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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26794 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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AI Propaganda, Deepfakes, and the Law of Undignified Failure

A few days ago, a video appeard on Twitter of two white Scottish girls, 12 and 14, yelling, "DON'T TOUCH US," at an unseen cameraman and weilding a knife and a hatchet. Allegedly (though not shown) the cameraman was a migrant or other ethinc foreigner, was trying some form of assault or harassment, and the girls were trying to defend themselves.

The video is real. The event, insofar as it was depicted in the video, is real. Scottish police really did charge a 14 year old girl with brandishing a bladed weapon.

What is not real is this AI-generated image of a young girl emblazened with Scottish garb and Celtic war paint defending her home and honor with sabre and battleaxe. The image does not even purport to be real. No one could possibly believe that this is a real image. And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video. I know that the AI image is not real, it is operating on me at a cognitive level below logical propositions concerning real entities and events. One might say that the AI image represents certain ideals and concepts in a more-or-less true way (a sort of "truthiness" if you will), but the image itself is not evidence of anything.

Unless you are brand new to internet political discussion boards (in which case, welcome aboard) you have heard the concerns that AI-generated images and video will usher in a brave new post-truth world in which you can no longer trust the evidence of your own eyes and ears. Concerns typically center around some sort of incindiary event which is in reality totally fake, but which is indistinguishable from reality due to the photorealism of the AI media generation (so-called "deepfakes"). More sophisticated commentators point out that even just the threat of such "deepfakes" renders all multimedia depictions of events questionable, since it would no longer be possible to use the media artifact itself to determine the underlying truth or falsity of the events it depicts.

The sad truth is that none of that shit matters, because reality itself hardly matters. The law of undignified failure states that, "when plans and people fail, they do so in a less dignified way than you imagined." Perhaps you imagined that the forces of goodness would fight valiantly against the forces of epistemic darkness, only being finally overwhelmed by an exploitable quirk in the degeneracy of the vectors that make up abstract image space. In undignified reality, we get done in by anime girls waving flags.

You might object, "yes, but the rape of white British girls really is that big of a deal! We need propaganda to get across how bad the problem is." Maybe! but I hope you can see that this is not exactly an asymetric weapon as far as truth is concerned. I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment, if only because conservatives live in more of an inherently audio-visual culture compared to liberals.

Because the AI generated image is a symbol that connects present events with two thousand years of Scottish and Celtic history. She could just as well be brandishing that axe at a Roman centurion, a Saxon warrior, or an English redcoat.

with sabre and battleaxe

Sabres are curved and single-edged, while the depicted weapon is clearly both straight and double-edged. It looks a lot like a Roman gladius, frankly, although you could be generous and call it a seax.

Thank you for coming to my nit picks.

I know that the AI image is not real, it is operating on me at a cognitive level below logical propositions concerning real entities and events.

Of course the image is real, it's really there in front of you, really shared by you for me to see, and it really exists. Saying it's not real is like saying political cartoons aren't real: technically true but missing the point. This is depicting something real in a way that's fictional, and the more I consider it the more a political cartoon fits the description.

Of course the image is real, it's really there in front of you, really shared by you for me to see, and it really exists. Saying it's not real is like saying political cartoons aren't real: technically true but missing the point. This is depicting something real in a way that's fictional

Ce n'est pas une fille.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends, and an innocent immigrant found himself caught up in the mix. I also wouldn't be surprised if they were indeed two Scottish girls innocently defending themselves against a molesty migrant with a knife and hatchet, in which case they can call me in a few years to fix them, but they don't need fixing. Yes, yes, I know, how brave of me to fence sit.

The online right becomes two-soyjaks-pointing when there's a potential young female heroine to simp for in pwning the libs, even if the vibe/behavior/lifestyle of said potential heroine would, ex-ante, be nominally contrary to the modal views of the online right. Funnily enough, in the AI-generated of her in Scottish garb and Celtic war paint that's making the rounds, she's still emblazoned with the Nike swoosh, which the online right would normally denounce as the ultimate symbol of globohomo. Free advertising for Nike.

Recently there was Sydney Sweeney, who somehow became a darling of the online right while being famous for getting naked and simulating sex on screen. There was Taylor Swift before her, who has a music video promoting a fictional half-black love-child, and who's about 2/3-3/4 of the way to being able to fill out an 11 v 11 football game with a list of just her known paramours (the side with the NFL tight-end would presumably be the massive betting favorite). There's somehow like an entire ecosystem of rightoid e-girl influencers—who surprise surprise, basically just thot around like any other e-girl behind the scenes.

Recently there was Sydney Sweeney, who somehow became a darling of the online right while being famous for getting naked and simulating sex on screen.

What I find most ironic about the whole "good jeans" controversy is that there's a strong possibility that she'll actually end up not passing on her genes i.e. she'll either remain childless or end up adopting.

What I find always find humorous, are all the progressive attempts to play it cool after getting caught proverbially wetting their pants. Sweeny didn't become anyone's darling, the left flipped out and started screaming "Nazi!", everyone else was just laughing at that. Her conduct, or how many children she will have, has no relevance to the situation.

They're not mutually exclusive options, either. Chavvy white underclass girls doing chavvy things in a park, molesty migrant approaches them because they're chavvy and he's molesty, and he bites off more than he can chew.

