to their art, including the specific choice of brush strokes that the software developers programmed in. They would balk at traditional artists who insist that you must actually put paint on canvas using a brush that you control physically, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the muscle movements that result from the unique set of training that the artist went through. And those artists would balk at even more traditional artists who insist that you must actually construct your own brushes by gluing together hair that you gather manually and mix your own paint, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the choices you made when constructing the tools that show up in the final result due to the tools being used. And those artists would balk at even more traditional artists who insist that you must actually raise the animal from which the brush hair came from and tended to the tree from which the wood in the brush or painting surface came from, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the choices you made when prepping the raw material for the tools.
And each of these people would have a point. A very good point worth making. But the point would largely be lost on the person listening, who doesn't particularly see those as worth the trade-off of losing the immense amount of efficiency and creative freedom. After all, with the additional efficiency, now they can create far greater, broader, and deeper works of art than with the previous methods. But to someone who's used to the old norms, these efficiency gains just look like shortcuts that only have a cargo cult understanding of the process.
AI generated imagery is different, in just how much of a leap in abstraction it is compared to the other ones. A digital artist still has skills that would transfer very well to painting on canvas. An AI tool user's skill doesn't need to go far beyond basic Photoshop skills and a basic artistic compositional skills. It's still so early right now that I don't think it's possible to tell, but based on how I've seen actual artists use AI generated images the last few weeks, I suspect that it will be more similar to the other ones than different; that in time, we'll see it as just another tool to increase an artist's leverage in expressing themselves.
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This is practically already the case for a lot of programming. The issue isn't actually writing the code, it's understanding what the problem even is.
People are both bad at and unused to thinking at a higher level of specificity and logic. This is apparent when you read what people write if they write something longer and more complex than a 1-2 paragraph comment. People's texts are rife with dangling modifiers making even their central points unclear, and this is rarely by mistake either, they don't even realize they are there or why it matters.
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I have also been experimenting with AI art generation (although I only had the basic StableDiffusion model, so thanks for showing me these other ones). Like you, I've found that in order to get what I want I need to use AI as one of many tools, iterating over AI generation -> make a collage in an art program -> run it through AI img2img -> edit in an art program, and repeat until I get what I want.
My drawing skills are a bit stronger, and I have a drawing tablet on hand, so I've been going a bit harder in the editing direction. One of the things I've noticed is that AI is really good at shading and texture, but really bad at composition. One of the things I can do is have the AI generate a texture, draw an image in flat color, edit the texture onto the flat image, inpaint the flat image but leave the texture alone, and the AI will shade the image in the style of the texture. (Obviously this only works for one texture at a time, so for a e.g. a person wearing jeans and a t-shirt you would need to do it three times: once for skin, once for denim, and once for the t-shirt.)
I'm not sure if I see AI generating meaningful images from scratch any time soon. People don't really want to see random pictures of landscapes or people standing with their arms at their sides. What people want is action.
What I do expect to see is for AI to be used as a tool to make faster art. Coloring lineart is a massive job, and AI can already do a pretty good first draft with img2img. In ten years maybe comic books will be one creator doing lineart and a highly-trained AI assistant filling in backgrounds and colors. Maybe cartoons will cut out the Korean animation studios and just feed their storyboards into an AI. As with all mechanization, this probably won't eliminate artists, but it will allow one artist to do the work of ten.
Stable diffusion's inability to produce non-trivial and correct composition on demand is entirely expected from its text encoder's properties, expecially after Imagen's paper, and the model is in fact grossly outperforming initial expectations; hell, it runs on smartphones with 6Gb memory, it has no business understanding compositionality even on small scale. Midjourney v4 seems better already; Imagen, parti and now eDiff-i are vastly better; SD 2.0 (assuming that's what it's called) will probably wipe the floor with Midjourney.
In any case, have you looked into RunwayML inpainting model? It's much more capable of parsing the context of the image.
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You can get decent images just from prompts alone. It's only a matter of patience, varying the settings and repeating until you get a good image.
