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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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but I also think people are entitled to demand sites remove deepfakes of themselves.

So you think it should be illegal if those sites don't?

Like, if you want to create your own personal wank material with Emma Watson, or your neighbor's daughter, keep it to yourself.

Nah. The right to share the products of one's fantasies, expressions, creativity, etc. is inherent in all of the associated rights.

What's in your head (or on your hard drive) is nobody else's business

Sure but it's my choice if I choose to make it their business in a particular context.

Putting it in public is like telling your neighbor's daughter that you jack off thinking about her. If you make it public, you make it her business (and her father's, to put it in terms that you consider relevant).

Maybe it becomes their business but that doesn't imply any obligation for the state to do anything on their behalf.

Anyway I swear it was Rowling but maybe it was Meyer or some other author of a similar context or maybe it was just erotic fanfiction they were opposed to. (Actually I think maybe the controversy was that Rowling disapproved and tried to take down fics with even small amounts of sexually suggestive content. I don't know. All I know is at least some fics were targeted by someone. In any case the analogy stands even if the details aren't correct.)

Edit: I think I'm right about Rowling. Maybe she changed her mind over time but there's definitely a history of her targeting fan content:

https://old.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/8nphgj/jk_rowling_vs_the_internet_a_history_of_harry/

J.K. Rowling comes out publicly in support of Harry Potter fanfiction online, but only on “her terms”.

This not much different than the people who are fully supportive of AI-based image techniques, but only on their terms, that we're discussing. So I think she's a good analogy here, especially since I again do recall some of the discourse being about how it violates the actors' image rights since everyone inevitably associates their appearances with the characters now.

Maybe it becomes their business but that doesn't imply any obligation for the state to do anything on their behalf

Yes, it does, because the state has made it their business to prevent them from doing anything to protect themselves.

The morally correct response to someone telling your sixteen year old daughter that he enjoys thinking about her while jerking off is ‘if you ever speak to her again I will kill you’. The state has decided to ban this option, and so it is incumbent on the state to imprison(or otherwise deal with) people who justify that recourse. The debate is about where to draw the line, not about whether the state should be involved.

The morally correct response to someone telling your sixteen year old daughter that he enjoys thinking about her while jerking off is ‘if you ever speak to her again I will kill you’.

Maybe if you're a violent psycho who is a ticking timebomb waiting to go off, though in that case I'd rather the state move on you.

(By the way, if you feel this strongly about people not jacking off to your (hypothetical?) daughter, then I sure hope you're equally as committed to keeping her completely modest in garb and demeanor. The moment you so much as let her walk around in front of other males in tight leggings (assuming she's attractive), all bets are off, whether they communicate that to you or not, if you want to try to appeal to some more traditional code of behavior. Many such daughters being jacked off to with their fathers unable to do anything about it other than seethe.)

The state has decided to ban this option, and so it is incumbent on the state to imprison(or otherwise deal with) people who justify that recourse.

Yeah, no. By this logic, it is incumbent on the state to imprison or otherwise deal with people chewing loudly because it has prevented me from simply murdering them. (You might say that chewing loudly could never possibly justify murder, but perhaps if you had dinner with some of my family members you might disagree.) That is nothing more than naked totalitarianism. (I don't actually support murdering or imprisoning people for chewing loudly of course. I am just pointing out that your argument is contingent on the notion that a particular behavior deserves a particular degree of punishment in the first place, which is obviously highly debatable. You're trying to launder in this premise as automatic.)

The debate is about where to draw the line, not about whether the state should be involved.

Yes, this applies so long as anything at all is illegal (like murder, which I'm pretty sure has been prohibited in some form in every society). It's also a meaningless statement.

Yes, I am aware that men think about women while masturbating, and that teenaged girls are attractive to the opposite sex.

Informing a woman or girl you’ve masturbated while thinking about her is creepy behavior* that will foreseeably be received as a threat, and there’s no possible reason to engage in it. Behaving in a sexually threatening manner towards women and girls justifies lethal violence from the men responsible for them. It’s been that way since time immemorial and the only exception has been if they’re just whores who forfeited their right to male protection(which was not the topic up for discussion). Things which are threatening are not the same as things which are merely annoying. Women have a right not to hear implied rape threats and their husbands and fathers have a right to police the things said to them.

*unless you’re in a relationship where she’s into that, I suppose, but I’m not talking about Reddit sex positive weirdos here.

that will foreseeably be received as a threat

That depends a decent amount on the context.