I suspect that molesty subcontinentals who realize they've bitten off more than they can chew react by running away rather than filming it, though.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends

Nitpick, but north of the border, the preferred term is ned, not chav.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends, and an innocent immigrant found himself caught up in the mix.

If this were the case, why is he following them around and filming? He’s walking toward them, and they’re backing away, not the other way around. Certainly I can believe that the two girls are not, themselves, “innocent” exactly. But it is very weird to follow two teenage girls around the park with a camera.

Although it is very strange that the released video is from the man’s perspective, which is a point in favor of his innocence. Has anyone seen an explanation for this? Did he post it himself? Has he accused them of stealing from him, or anything like that?

Seems almost identical to the video of the minnesota girl saying nigger. We don't see the initial brandishing of the 'weapon' in either case, but presumably right after that, the guy pulls out his phone and tries to bait it out again to share on the internet, even if he has to pursue her a bit. And in both cases, the guy filming suspects he'll be more sympathetic.

If this were the case, why is he following them around and filming? He’s walking toward them, and they’re backing away, not the other way around. Certainly I can believe that the two girls are not, themselves, “innocent” exactly. But it is very weird to follow two teenage girls around the park with a camera.

Okay, I got my conspiracy theory.

This was all pre-planned by one of those creepy NGOs to be a Central Park Karen situation kicking off Boat Migrant Lives Matters, except it backfired by being YesChadded into orbit.

Did this…happen? I vaguely remember some Central Park nonsense. I don’t remember it being a psyop.

Depends what you mean by "happen", as I was half-joking. There was a guy recording himself following some woman around the park. I think her dog was somewhere where they weren't allowed, and the guy was complaining about that. She wanted to be left alone, but after being ignored for too long, he pulled out some dog treats out of his pocket, and tried to get the dog to come to him. She freaked out, and started screaming that if he doesn't stop, she'll call the cops and tell th a creepy black man is stalking her. This during BLM times was seen as an implied death threat. She promptly became the face of racism, I thinkbshe lost her job, and for a while even her dog.

I don't think any NGO was involved, that part was the joke, but honestly at this point nothing would surprise me.

I don't think any NGO was involved, that part was the joke, but honestly at this point nothing woupd surprise me.

I don't think an NGO was involved, but the media kerfluffle appeared to be an attempt to kick off the racial reckoning (that didn't fully work; they got the formula right with Floyd).

There's Central Park Dog Karen (really, two of them; it was a case of dueling Karens) and Central Park Bike Karen (which involved no Karens, as it turns out). As far as I know neither was a setup by a creepy NGO.

I don't understand why anyone records themselves committing crimes and then uploads them to the internet with some sob story about how they are actually the victim. And yet it just keeps happening. And there are always people willing to take their side, which I suppose shouldn't shock me anymore, but it still does.

I was watching some old Gad Saad interview maybe 10 years ago, and he was talking about the pathos of the 3rd world regarding honor and truth. Which basically amounts to, commit fully to the lie, and never stop doubling down and escalating, no matter how obvious the lie is. His example involved an uncle he was having a debate with over some fact, and who was right about this particular fact. The next day he mentioned to his uncle that he looked it up, and had in fact been correct, and his uncle just calmly claimed that the sides of the debate had actually be reversed. Broke Gad's mind for a minute. He had spend the afternoon arguing for *A when his uncle was vehemently claiming Not A, and then suddenly the next day his uncle is claiming it had been the opposite in the cold light of fact? All to maintain some facade of having been correct?

But that's just how some people work. Just tell a brazen impossible to believe lie, and there exist some subset of people who will throw out everything they know about how the world works (if they knew anything at all) and just default to "Well, it's one person's word against another, I just don't know"

I wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends, and an innocent immigrant found himself caught up in the mix. I also wouldn't be surprised if they were indeed two Scottish girls innocently defending themselves against a molesty migrant with a knife and hatchet, in which case they can call me in a few years to fix them, but they don't need fixing. Yes, yes, I know, how brave of me to fence sit.

IMHO these speaks to the innumeracy and propaganda of the age. It's like when people were polled about how many black men were being shot by the cops, and they thought it was thousands, nay, tens of thousands, when it was in fact dozens.

And this is triply so when it comes to mountain of evidence that the grooming gangs, and the failures of the state that are on a scale that beggars belief. It's almost the inverse of the BLM disconnect from reality, where you might assume dozens of girls have been raped by Muslim Immigrants, when in fact it's tens of thousands. Nay, hundreds of thousands!

That you are pulling some sort of "equally believable" fallacy here is a mockery of reason. I mean sure, all things are possible. But gun to my head, 10-1 some groomer was trying to pick the 12 and 13 year old girls up.

Scottish cities have long had a bad reputation for a reason. If a girl is going around with a knife in a Scottish city, she’s probably not someone you want to meet.

2-1 I’ll give you.

If you saw that video, and thought "Ah yes, this 13 year old girl holding a knife and hatchet wrong is clearly a hardened criminal who is harassing an innocent adult male who is following her for purely altruistic reasons, like returning a wallet she dropped", then I can't help you. Even being true that this Scottish city has a reputation for lower class whites being involved in violent crime, that it would factor into your thinking at all with respect to a 13 year old girl speaks more to your own prejudice (either against whites or for browns) than it does to the reality on the ground.