I tried to make a picture of Qin Ding Ling from Reverend Insanity. Key objectives were Asian-looking heroine, black and gold armour, cape, non-fucked face, non-fucked hands. With prompts alone I can get all but one of those things. As far as I'm concerned, that's mission accomplished.
I can get wAIfus just fine too from Stablediffusion. For some reason I can't upload more than one image, so here is proof of the latter. If I had to nitpick, maybe her ear is slightly messed up? But you'd struggle to notice that on first glance.
/images/1668047720884566.webp
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Far more informative than the thousands of Indian YouTube channels explaining “how DALLE works.” Thank you brother.
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In Ukraine news: Russia to withdraw from city of Kherson
As said in the article, this seems like big news, since Kherson was the only "big city" Russia has conquered in this period of war. Even the pro-Russian sources I follow on Twitter aren't trying to spin this ("Feint! Planned withdrawal! Actually good for Russia!") any more.
Of course this means that the new defensive line is harder to crack, but really, at some point, you'd imagine sheer morale questions would make it hard for Russians to proceed, at least. Where will the Ukrainians push next?
I've heard some ambiguous reports of Ukraine having moderate successes pushing against the line of contact near Lisichansk, but otherwise it seems that the holy grail for them would be to push downward to cut the land connection to Crimea around Melitopol.
I find it curious to see the contrast between how every city Russia captured from Ukraine was a month-long slog and massive drain on manpower and operational resources (consider Mariupol, where between logistics and the alignment of the local population the situation was very close to as good as they could hope for, and the struggles for Severodonetsk/Lisichansk and Liman later, not to mention that they still haven't cracked Avdeevka which is basically a suburb of Donetsk), and every city they surrendered so far was given up with barely a fight. What stopped them from digging in somewhere in Kherson and giving Ukraine its own Mariupol? Do they simply not have any sufficiently capable or fanatical troops willing to fight to the death under miserable conditions like Azov did, are they still thinking of saving them for some hypothetical more important future engagement, or do they figure Ukraine would have an easier time smoking them out for one reason or another? (I did already wonder why Russia struggled so much in Mariupol; do they just not have adequate bunker-buster bombs, or did they not want to use them because of the civilians sheltered with the Azovites? My read of the Russian public sphere was that sympathy for those civilians, most of whom were probably spouses/children of Azov fighters, was rather low, so in that case it really would have had to be about Western PR or "red lines".)
In related weird news, the Russian-appointed deputy governor of Kherson region, Kirill Stremousov, was reported to have died "in a traffic accident" today. I mean, who knows, maybe he really did just run a red light in front of a tank trying to get to the other shore faster, but given the timing and scarcity of information this seems like a likely cover story; more likely in my eyes that it was an assassination or that he even committed suicide in light of the situation. (edit, some relevant telegrams just now started circulating a picture of a thoroughly wrecked car on a road near Novaya Kakhovka (the city with the dam across the Dnepr northeast of Kherson) claiming it to be his.)
Well, one of the reasons might indeed be that there were considerable advantages for Ukraine for holding Mariupol: it kept Russian troops tied and away from the Donetsk front at a crucial time, and the bravery of the troops at Mariupol also served as an obvious inspiration at a dark period for Ukraine and offered propagandistic material, both internally and externally. This holding action got Ukraine through to the period in the summer when Western aid started showing up and making some difference.
More to the point, though... maybe it is true, the Russians really just don't have the sufficient spirit to do it?
Throughout the war, the pro-Russian side on the Internet has banged the drum about how Ukraine (as an entity separate from the Russian world) is FAKE FAKE FAKE, an invention of the Austrians and Poles and Germans, imagination of the exile communities, forcibly maintained by Nazi Banderites, an unsustainable made-up chimera, a "Reddit-ass country", "fighting for globohomo and Pride parades", a number of similar claims intended to bolster the idea that at any moment everything would just break and Russians would be received as liberators in the end and so on. Meanwhile, of course, Russia is a real country, the realest there is, and Russians would of course fight for it in the same way as in 1941 and would gladly just rather die in a nuclear hellfire than lose.