Behaving in a sexually threatening manner towards women and girls justifies lethal violence from the men responsible for them.

Maybe, if being "responsible" for them also means they have complete and absolute just and proper property rights and masculine dominion over them (which is also how it's been "since time immemorial"). Otherwise they are merely simping to some degree. The natural price of masculinity taking responsibility for the feminine is the feminine's complete and absolute obedience in return. So if you are not advocating for this then you are simply advancing cuckoldry under the guise of chivalry (which I suspect because you're framing the issue here as an injury to the female as opposed to her owner).

if they’re just whores who forfeited their right to male protection (which was not the topic up for discussion)

That's like at least 97% of modern women/girls over the age of 13 or so though, so I kind of think it's implicitly up for discussion. The actual society we live in is not the one you're describing.

Women have a right not to hear implied rape threats

If we're talking ideal ideal world (obviously my opinion influenced by my ideological presumptions here, though I think it's a lot more traditional), men have a right to not hear implied threats against their exclusive use of their property and women have very few to no rights. Again, the injury is to the man (hence why "rape" evolved as a synonym for "steal", because it's stealing another man's property). But even then I think in most cases going to the absolute extreme over someone saying they find your property attractive is a little much. If somebody said they liked my car, I wouldn't automatically in all circumstances threaten them like were threatening to steal it.

unless you’re in a relationship where she’s into that, I suppose, but I’m not talking about Reddit sex positive weirdos here.

The fact that you think relationships where the girl finds her partner sexually attractive enough to enjoy the idea of him wanting to masturbate to her is the domain of "Reddit sex positive weirdos" says a lot here.

My entire point is that we are not living in the kind of society you’re imagining, we’re living in a society where the state takes on the function of protecting women from sexual violence and predation. And the state, if it’s going to take on that function, has the responsibility to actually do that. Which in turn means that it needs to protect the privacy of the nude bodies of non-sex workers(and no, wearing a bikini does not make you a sex worker, and I say that as someone who does not approve of bikinis).

My entire point is that we are not living in the kind of society you’re imagining, we’re living in a society where the state takes on the function of protecting women from sexual violence and predation. And the state, if it’s going to take on that function, has the responsibility to actually do that.

And I consider this invalid, because the only thing that warrants protecting in my view is men's property rights over women.

Furthermore, the creation of fiction is automatically not violence or predation, because it's fiction (unless some better justifications than are being offered can prove otherwise in particular cases).

The state has also taken on the function of protecting people from violence, but it does not ban most threats, only fairly extreme and imminent ones, which is probably the best analogy here. I can with pretty much full legality quite credibly make you reasonably believe that I have a strong desire to kill you, with you maybe being able to seek a protection order against me at best (which barely punishes me in any way and even then usually requires repeated incidents), to a far greater degree than me masturbating to you would imply that I desire to rape you.

"The state has taken on a duty to protect against X meaning it must crack down to every degree possible on any behavior that could possibly be conceived of by anyone as relating to X whether sensibly or not." is what gave us years of coronacultist totalitarianism. No thanks.

Which in turn means that it needs to protect the privacy of the nude bodies of non-sex workers

??? The privacy of their nude bodies is not a subject of contention here. Their face is being put on the nude bodies of other people (who overwhelmingly are sex workers). It is little more than a high tech equivalent of what any teenager could have always achieved with a Penthouse, his school yearbook, some scissors, and some glue for decades. Did you think magical x-rays were involved here or something? (And on that subject, it's ironic that the state would supposedly be tasked with protecting this because its own imposed TSA body scanners are in fact the biggest known violation of it in human history.)

wearing a bikini does not make you a sex worker

It absolutely 100% does if your primary purpose behind doing so is to create sexual transactions where men get horny over you/jack off to you in exchange for you getting cash/profitable attention/ad revenue etc.

I’ve already addressed your first point- the discussion is one of line drawing(that is, at what point so creepy comments towards women become criminalized) and not of whether men should have carte blanche to say whatever they want to women. We obviously disagree on where the line is drawn. And, for the record, a society where the state does not ordinarily police relations between men and women but her male relatives have much more leeway to use force in protecting her is also just, it’s just not on the table(and likely would not go well for a self-described pedophile).

It is little more than a high tech equivalent of what any teenager could have always achieved with a Penthouse, his school yearbook, some scissors, and some glue for decades.