And I mean, like I said, maybe I'll end up with egg on my face. Maybe we won't find out the guy following her and filming has a history of being known to the police and was caught and released on a laundry list of sex and violent crimes of various severity. Maybe we won't go on to discover that the poor 12 and 13 year old girls hadn't already been sexually assaulted, or grew up watching their friends and family get sexually assaulted by Muslim rape gangs.

This actually reminds me of that minor thing where a gang of black teenagers was trying to steal an e-bike from a pregnant nurse. In a town where it's a well known "victimless crime" for black teens to snatch e-bikes from the people who rented them and ride off. And people tried to take some "well it's her word versus his" position when it was patently obvious the black teens were lying as their story involved this pregnant woman forcibly removing them from the bike and then getting on it to leave before the camera began rolling. Which would require an ignorance of physiology and gender differences that might be par for the course for "rationalist".

If you saw that video, and thought "Ah yes, this 13 year old girl holding a knife and hatchet wrong is clearly a hardened criminal who is harassing an innocent adult male who is following her for purely altruistic reasons, like returning a wallet she dropped"

Literally nobody is claiming this.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends, and an innocent immigrant found himself caught up in the mix.

Somebody is claiming this.

Literally not the same thing. She was probably holding a knife to impress some sixteen year old boy(I suspect she succeeded). There's no reason to believe she be a hardened criminal to do that(although almost certainly he is).

That’s not remotely the same as your straw-man claim.

I want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts. (A bold prediction, I know.)

Is there at least a decent possibility that this girl and her sister are helpless victims of harassment by scummy Pakistani men and neglect by a heartless police bureaucracy? Sure! But we have plenty of teenagers here in America who carry weapons to use on each other, or occasionally on bystanders from outside their social class.

I have personally been harassed and threatened by roving gangs of feral kids in this country, and in many cases they were certainly no older than this girl. Now, those kids were pretty much exclusively from demographics which many people here (myself included) instinctively sort into “outgroup”, and therefore right-wingers have no difficulty taking seriously accusations against them. Like the girl in the video, those teenagers, if and when confronted by adults, effortlessly shifted from brash aggression to the performance of fear and vulnerability. (“We’re just kids! Stay away from us, you weirdo!”) It is trivially easy to see through this tactic when imagining a gang of, say, black teenage carjackers.

What Americans in particular seem not to grasp about Britain is just how terribly dysfunctional its white underclass is. American right-wingers love to smirk knowingly about stories of the rampant “knife crime” in the U.K., safe in the assumption that this is overwhelmingly a non-white phenomenon. However, Scotland and the North of England have had an entirely native class of dissolute criminal youths for a very long time. Drug abuse and broken homes have gutted these communities long before brown immigrants started showing up in any significant numbers. Yes, the mass immigration is obviously bad; it has both compounded existing problems, and introduced a slew of new ones. But trying to sort this altercation into a clear tribalist frame — “I see a white British girl and a subcontinental man, so I know everything there is to know about who’s in the right” — is widely irresponsible given the total dearth of solid information.

What I see as the likely explanation here is that these two girls, possibly as part of a larger group, were acting disorderly and aggressive in this park. The man filming and another woman (apparently his sister) either confronted the girl, or were approached by her, and began filming. He did so because he believed that, if this escalated, he would be served by having video evidence of her wielding weapons. (That way if she tried to ditch them somewhere and deny having them, he’d have counter-evidence.)

These girls are likely from a very broken family environment and may well have suffered abuse in the past — either from brown immigrants, or from their own white family members, their gangster boyfriends, etc. — and their fear in that moment could be genuine. (As could their fear of being caught.) That doesn’t make this guy wrong for filming them or approaching them. If these girls are old enough to roam around unaccompanied, carrying bladed weapons, they are also old enough to be filmed. That can be true even if their reasons for carrying the weapons end up being totally innocent/justified! Multiple people involved in this altercation can all have legitimate motivations and be acting rationally according to their perceived interests.

If the agitprop narrative ends up being fully corroborated, I won’t find it especially surprising. Obviously there have been massive negative consequences resulting from mass immigration to the U.K., including rape gangs targeting precisely this sort of dissolute underclass girl. This city, Dundee, has a foreign-born population of 9%, including apparently roughly 4,000 Asian residents. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of those guys have been caught harassing/propositioning white girls! Still, at this time we lack anything remotely close to enough evidence to confidently assume that’s what happened here.

I want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts. (A bold prediction, I know.)

Is there at least a decent possibility that this girl and her sister are helpless victims of harassment by scummy Pakistani men and neglect by a heartless police bureaucracy? Sure! But we have plenty of teenagers here in America who carry weapons to use on each other, or occasionally on bystanders from outside their social class.

I'll grant that something feels off about the video, but I rate her chances of being a dual-wielding chav even lower than the pure victim narrative. I've met girls who could pull a knife on you (gypsies), this one never used one in her life.

I suspect she was trying to impress some guy who does be a hardened criminal.

Every weapon-wielding chav has to start somewhere. She’s obviously quite young and is probably just starting to carry these as a way to look/feel tough. I’d be surprised if she’s used them on anybody yet, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait around and let her keep carrying them until she finally does use them in earnest.

Every weapon-wielding chav has to start somewhere

They usually start with people smaller than them, not twice their size.

Nope, I'm willing to bet on this. Maybe the situation is more complicated than the rightoids say, but it's definitely not what you're saying.