Well, the proof of the pudding etc., and the taste of the pudding would now seem to indicate that Ukrainians, individual cases indicating otherwise aside, are truly fighting like hell for their invented made-up Reddit Nazi globohomo country, while russians, individual cases indicating otherwise, are losing whatever spirit they might have had at some point, as indicated, for instance, the massive waves of exiles leaving the country at whatever indication there has been that they might be conscripted and have to fight.
Eh, I think that read is a little too optimistic for the Ukrainian side too. Mariupol, in the end, was held by something as close to Nazi Banderites as it gets; the regulars in the city (who were holed up in the factory on its north) capitulated comparatively quickly. There's also the aspect that Ukraine seems to continue delivering unforced PR morsels to Russia (not that they make it far outside of Russian channels) with group photos of Zelenskiy's entourage or troops spearheading the recapture of territories regularly featuring someone in the background flashing swastika tattoos or SS uniform patches, which indicates to me that the neonazis are considered fairly indispensable as particularly trustworthy or otherwise "elite" units (in the case of the presidential entourage, perhaps even that the loyalty of anyone else is considered too questionable for safety). Perhaps the real lesson is that neonazis are the only ones (in this conflict, at least) who are really willing to keep up the fight "in the dark". It's not like Russia didn't try to establish their own unit of Nazi LARPers (Wagner), but the memeplex just doesn't work that well without a coherent ethnonationalist idea behind it.
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Defending one's country is very different from participating in a bullshit war of aggression, even if one is the type to stan based $TEAM from the couch regardless of morality. And being forced by circumstance to defend your county makes this country more real in your mind. This is the issue Putin (and those loyalist commenters) have cynically and irrationally dismissed. In my opinion, Ukraine was a country of comparable «realness» with Russia before the war, but now it's a living movement. Nothing new since Machiavelli. All this pseudo-historical essentialist analysis about the origins of Ukraine, how could it persuade anyone that Ukrainians will fold? Nations are in fact imagined communities and so long as Ukrainians themselves don't imagine themselves to be meaningless Austro-Hungarian chimeras, they will act like people belonging to a nation.
That said, even back in 2013 there have been opinions stressing the fragility of Russian identity:
(This is, of course, just wishful thinking. But in a way, it's gentle. Russians do not start to identify as «Siberians»: they just learn English and leave).
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I think a mistake that a lot of commentators (both in Russia and the West) have made is conflating Yanukovych's "Party of Regions" Ukraine with Euromaidan Ukraine. Back in 2019 I was in Poland for a few months, helping set up local training/maintenance pipelines for the Polish DoD, and had the opportunity to talk to a few UAF guys who were cross-training with them.
According to them Ukraine had been trying very hard since 2014 to crackdown on corruption and rebuild their military and economy along more western lines. They described the war in Donbas as "a wake-up call" and were quite adamant about having no desire to be soviets again. Granted, guys being sent to cross-train are almost certainly going to be the cream of the crop/those already flagged for promotion but still... Reading about the alleged persecution of Russian speakers in Ukraine I found myself wondering just how much of it was "racial animus" vs "genuine attempts to fight corruption". It's probably impossible to ever know for sure, but my impression at the time was that the Euromaidan government enjoyed a much broader base of support than many were giving it credit for that the UAF was quite serious about getting it's act together. Accordingly my prediction back when this all kicked of was that any attempt by Russia to push into western Ukraine was likely to end in a blood-soaked clusterfuck. Id say that prediction has been borne out.
My suspicion now is much the same as it was in April, that this will play out similarly to the Russo-Finish war, with Russia ultimately "winning" on paper by gaining some minor territorial concession but loosing in most of the ways that actually matter. IE suffering outsize casualties and utterly destroying any future chance of bringing
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While conviction certainly plays a part, it's not particularly confusing if you look at the geography. To turn Kherson into a grinding urban conflict like Mariupol would mean Ukrainian forces entering the city. This would mean Ukraine separating Kherson from the Antonivka Road Bridge that is the only point of supply or evacuation. Any notional preparations to fight a siege in Kherson would therefore only be relevant if Russians had reached the point where they had lost this key bridgehead. Any Russian forces staying in Kherson would be doing so with the knowledge that they would either die or be captured there, once Ukraine closed in.