Yes, my daughters high school classmate doing and then disseminating this would seem to me a quite central example of grounds to become very angry, and resort to violence if regular disciplinary channels do not punish him.

It absolutely 100% does if your primary purpose behind doing so is to create sexual transactions where men get horny over you/jack off to you in exchange for you getting cash/profitable attention/ad revenue etc.

Most women who wear a bikini are doing so because that is what our culture considers normal to swim in. You can deplore that(and I do) without thinking it makes them all sex workers(which it doesn’t).

and likely would not go well for a self-described pedophile

It would go great if we all followed the masculine principle that I do what I want with my daughters/feminine property and the same for yours. (If you're actually a trad and not a modern moral missionary on a rampage in disguise then surely you can agree to this.) Otherwise you do realize that we pedos own guns too right? Angry agecucks do not scare us.

Yes, my daughters high school classmate doing and then disseminating this would seem to me a quite central example of grounds to become very angry, and resort to violence if regular disciplinary channels do not punish him.

Well unfortunately for you he's almost certainly going to upload it to a Russian domain registered under a fake name under a fake username himself like "420lmao69". Good luck finding him. At best you end up as this guy. You should have just made sure your daughter didn't come off as an appealing piece of jailbait in the first place, like maybe a no bikinis rule would have helped.

In fact, why even have her in high school in the first place anyway? If you were really trad, you would know that it is only a danger and a burden for a woman to have that level of education, or much of an education at all beyond the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic + domestic matters.

Most women who wear a bikini are doing so because that is what our culture considers normal to swim in.

I feel like you haven't had many sexual conversations with many women. It's pretty easy to get them to admit that all of the modern normalized thot stuff turns them on and that they're addicted to the dopamine hits of sexualized attention and that's why they helped normalize it all and continue to participate in the normalization of it. Hell you can find such admissions all over the Internet too.

That "It's just a bikini. It's just what all of the other girls wear!" junk is just the excuses they tell their pet betas and other men they put on a clueless routine for to fool into thinking they don't know exactly what they're doing (because they're not sexually attracted enough to them to want to openly communicate sexuality to them).

So you think it should be illegal if those sites don't?

Yes. Just like if you publish a libelous article about me I can demand the site take it down. They can refuse, of course, and then I can sue, but the end result is, theoretically, men with guns enforcing the law, yes.

Maybe it becomes their business but that doesn't imply any obligation for the state to do anything on their behalf.

Okay. If you tell someone that you enjoy jerking off while thinking about his underage daughter, no, he can't have you arrested for it.

People who expect no consequences for anything they say or do as long as it isn't actually illegal tend not to like the consequences and then suddenly become very interested in legal protections.

Edit: I think I'm right about Rowling.

You're not. You said she was opposed to fan fiction. She's not. She was opposed to minors being exposed to porn. You might disagree with her wanting to impose conditions on writing fan fiction, but that doesn't make her opposed to fan fiction (and in practice, she's never done much to enforce her terms except on large commercial sites).

Technically, fan fiction is still at best quasi-legal, and authors who are actually anti-fiction can and do force sites to remove fan fiction of their works entirely. Rowling could, if she wanted to, go after the many sites that do host sexually explicit HP fan fiction, but she hasn't.

This not much different than the people who are fully supportive of AI-based image techniques, but only on their terms, that we're discussing.

It's quite different.

So I think she's a good analogy here

It's not.

Just like if you publish a libelous article about me I can demand the site take it down.

It's not libelous if it's not presented as true. If I write a fictional story about you raping an eight year old that is explicitly presented as fictional, then as much as that may disturb you, you can't do shit.

People who expect no consequences for anything they say or do as long as it isn't actually illegal tend not to like the consequences

This is random pseudo-macho posturing that's irrelevant to the argument. But yeah in any case I will definitely take my chances with your average weak modern Reddit heckin' dad versus the state. (I mean even if I did deepfake someone's daughter, which I wouldn't at all especially now since I think current deepfakes are primitive and cringe, I'm not exactly going to go telling them about it, since, yes, legal or not that's pretty shitty or at least dumb etiquette, and if I shared it online I'd do so anonymously, but still. I've masturbated to a lot of people's daughters and I'm pretty sure none of them know anything about it except maybe the dads of the girls I've openly dated, though even that's not many because I have a weakness for fatherless girls.)

and then suddenly become very interested in legal protections.

...Is it supposed to be some sort of flaw in my argument or "gotcha" that I am very interested in legal protections... for that which I think should be legal? That's kind of the point, yes.