Well yes, my theory is that either these girls were part of a group that was harassing people, or that they were picking on other kids and that the guy filming confronted them. This would explain why suddenly they seem (or are pretending to be) afraid.

Then they'd split in a second, and disappear in a metaphorical puff of smoke, not wait around until the dude pulls out a phone and starts recording. Even if he was quick on the draw, all you'd see is their backs running towards the horizon.

That’s reasonable but not guaranteed. Again, I’m just trying to game out different explanations, and fitting the (very scant) available evidence into different interpretations to see what appears most plausible.

That's fair, but like I said, I think it's more likely this is some 42D chess psyop, and the whole thing is staged.

More comments

Ah yes, of course. The guy filming forgot to upload all the exculpatory evidence that he filmed! Why didn't I think of that explanation.

Exculpatory of what? If he didn’t do anything wrong, there wouldn’t be anything to film.

American right-wingers love to smirk knowingly about stories of the rampant “knife crime” in the U.K., safe in the assumption that this is overwhelmingly a non-white phenomenon.

This isn't why right-wingers smirk at it. "Knife control" was the right-wing reductio ad absurdum of "gun control" until the UK came along and said "yes, I am the straw man you would imagine, I don't even recognize I am saying exactly what you predicted in exactly the way that proves you right."

All demographic groups (including whites, including Anglo-Saxon whites) have much lower homicide rates in England than they do in America, which is usually the point the gun control advocates were making, no?

Maybe intelligent, informed gun control advocates. But most of them are shrieking about school shootings and ‘we swear there’s no slippery slope’.

That being said, brandishing a hatchet would be a crime in the U.S. I can totally imagine a teenaged white girl being charged for brandishing a knife at a Hispanic man telling her to quiet down in public or whatever, but we haven’t had a rotherham scandal- Epstein was not an ethnic group and didn’t recruit his girls off the street. And we don’t actually know what started the confrontation.

Epstein was not an ethnic group

Sure he was; the political football being played with him currently is partially about to what degree that should matter.

Nice quote, did you steal it from the President?

  • -13

The UK has the best hay people. Everybody knows it. They said many years ago "The UK will have the best hay people" and I said "No, I want America to have the best hey people". But it's better this way, I'll let the UK have the best hay people. Just this one time. Maybe I'll tariff their hay people, I don't know. What do you think?

For those not in the know, the above two users have revealed themselves to be Tumblr users. By saying I recognize this, I am also revealing myself to have logged into Tumblr in the past year. I hope you all appreciate the sacrifice I made to explain the joke.

Who's the other one besides 347...? Jazzhands?

"yes, I am the straw man you would imagine, I don't even recognize I am saying exactly what you predicted in exactly the way that proves you right." is a Tumblr reaction screenshot. For example:

https://corvidiss.tumblr.com/post/744323070415749120/id-screenshot-of-a-tumblr-post-by

I hope you all appreciate the sacrifice I made to explain the joke.

Thank you for your service. Of course, you still won't be spared in the purge of Tumblrites...

I understand - double agents often make the ultimate sacrifice.

What is not real is this AI-generated image of a young girl emblazened with Scottish garb and Celtic war paint defending her home and honor with sabre and battleaxe.

At this point it's warranted to ask the tangentially related question as to why Scotland altogether is apparently not one bit less cucked than England.

Scotland (well, urban progressive Scotland, not the Highlands) is the Canada of Britain - their modern identity is deeply wrapped up in not being their richer, more famous, comparatively more conservative neighbour. As such, Scottish nationalism has taken on a distinctively left-wing, almost third-worldist character. Devolution hasn't helped, in that it's given Scotland a sort of toy government where SNP politicians can play around knowing they'll be bailed out of any serious consequences for bad decisions by the British taxpayer.

You know it's funny what makes connections in your brain and gives you the eureka moment.

Here I am taking my morning shit, reading this, and my instant response to the conversation here is:

"Oh yeah of course people don't care if this one is 'the story' it just captures the emotions just right, exactly like BLM..."

Oh.

OHHHHHHHHHHH.

Obviously I know intellectually that BLM is an emotional movement about frustration in response to perceived injustice. But I've never really felt it. Until now.

Good reminder that most of us are reasonably good at being objective and decoupling, but those things have vulnerabilities and have chasm sized holes with respect to predicting populations and people.

That moment of dawning realization when you understand that your enemies are humans just like you, and you're a human just like them.

Not to pick on you specifically of course. It's a difficult truth to realize, and it's an easy truth to forget. We all need constant reminders.

My only nitpick would be that I don't see it as a "vulnerability". I just see it as a constitutive part of being human.

My only nitpick would be that I don't see it as a "vulnerability". I just see it as a constitutive part of being human.

I mean the more objective style we generally see here is extremely valuable most of the time and is usually "better," but it's important to remember that the average person doesn't really think or act like us and that has implications for explanatory power of most of our thinking.

I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment, if only because conservatives live in more of an inherently audio-visual culture compared to liberals.

Hard disagree. Left uses audio-visual tools to push their agenda all the time. This photo of a drowned toddler did more for triggering mass immigration acceptance back in 2015, than any other rational argument at the time. Sam Alinsky's Rules for Radicals explicitly calls for tactics like this - such as using small provoaction in order to garner "disproportionate" attention that can be then captured and used for propaganda. If anything, the right is way behind this tactics mostly because it is leftists who are now in power and who are to large degree prone to this sort of asymmetrical warfare. Although even that is questionable as long as the left can keep pretense of them being the underdogs.

using small provoaction in order to garner "disproportionate" attention that can be then captured and used for propaganda.