The timing also makes sense. Given recent Ukrainian advances, there was only about 5km left until Ukraine could comfortably saturate the sole escape route with M777 or 155mm equivalents, after which withdrawal would become much more dicey.
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My personal copium is that Russia is focused on debilitating Ukraine’s economy, then killing their troops at a higher rate than they kill Russian troops, while implementing cheap drones in combat. This is the most cost effective way to win the war. Russia has to pay for a few hundred thousand troops next door, while NATO has to pay for all of Ukraine’s military plus some significant part of twenty million citizens still in Ukraine. Russia gets to knock the electricity in Kyiv and elsewhere to prevent a semblance of a modern economy, and harass in other costly ways. For every dollar Russia spends, NATO will have to pay 10 to 30. The limiting factor of Ukraine is the economy and men. In this sense it’s in Russia’s interests to make Ukraine disperse their soldiers across the whole territory.
A withdrawal from Kherson would have the exact opposite effect, as falling back behind the natural boundary of the Dnieper will effectively shorten the front and enable both sides to redistribute any forces West of the Zaporizhzhia-Melitopol axis.
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Kherson, because bar any un-announced agreement between the Russians and Ukrains over the terms of withdrawal, this will be a fighting retreat. It remains in the Ukrainian interest to force the Russians to retreat under fire rather than in relatively good order. Some of the main crossings are within 10km from being in 'normal' artillery range, which would greatly increase the pain to the Russian retreat.
But for the rest of this winter? I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's much lower tempo/scale meant to make the Russian conscripts miserable rather than make a major breakthrough. Winter is well and here, and while it's not been the worst winter, the Ukrainians have been having as much trouble as anyone else in the relatively favorable southern terrain. There's also plenty of media of the Ukrainians having shot through their artillery barrels from over-use, they have indeed taken significant attrition in the units that were committed to Kherson that will need to be reorganized/reset/retrained, and so on. Plus, it's November. I wouldn't say it will be a quiet winter, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Ukrainians take an operational pause of about a month just to reset from Kherson, and then they'll face the decision of starting something in the middle of winter before Christmas, and of course the potential season of mud.
Given the timelines, and the ongoing western training/equipping pipelines, I wouldn't be surprised for a major offensive after the season of mud (which is not the same across the country, and would support an earlier offensive in the south than the north).
More interesting to me is the Russian side of this.
For one, Putin actually capitulated to his leadership advocating the retreat. This was probably the influence of General Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russian forces in Syria and who had (or retained) a good reputation with Putin and was brought in to take over last month. Surovikin succeeding where the Defense Ministry had failed for some time, but also overcoming the hardliners who had insisted escalation (which had included conscription) were needed to avoid the appearance of future defeats, is revealing.
For a second, just as the Ukrainians have reason for an overall pause, so do the Russians. The Russians have put conscripts around the fronts already, but many have also been put into training regimines as the Russians try to re-build their training organization infrastructure. A few months of relative lull can get the Russians from the embarassment of totally untrained conscripts to a maybe minimally trained, and have basic defenses prepared through the winter, etc.
Third and finally, an operational lull is likely the last/best chance Putin will have to force an armistice/truce/peace and turn this into a frozen conflict along post-Kherson lines. The Russians have been targetting Ukrainian energy infrastructure and are likely to continue, which hasn't yet caused a grid collapse but eventually would/could if they keep throwing enough drones at it. While the European energy card has failed to meet the pre-war expectations of what a cutoff would entail, being a major pain instead of a catastrophe, breaking the Ukrainian energy grid and leveraging that with other options might be seen as a way to compel the unicorn of European forcing a pro-Russia settlement at a point when Russia probably has the most relevant territory it has going forward.
This is a window, however, and I admit to being bear-ish on its prospects, because as the Europeans bring more energy and energy import infrastructure online in the coming months, the Russian leverage drops.