You said she was opposed to fan fiction. She's not.

I mean, as the link shows you, many actual HP fanfiction authors disagree. Many people also disagree that Diane Feinstein is opposed to guns (after all, you can disagree with her wanting to impose conditions on them, but that doesn't make her opposed to them, right?). Unless you can explain exactly what's "quite different" here and thus wrong about my analogy, I think the whole debate is a pointless back-and-forth of semantic vagueness.

Again, I'm talking explicitly about the "You can't write a sex story about Hermione, because when people think of Hermione they think of Emma Watson's image, and Emma Watson didn't consent to have her image in your sex fantasies." argument I've seen about erotic HP fanfiction. (I'm not saying Rowling made this exact argument directly herself. She was just a convenient segue.)

It's not libelous if it's not presented as true. If I write a fictional story about you raping an eight year old that is explicitly presented as fictional, then as much as that may disturb you, you can't do shit.

This does not appear to be correct:

"For example, in 2009, in the “Red Hat Club” case, the plaintiff was awarded $100,000 in damages by a Georgia court for a fictional portrayal modeled on her. The “original” claimed that her fictional counterpart, falsely depicted in the bestselling novel as a sexually promiscuous alcoholic who drank on the job, defamed her. From a libel defense perspective, this drawn-from-life portrayal failed, in part, because the author included personal characteristics that made the plaintiff recognizable, and mixed them with other traits that were false and defamatory, but, still believable."

If you can successfully sue because you were portrayed as a slutty drunk in a work of fiction based on you, I suspect you may be able to sue for being portrayed as a child rapist.

It's not a slam dunk, and often fails, depending on how closely the fictional version is recognizable to the original, but it does appear that you can indeed "do shit."

Fair. I'd be interested in seeing what some sort of disclaimer specifically targeting this achieves though, something like "X is quite obviously not a child rapist. There is no evidence that X is actually a child rapist nor is it believable based on all known information about them that they could be one." etc.

I mean, that's one case. There's also this meme about Glenn Beck and the guy who registered a domain for it won his case.

Plus, I don't think this can apply to deepfakes. If I write a fictional story about you doing X, then perhaps that can come with some implication that it's some veiled satire suggesting you might actually do it. But if I make a deepfake, I mean it's in the name. It's fake. It is very clearly not you doing it.

Sure it is entirely unclear how it would work with deepfakes if at all. But the deepfake is presumably recognizable as the subject (as that is the entire point) so you could perhaps get away with deepfaking them having sex as this is something they likely do. If you deepfaked them onto child pornography that might trigger something similar. That is highly speculative though. I suspect different courts and jurisdictions will go different ways.

Link to quoted article

A different article says of the same lawsuit:

Thursday’s legal victory for Stewart [the "victim"] was tempered, however, by a relatively small $100,000 award for damages, with the jury refusing to award her attorneys fees. The cost of litigating the case over the last five years likely exceeded $100,000.

Indeed, hence why it is not a slam dunk, but it is something.

It's not libelous if it's not presented as true. If I write a fictional story about you raping an eight year old that is explicitly presented as fictional, then as much as that may disturb you, you can't do shit.

I could probably sue on the basis that it causes me reputational harm, though my understanding of the law is that I'd have a hard time establishing actual damages.

People are coming up with all kinds of other scenarios, about Photoshopping a dick into someone's mouth or creating a deepfake of someone being raped and tortured, and not all of those things are illegal. I don't necessarily agree that none of them should be.

I'm in favor of enabling subjects of deepfakes to issue takedown demands, though enforcement will be very impractical in practice.

This is random pseudo-macho posturing that's irrelevant to the argument. But yeah in any case I will definitely take my chances with your average weak modern Reddit heckin' dad versus the state.

It's not macho posturing - I said you should keep your sexual fantasies about your neighbor's underage daughter to yourself and not share them with her or her father, and your response is "Nuh uh, it's not illegal!" I mean, sure, not everything that is wrong and unethical is illegal, and you certainly can go around telling everyone about your sexual fantasies. Reverting to "It's not illegal" when discussing ethics is a dodge.

I mean, as the link shows you, many actual HP fanfiction authors disagree.

No, they think she was trying to impose conditions they didn't like. Also, that link is four years old and references events going back much further, in the early days of online fan fiction.

The vast amount of HP fan fiction that Rowling has tacitly (and in some cases, explicitly) approved disproves your entire argument.