That's also pretty much the classic Palestine-Israel conflict at play.

That's a lot of words for "I don't like the way poor people look and find them less sympathetic than cartoons".

Which is......a take.

It’s uncouth to say, but given how these Boudicca memes are blazing across the netscape, it’s hard to contend this is a false assessment.

Reality always has the last say.

I don't have much to say about this, even though little girls and bladed weapons form a major part of my life. It's cute, I guess. The incident in the video I mean. As far as propaganda goes, we've seen so much that this is just background noise. And as for the AI image...okay? Doesn't really do much for me. I found the real video more interesting, though neither is worth much. Even the real one could be staged or manipulated. And even if real, what did we see? A girl screaming at the camera and briefly pulling out two things that might have been weapons (in someone elses hands). Girls do dumb shit all the time. Maybe this one wasn't dumb but actually heroic. But we don't know. How the hell would we be able to tell?

We live in an epistemic desert, where all information is mirages.

the object level issue is too muddy to comment on until more information surfaces. Perhaps the teenager had sympathetic reasons for brandishing knives, perhaps she did not.

However, the general point in this case feels like a nothingburger. I don't think AI images are doing anything new. Before the advent of mass photography and telex, all pictures in newspapers, magazines and other contexts were illustrations, designed to evoke emotions yet supposed to illustrate real life events. Even with photography, many news photos have been intentionally staged to be evocative. During the past decade, meme texts, pictures and shopped photos have been cheaply available from 4chan. Only difference is that quality of freely available illustrations have been slightly upgraded, but it can be assumed the audience is soon desensitized.

And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.

Friend, if crappy bog-standard AI beige cartoons that are blinkin' well everywhere elicit strong reactions of sympathy from you, congratulations, you are Pavlov's dog.

Which probably is the entire problem in a nutshell, now I come to think of it.

Does anyone else hate that cartoony style because of over-exposure to it, even for 'serious' discussions of topics? I was about ready to throw a glass at the screen when Freddie deBoer used the crappy cartoony bastardised-Ghibli chibi of Joe Rogan, for pete's sake!

I thought chatgpt's newest model was awesomesauce when it first came out, but after seeing midwits spam brown image after brown image I've come to despise it.

like seriously can you put in 2 minutes of effort tweaking your prompt to make it not a dull brown mess?

And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but what the fuck are you talking about? It isn't even a good AI-generated image. You were hyping it up and I was wondering if when I clicked on your link I was going to see some kind of incredible cognitohazardous superstimulus version of the real incident (which I had already stumbled upon, found evocative in a vacuum, and now find even more evocative given the context). But what you've actually given me is like a low-rent obviously-AI-generated Ben Garrison knockoff. Get a grip, man.

some kind of incredible cognitohazardous superstimulus version of the real incident (which I had already stumbled upon, found evocative in a vacuum, and now find even more evocative given the context)

You can't just say that and not share it with the rest of us!

Sorry, misparsed phrase there, I meant the real incident itself.

Autism runs rampant on the Motte, and remember that anime is often preferred to 3D reality because it is easier to parse and safer to consume.

This probably sounds a lot more hostile than I intend.

It seems funny to me that the idea of Believing Women (w.r.t. them actually being harassed when the women react as though they were) is widely mocked on the right internet... unless the accused are migrant and especially unless the accuser is below the age of majority.

The media landscape I've been brought up on suggests to me that a certain demographic of women learn/are taught to scream rape to ward off any sort of attention, warranted or not, from very young age.

Correct me if I’m wrong but Epstein and thé rotherham perpetrators being predators isn’t really disputed?

You'll occasionally see a particularly tonedeaf Muslim blame Rotherham on the girls, or a particularly fervent supporter of prostitution do the same re:Epstein.

If Blaisey Ford had a video of herself dual wielding at Kavanaugh, filmed from his perspective, telling him to leave her alone, I think I might believe her.

And this works both ways. If you want to call out our hypocrisy, show us your MeToo era posts first.

Feminist accusations widely mocked by right-wingers online and reports of migrant/Muslim/black etc. underclass sexual violation of native teenage girls and young women tend to concern widely different forms of male behavior though.

And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video

So, I don't agree here and I'm curious as to which of our perspectives is the more common one.

Please answer the poll on which of the options elicits stronger emotions:

https://strawpoll.com/NoZrzw9oBZ3

Then there is the question of which of the two garners more engagement and there I don't really think it's a question of which is more engaging but rather which is easier to consume while still being reasonably engaging. An image is much easier to consume than a video and it fits much better in a text feed than a video does. You can glance at an image and then scroll right by, while a video breaks your engagement flow with the feed.

Since you don't give this option, I'll have to record "neither" as my answer here. The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?" In a slightly different context, this would be "little thugs attack ordinary person going about their business in broad daylight".

The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?"

It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.

They both annoyed me, I think the anime even more because it's so horrible and is desecrating what remains of the corpse of public art. The video is "lower class criminals-in-training behave like such in public" which, unhappily, is too common to evoke more than "for feck's sake, where are the parents?"