That's a pretty big bar. It's the single best explanation for this combination of maneuver and publicity.
My guess is that it's part of initial secret diplomacy. The best evidence will be the ferocity (or lack thereof) of the Ukrainian attack now. If they smash the bridges and run six divisions into Kherson, capturing/killing large numbers of Russians, I'm wrong. If the fighting is light, but the Ukrainians make steady progress, then it's more likely talks.
I caution against the strength of this assessment. What we're seeing is compatible with this assessment, and it's not an unreasonable assessment, but it's also compatible with Russia having learned an important lesson from the retreat at Izyum, where they lost control of the narrative and received much more damage from an obviously pending issue because no one official could say what was obvious in the social media space, that the position was untenable. This combination of maneuver and publicity is absolutely taking control of the narrative in a way the Russians consistently try to influence, without the making-it-up-as-they-go-along that was a large part of what made Izyum a catastrophe.
A point to be made is that even if Kherson wasn't about to fall immediately but in the coming months, its nature of it as an untenable position has been generally recognized for some time. If even Putin can be made to recognize that- and implicitly this is a shared assumption in the negotiation hypothesis or else Putin wouldn't have a need to make a deal there- then even in the lack of an agreement, there would need to be maneuver and publicity to exit in as good order and with as much damage control as possible.
The issue with this test is that smashing and running six divicisions into Kherson may not be within their capability. The Ukrainians weren't exactly days or maybe even weeks from breaking into Kherson before this announcement, and have been trying to smash the bridges for months with mixed effects at best.
There is also a domestic Ukrainian political consideration to consider. Kherson has been a significant meat-grinder for some time, and while the Ukrainians have made it work (as obvious output is now obvious), there's always a balance between pure military optimization (destroy as many Russians as fast as possible), and military-political strategy (not lose political support, by politicians or public, increasing the casualties of an already 'won' engagement that won't end the war). If the Ukrainians ran six divisions at Kherson, and got a bloody nose for the trouble but no appreciable change to the strategic balance of power, that would be both an internal liability, but also an external diplomatic liability.
And this is without the third level of meta-strategy on how to deal with the people who do want to try and leverage this into talks/peace settlements. Regardless of whether this evacuation is part of a deal, there are significant parts of the Western governments backing Ukraine who will seek to make it the basis of a deal and compel an armistice. This goes into a rabbit hole of competing theories/counter-theories and distinction of positions, but a point here is that if you are a Ukrainian maximalist, the key to success in the longer war isn't destroying the Russian forces located in Kherson now, but to sustain Western support long enough for a long war, and so operational maximalism is in tension with strategic optimization.
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It currently doesn't seem to be a fighting retreat.
Indeed. It appears the fighting retreat was what was happening the last few weeks. And egg on my face for not raising that possibility either, despite some (admittedly contradictory) reports of partial withdrawals. It remains to be see how much was/was not withdrawn- there seems to be indications that some conscripts brought in to buffer the more experienced elements were left behind and told to basically do whatever, with many of them donning civilians and trying to go to ground in the city, but the consolidation of the west bank seems to be going on quickly. It remains to be seen how much was left behind, but... well, we shall see.
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Objective milestone that decidedly disproves, along with the izyum-lyman offensive, the main claim from russia bulls, that russia would keep gaining territory at the expense of ukraine indefinitely. Specifically I remember a claim that Kharkov would fall to russia before Kherson falls to ukraine. And Kherson falling was one of Karlin’s conditions for being proven wrong. Where are all you people now ? You owe us an update, an apology, a delta, or something.
He'll probably re-adjust to 90% russian victory at the first good omen like the last time his busted predictions forced a downgrade.
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Where were those people before? I don't recall seeing that position in posts here, though it's of course possible that they were simply rendered invisible by excessive downvotes.
They were legion and upvoted. shakesneer, cullis, parsnip, difficult ad, jkf, igi, etc.
Could you actually link an example post?
Shakesneer:
Claim repeated by jkf downthread.