I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment

Well there's also the fact that the left has huge budgets to propagate their ideas, they don't need AI. They can pay 50, 100 people to make propaganda for a single show. They have entire broadcasting companies all around the world. They already have endless NGOs and cadres and academics pushing out meaningless words, they don't need to automate it. Automating it might even hurt them in absolute terms rather than just relative terms, rendering their patrons unemployed.

See my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348142?context=8#context

Here are a few riffs on the video that have crossed my feed (all should be viewable without logging in): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzUEppFW0AA_Ucc?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzSGAjkakAAp7VP?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://x.com/bitcloud/status/1960179071511585038/photo/1 https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1

I do think these new capabilities benefit the right more than the left in the current environment. You correctly point out that these are asymmetric weapons, but that needs to be interpreted in the context of an information "battlefield" that is heavily tilted against the right. There are comparatively very few right-wing institutions that staff full-time paid journalists, political cartoonists, and commentators to pump out high production value propaganda in response to the news cycle. Technology that allows anons on Twitter to turn their idea into reality with a few prompts and a bit of tweaking in photoshop is a democratizing force that helps level the playing field. Twitter is an incredible incubator for these ideas and messages as well, now that they have dialed back the censorship. The most effective messages rise to the top, while the low-effort slop (mostly) languishes at the bottom of the replies section.

https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1

Was not ready for text to speech to read out the username in this url

And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.

I hate to tell you, but this is not a new phenomenon.

I think we can go back even more.

What do you think of when I show you this image?

If you were paying attention to The News at the time, then you'd recognize this image captures important social commentary. It was disseminated by our very best, professional national media outlets. Attached to it was a story about a MAGA chud laughing in the face of a noble and indigenous savage. The media manufactured and corralled the narrative in less than a day. Full blast an hour or so before I knew the entire encounter available for viewing on Youtube. This was not much slower than the Twitter story of the mysteriously well armed (for Britain) chav(?) teen that is alleged to be warding off Pakistani Asian advances. Alternatively, a teenager making poor decisions.

I don't think the AI connection is very relevant here. You can argue the image generation enhances the meme, but I don't think it is central. The video is enough. To take off it requires a common understanding and a major demand. There's a lot of demand on Yookay Twitter. I judge that the demand can be largely laid at the feet of British institutions and culture which are paying a cost for past transgressions. You may judge differently. This does not absolve propaganda for feel mads or Twitter bucks.

My brain short circuits a little seeing a girl dual-wielding hatchet knife in public. That is not a situation that organically transpires. About the closest thing I can map it to is various criminal situations in lower-class environments filmed for entertainment.

I look forward to more information than five sentences in the Daily Record. Why do you lot need so many tabloids and why do they need to be daily? The Weekly World News is a world class tabloid.

Daily Record

This is a Scottish newspaper, so it's local rather than national, unlike The Sun or The Daily Mirror (and you get regional versions of those, e.g. The Irish Sun). A lot of the daily papers got hoovered up by the Murdoch behemoth and brought downmarket as tabloids to become profitable. Your question is a bit like asking "Why do you need the Minnesota Star-Tribune, isn't USA Today enough?"

Fair enough I was talking out of my ass. At least I now know where to go for my horoscopes. I don't exactly trust Russell, but I don't exactly not trust him either.

I honestly don't know what you're objecting to here, if you're objecting to anything. A part of me wants to go on a Fruck-eque diatrabe, but his point seems so obvious that I feel like I must be missing something about yours.

Please confirm that you believe that this meme, which you yourself admit does not even pretend to be real, represents some novel danger to the truth, which we haven't faced already on a much larger scale.

You might object, "yes, but the rape of white British girls really is that big of a deal! We need propaganda to get across how bad the problem is." Maybe! but I hope you can see that this is not exactly an asymetric weapon as far as truth is concerned.

No, the way I would object would be to remember the last ten years of mainstream media and laugh at your concerns about propaganda until I hyperventilated.

You are right, it is an asymmetric weapon. And the establishment want to keep it that way. So it doesn't matter that explicitly government backed propaganda was used to protect migrants who raped little British girls, or to cover up said rape of little British girls, or to protect the people who covered up the rape of little British girls. It doesn't matter that slightly less explicitly government backed propaganda has been used in the decade since to paint the 'migrants' as scared women and children fleeing tyranny and to defame and punish anyone who doesn't like them. It doesn't matter that government propaganda hid nigh constant protests in France for years, or was used to defame a presidential candidate, to censor social media, to protect corrupt and incompetent politicians, to launder public support for useless and pointless wars, to hide the intel agency to big tech pipeline, to convince everyone to fear their neighbours and cripple childhood development and wear a stupid fucking mask/not wear a stupid fucking mask and give up their bodily autonomy in the name of self righteousness. What matters is that Tommy fucking Robinson can whip up a meme in ten seconds. That's when propaganda is dangerous.

I think it does demonstrate that people are starved for a heroic/mythic figure to rally around or organize under and to inspire them to collective action towards some (ideally) righteous goal.

We're really short on such people these days. No politicians really live up to their own hype. Trump's reality warping field is strong enough that people DO find him inspiring. But he is simply not a 'leader of men' in the sense that one can't imagine him at the front of a cavalry charge on a battlefield or marching into a conquered city to personally accept terms of surrender.

Unlike, say, George Washington or Ulysses S. Grant.

Made all the worse in the U.K. which has a literal king who has a literal sword and in theory has the ability to deploy the military inside and outside the kingdom.

But, and maybe some British Citizen can clarify, its also impossible to imagine the British military rallying under the king's declaration to purge the isles of the invading hordes or what-have-you. Just, wouldn't happen under the current structure of things and social expectations.

And so, the right is really groping around for ANY figure that could possibly rouse their tribe to war and actually hold the coalition together long enough to rout the hated enemy. And they grasp upon a 13-14 year old girl with behavioral issues as their long-awaited queen.

And hey, the U.S. does it too. Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, Shiloh Hendrix... just 'normal' people who happened to pull off a 'win' in a very specific place and time, and weather the onslaught of publicity and scrutiny, and did something that lefties really didn't like.

They get elevated to the status of 'heroes' but man, they pretty much fade out once it is clear they don't have the chops for maintaining the spotlight, much less being the core of a movement. And who does? Who can you actually imagine being dynamic enough to challenge existing power structures, stable enough to not fall to personal scandal, and somehow also strategic enough to win meaningful, repeated victories when it counts.

AI is good for creating imagery from that slightly-more-idealized world you wish you lived in. I do it pretty often, to create a vision of the future that I find appealing and would like to live in/escape to. But I try not to very directly make alternate versions of the present, especially one that supposes people or individual persons are different than who they really are.

That is, I don't want my actual perception and memory of reality to be supplanted by a version that I prefer but that simply isn't correlated with the truth. Believing the true things even when you'd prefer the true things be something else means NOT believing the false things even when they are exactly what you would prefer be true.

No. A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war, no Trump is NOT a divine instrument of retributive justice who also has six pack abs and a ten inch penis (he does alright, regardless, mind), no Zelenskyy is not some genius defensive strategist who can beat back Russian invasion via sheer grit and guile (and billions of dollars of aid and western weapons), no Luigi Mangione is NOT an avenging Saint, so on and so forth.

But people do, really really do, want that idealized version to be real and true, which is probably why they're ready to accept the digital fictions so readily. Which spells very, very bad things for our shared epistemic environment.

But, and maybe some British Citizen can clarify, its also impossible to imagine the British military rallying under the king's declaration to purge the isles of the invading hordes or what-have-you. Just, wouldn't happen under the current structure of things and social expectations.

The last British King to rally the troops against his domestic political opponents was also called Charles, and ended his reign noticeably shorter than he began it. I don't think Charles III is going to be following his example.

Charles II managed just fine, although admittedly his coup-d'etat was done from afar and not necessarily under his aegis. The trick is to let people get a good, long look at the alternative and then to march in your armies when nobody can stomach fighting to defend the status quo.

The trick is to let people get a good, long look at the alternative and then strike when they can't stomach defending the status quo.

Thankfully, that bears no resemblance to anything that might be happening nowadays.

Charles I was actually able to rally an army and fight a war for several years, though. I'm suggesting the current Charles doesn't even have the juice for getting a warband together in the first place.

behavioral issues

This little girl has absolutely had it with the rapacious diversification. That she has had to arm herself to protect her sister is a kind of condemnation on UK society we can't even come close to making ourselves.

I kind of doubt that's the main reason, actually.

I'd guess its the same reason why a lot of lower-class Americans walk around with a gun tucked in their waistband (and I do mean that, not holstered, just jammed in there). They're worried about self-defense, but mainly from each other.

We have young girls that like to knife fight too, after all.

I remember that video well, it was actually one of the first (well, not the first, but certainly one of the more acute) cases which really shook me from the lefty consensus I had grown up in. I was already drifting away for various other reasons, and had always disliked SJWs (as they were then called), but the SJ race-war reaction to this incident was so ludicrously indefensible, and the left-leaning pushback so conspicuously absent, that it really stuck with me.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the video, the cop absolutely unequivocally saved the other girl’s life; the one who got shot literally had her arm up mid-stab (and going straight for the heart) when he opened fire. It was quite heroic, really.

It was just such an obscenely naked case of “black lives matter, but only when it makes a white person look bad”. It’s not like anyone would be saying that other poor girl’s life mattered if she had been stabbed.

Yep.

I'm critical of a good number of officer-involved shootings. I can remember that one that started shooting because an Acorn dropped on a car hood, for example.

But if there's ever a 'good shoot' its taking out someone who was literally in the act of trying to kill someone else.

Also, I train people in self-defense professionally... and knife attacks are the scariest and hardest to defend situations. Which is to say it is not reasonable to expect the officer to intervene and try to subdue the person with the blade, so shooting them really does end up as the best option, if you don't have a full-body stab-proof suit.

A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice. #BlackLivesMatter.

Not the particular tweet I was expecting, but amusingly enough it was the incident I was expecting. I was expecting this classic Tweet:

Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.

LOL I was trying to find that specific one, but settled for one that was kind of close.

wait, explain Shiloh Hendrix to me?

https://www.postbulletin.com/news/local/crowdfunding-campaign-for-alleged-woman-involved-in-viral-tiktok-garners-over-100k

The video depicted a man, who is not white, confronting the woman for calling a Black child a racial slur. Though the original video was taken down, Michael McWhorter, known online as TizzyEnt, reposted the video on Wednesday, April 30, to his more than 9.5 million followers across TikTok , Instagram , X and YouTube.