I think the claims in that post seem to be measured, reasonably well-hedged and a plausible impression to arrive at based on the situation on the ground back then (even if developments since then have shown that the poster's apparent expectation that the situation will continue turned out wrong). I think there is nothing to apologise for here, and demands for an update appear to be an isolated demand for rigour as I for instance don't see anything like it leveled against the posters who backed mainstream predictions of imminent Russian economic collapse. Do you actually think that the post you linked is guilty of greater epistemological vices than the ambient level of this forum, or is it that you have a specific beef because you think the side you support was unjustly robbed of energy/hype/confidence there?
It’s not an isolated, random claim. Ukraine’s relative lack of ground gained at that point(ignoring the kiev retreat) was the keystone of the russia bull thesis, repeated again and again in these discussions, as can be seen in the linked thread. And understandably so: it’s a simple, objective argument to just look at the changes in the colored areas of the map.
But when the keystone collapses, I expect repercussions on the general thesis. No one needs to apologize, being wrong isn’t a crime, that was just needling to get a response. But this event should change their minds, and if not they should at least explain why it hasn’t. Karlin, for all his faults, recognized this when he put kherson falling as one of his conditions. Claims of russian economic collapse by contrast are marginal to the russian bear thesis.
Shakesneer seems to hedge, yes, but upthread he gives credit to what later events have conclusively proven to be an absolute clown: will shriver. He claimed after the first days of izyum that the UA was destroyed and would never again be in a position to mount an offensive, etc.
I said: Kharkov will not fall. They said: kherson will not fall. Is it an isolated demand for rigor for me to question them when kherson falls?
How about just addressing those people if they make posts again that indicate they did not change their opinion, instead of polluting the commons with heat-raising rhetoric? You didn't even ping any of the people in question, so how was anyone supposed to know you meant them with your hyperbolic insinuations of confident wrongness?
I don't get the sense that they were in the first few months.
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They're measured and well hedged because that thread is from 2 months ago and thier confident predictions of "the Ukrainian military will collapse within days" had long since gone the way of "two weeks to flatten the curve". In contrast, here's the original CW thread from the week of the initial invasion.
I see nothing of the kind in the thread you linked, and only a little in the associated "Ukraine Invasion Megathread" from the sticky. Unrolling more than halfway through the thread, all I found was this this single comment from Shakesneer, which still is quite hedged, and his immediate response from a user I have no recollection of, who still gives a timeline of six months rather than "days", and then another from @FCfromSSC. On the other hand, here is a post uncritically echoing a claim that Russian aviation will collapse within a matter of weeks (still looks fine on flightradar24 to me), and I scrolled by another one linking a video with similar claims about the rest of the economy (which I unfortunately lost again to the sea of Javascript before copying the link). The vast majority of posts are not making confident predictions of any kind that didn't pan out, and either way a week or two into a war that was this far out of our usual models of how the world works is not really a time window in which I would expect most people to exhibit superforecaster-level clarity on it.
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There's also this guy, among others, who would take similar positions without making concrete predictions or taking any kind of responsibility for being wrong. I want to say the deleted user was Navalgazer420xx, but I could be mistaken. You can follow the links in that post for other people making that argument.
I suspect most of the people who were notorious for taking this position changed their username when moving to the new site based on posting styles.
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Please, see some of the responses to my request for Ukraine prediction in July for people that may need to update their priors.
For example, someone said there was less than a 5% chance that Ukraine would conquer more than Russia in the following 2 months and that there was less than a 5% chance that Ukraine would make ANY significant gains.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/w1s5b7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_18_2022/ih9i22f/?context=3
That seems to be Shakesneer, the one person it does seem this discussion is converging towards seeing as being likely very miscalibrated regarding Russian prospects as of three months ago. No other predictions in there strike me as declaring the reality we since observed particularly unlikely.
Interesting to review though, thanks for the link.
My pleasure.
The other one of note is Bearjew saying that Ukraine having a 35% of holding Kramatorsk through the end of the year was optimistic, implying that there was more than a 65% that Russia would take it.
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HlynkaCG had the best prediction on the old Motte that I am aware of, though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/wda188/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_01_2022/iiq2xzd/?context=3
Thanks but I also predicted that Putin wouldn't invade.