In her campaign, Hendrix claims the child stole from her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at the Soldiers Field Park playground.

“I called the kid out for what he was,” Hendrix wrote.

For context, this happened right after Karmelo Anthony, a black teenager, stabbed a white high-school student to death at a track meet and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via fundraising sites. Hendrix also started a fundraiser to cover relocation expenses, and it went viral in the aftermath of the Anthony incident. From the sentiment I saw on social media, it seemed like mostly spite donations and people supporting her refusal to cave to the cancellation mob. There was a concerted effort to get her fundraiser above the Karmelo Anthony total, and it ended up raising something like $800k.

And just as it seemed like her 15 minutes of fame were up, she was just charged with three counts of disorderly conduct, apparently for simply using the n-word.

A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war

Technically she was around 16 years old…

Why does everything in the UK seem to revolve around underage girls, if they aren't being trafficked to a crown prince by foreign intel agents, they are being gang groomed or assaulted by immigrants, or leading crusades, now they are wielding skyrim tier bladed weapons. Will the UK soon have a squad of teenage girls in uniforms battling in the streets for their country's freedoms?

Because both men and women alike are completely obsessed with teenaged girls; men because biological imperative (literally what the male sexual attraction model selects for), women because... also biological imperative (sexual competition and insecurity about the former).

This is why women are, in aggregate, far more accepting of teenaged girls being gang groomed or assaulted by immigrants than [native] men are- that's just what you do to sexual competition.

Magical girls are more of a Japanese thing.

It feels like it’s actually Americans who have the hang-up about underage girls, and that this cultural disconnect is what is driving a lot of the “WTF is going on in the UK” discourse from American commentators.

Pardon? You think we look at videos like the one you linked, and go "old enough to bleed, old enough to breed", or something?

American attitudes about teenagers having sex, especially female ones, are legitimately much harder than British.

...and it's completely irrelevant to cases such as thus one...

Plus, honestly, at this point, are you sure? This seems to have been true 20-ish years ago, when conservative culture in America had some slrt of presence. Nowadays? I'm not sure I'm seeing it. Do you have any examples in mind?

I am not sure if the UK has any other demographics that some significant part of the population won't feel comfortable, or even compelled by their position, publicly expressing disdain for.

leading crusades

Wait, which UK underage girl led a Crusade?

The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

-Rudyard Kipling

Charlie’s (Underage) Angels

Which just invites the question of why the left isnt using the same weapon against the right. Make its own cartoon memes of how bad things really are for the poor migrants and refugees and oppressed BIPOC.

Why, it may just be that the language wielding elite prefer to wage war on their turf where they can use vague words to shape perceptions using the moral weight of such words asymetrically. Refugee, child migrant, trans children, urban youth, journalist, UN worker. All these terms elicit a mental approximate closer to the stock image photo of what a sympathetic portrayal for such looks like, usually a prepubescent child eyes full of wonder or a do gooder westerner in squalid conditions with a heart full of hope and a belly full of vigor.

Maybe the push from leftist media to scrub images and videos of what happens on the ground is entirely because the definitional warfare breaks under reality and repeated evidence of "17 year old" of certain demographics being statistically overrepresented starts making Noticing more common. Worse if the left tries to pretend something is the inverse, like when Rittenhouse was portrayed as killing Blacks to supercharge the narrative of white nationalism running unchecked.

The Left can't use the low hanging fruit of visual art to its cause, a fruit plucked only by Ben Garrison or Stonetoss in the past but now accessible to every angry person with an internet connection. The meta is shifting, and its not in the favour of the left.

Make its own cartoon memes of how bad things really are for the poor migrants and refugees and oppressed BIPOC.

They are, when the right sees them the response is generally "yes chad". Enough so the right makes their own

The video is real , but what was the sequence of events that led to her brandishing those weapons .It's not like people carry axes when they go walking. were they just on the ground lying there or something.

The police haven't outlined any of the circumstances around the video such as was the foreigner harassing the girls. The will likely keep details to a minimum using the excuse of privacy for the minor.

Without clarifying that the girl was casually carrying the weapons before having met the foreigner, the situation is going to be memed into 'Scottish Boudica defends herself against the foreigner; where are the men?' I know this because this is currently being talked about on /pol/

Edit: There is also a shitshow of a thread on the scotland subreddit where you can expect usual reddit takes.

That image is strictly within the capabilities of any decent artist, and it has that hideous brown tint that every chatgpt imahe has these days.

Sure political cartooning has become more democratized slightly, but very rarely will this shitty slop rise to the top over real artists.

yes it has that shitty Ghibbi style or whatever it is called with the obvious sepia background. it's not even good animation

but very rarely will this shitty slop rise to the top over real artists.

Sorry to break it to you, but uh, yeah it does.

https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1833154509222129884?lang=en

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1905332049021415862?lang=en

Turns out demand was elastic. The ability to respond to the current thing in minutes with trivial input costs changes the game. Memes were a big part of Trump's 2016 win, but this is the next level.

but Ghibli is a dead giveaway . The concern over fakes is that they are subtly indistinguishable from a real-life event or the original image (e.g. slightly slurring someone's speech to convey inebriation) . Those examples you give are obvious fakes. Those fakes go viral for the novelty factor, not because people are confused or are mislead. Also, those are based off of photos, so there is no artist.

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