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Update: Ukrainian Troops in the town square of Kherson as of two hours ago (about 15:00 local time)
edit: @ZorbaTHut, is theMotte redirecting mirror links to twitter-actual intended behavior? If I wanted to link to twitter I wouldn't be using a mirror.
There's this complicated knot of code that takes a bunch of common redirectors for various sites and changes them based on user preference. There's actually a setting in your preferences that makes it redirect all Twitter or Nitter links to Nitter, if you prefer. I think it's sort of a cool idea, but it's also badly coded and not very extensible; I've mostly just left it alone while I think about what I want to do with it.
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Try nitter.ca.
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Armchair divisions on both sides were screaming treason yesterday, Russians mad about surrendering territory without a fight, Ukrainians mad about not getting enough footage for their new AMV. Which is probably not the worst possible outcome: if someone managed to negotiate the withdrawal with the leadership of both countries, then a diplomatic solution is a little bit more likely now.
EDIT: looks like someone has forgotten to negotiate a withdrawal with Ukraine or they altered the deal
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That would fit with a Russian strategy of hammering Ukrainian-Ukraine and then retreating to a more defensible position of just the majority ethnic Russian regions.
Russia already had taken pretty much all the majority-ethnic-Russian (as opposed to Russian-speaking Ukrainian) regions before Feb 2022.
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The Russian army managed to proceed westwards under literally Stalin, so I don't really think you can characterise the Russian infantryman as a creature with great susceptibility to morale damage. Lose: concentration camp. Win: gulag!
Stalin, yes. But also Zhukov, Chuikov, Rokossovsky, Vasilevsky, Vatutin, Konev...the Red Army leadership corps was worlds better than the current corrupt clique of yes-men the Russians seem to have.
I think you're wrong here on several levels: both in terms of their objective competence and in terms of their troops' perception of their competence (which is the relevant factor for morale). Consider that Russia's WW2 generals were:
Predominantly literal peasants because those were the only people the commies would promote, cough epigenetics cough
Predominantly the bottom of their respective military academy classes because all the good ones had been shot 1936-1939
Recently guilty of the immense fuck-up of having been totally unprepared for Barbarossa (modern historians might be inclined to attribute this failure exclusively to Stalin personally, but one suspects that the median contemporary Russian would have begun to harbour suspicions about the entire military command, especially given all the pro-Stalin-personally agitprop)
Many of the commanders you mentioned were repeatedly demoted for incompetence, e.g. Zukhov in July 1941. Rokossovsky had only recently been fished out of NKVD prison for being a foreign spy and shoved into a uniform, talk about scraping the barrel ffs. Are you really gonna have high morale when fighting under that?
As such, I stick to my guns that Russian morale in 2022 is basically guaranteed to be higher than Russian morale in 1943.
I'd suggest that item two had a whole lot more to do with it than item one given that many of the western allies armies were similarly lower-class affairs.
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It's worth adding that the Soviet casualties in the early and mid parts of the war ranged from 2-4 times as high as the German. Even during the end when the Soviets outnumbered the Germans 4 to 1 with better equipment, more fuel, and total air superiority, the Soviets usually only achieved around 1 to 1 casualty ratios. Not only is it hard to believe the Russians had much faith in their leadership, its hard to actually call Zhukov et al better than what the Russians are putting out now. They were just in a much more favorable situation materially.
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The Russia of WW2 doesn't exist anymore than the US of that day does.
The Russian people will put up with a lot, but I don't think the modern state has anything approaching the capabilities of 1940s USSR.
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The RKKA had British and American lend-lease instead of sanctions, though.
I note here a rather egregious goalpost shift from "morale" to "ordinance".
Fighting a war on your own territory with plentiful supplies works wonder for the morale. Fighting on the enemy territory with shit supplies tends to undermine it.
Just for example, Soviet troops gained an appreciation for Spam during WWII.
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Literally Stalin's regime, at least as far as I can judge from people's mood today, had better propaganda and uniting myth than Putin.
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