Many people also disagree that Diane Feinstein is opposed to guns (after all, you can disagree with her wanting to impose conditions on them, but that doesn't make her opposed to them, right?).

I actually doubt that many people disagree with that. But if you said "Diane Feinstein wants all guns to be illegal for everyone, period," that's a claim that may or may not be true (who knows what she really believes?) but it's not supported by any actual words or policies from her. If you said "She wants heavy restrictions on guns," that's obviously true. But "JK Rowling opposes certain kinds of fan fiction in certain contexts" is not the same as "JK Rowling is anti-fan fiction." It's not even a good parallel with your Feinstein analogy.

Again, I'm talking explicitly about the "You can't write a sex story about Hermione, because when people think of Hermione they think of Emma Watson's image, and Emma Watson didn't consent to have her image in your sex fantasies." argument I've seen about erotic HP fanfiction.

That's more an ethical argument than a legal one. Emma Watson would not have legal standing to demand that erotic fiction about Hermione (or about Emma Watson - RPF exists) be removed. But Rowling could demand that the former (though not the latter) be taken down, on the basis that fan fiction is, as I said, at least currently considered an IP violation, though this hasn't really been tested in court.

I could probably sue on the basis that it causes me reputational harm

How would it cause you reputational harm? If anything you'd be the victim of malicious fiction, and victimhood is a reputational benefit nowadays.

I don't necessarily agree that none of them should be.

Well I disagree. Fiction is fiction and thus automatically possesses a rightful presumption of being implicitly harmless (as it is, quite literally, unlike most important harms, not tangibly real) absent a more pressing justification than someone's discomfort over their depiction, whether it's because it's extra realistic looking (but again, still not actually tangibly real) or not.

I mean this is of course speaking in terms of abstract ideal legal policy. Strategically speaking, if you want to make deepfakes illegal in any sense and force those who want to see fake Pokimane or fake Emma Watson getting railed into the depths of the darknet where stuff like child porn also circulates, thus strengthening the entire enterprise of private and anonymous content contribution opposing the unjust power of the modern digital hegemony, then that's probably a win for people like me.

I said you should keep your sexual fantasies about your neighbor's underage daughter to yourself and not share them with her or her father, and your response is "Nuh uh, it's not illegal!"

Uhh no. My response actually was:

Maybe it becomes their business but that doesn't imply any obligation for the state to do anything on their behalf.

"Maybe it becomes their business" doesn't in any sense imply some overall objection to the principle of generally keeping such things to yourself on etiquette/behavioral grounds, and simply advancing the viewpoint that a certain behavior is not a concern of any formal power is not some blanket approval of it as ideal behavior in all contexts (many such cases of people unfortunately believing the opposite nowadays though). "That doesn't imply any obligation for the state to do anything on their behalf" is in fact some of the weakest commentary on a behavior you can give, other than again through the flawed modern lens that so frequently crops up where if you're not advocating calling the SWAT team in on something then you must be its biggest cheerleader or at least trying to excuse it.

Reverting to "It's not illegal" when discussing ethics is a dodge.

But we're not just discussing only ethics, unless the only compulsion you're advocating for being behind those takedown requests is that it'd be the right thing to do.

No, they think she was trying to impose conditions they didn't like.

And the Reddit admins were only trying to impose conditions on your subreddit that you didn't like.

Also, that link is four years old and references events going back much further, in the early days of online fan fiction.

And? My whole original point is that JKR was criticized for opposing fanfiction primarily in the past.

(Anyway I'm just going to ignore the rest of the stuff about whether it's reasonable to say that JKR opposes or ever opposed fanfiction or not since it's completely tangential and I'm not in an autistic enough mood today (which is not to say I never am) to dive into this conversation spiraling into dozens of tendrils of barely relevant side disputes (and I'm not saying you were the only one engaging in this up until this point by any means).)

That's more an ethical argument than a legal one.

Yes. And it's a bad one in my view. And it's similarly a bad one for Emma Watson/Hermione deepfakes too.

But Rowling could demand that the former (though not the latter) be taken down, on the basis that fan fiction is, as I said, at least currently considered an IP violation, though this hasn't really been tested in court.

And I also oppose this, though debating the validity IP law is mostly again a whole other subject.

Again, to me, the central dispute is whether openly, explicitly fictional content (again, if it's lying about being fictional, then that gets into the realm of fraud which is a whole other matter) should be prohibited because it makes its subjects uncomfortable or feel "violated" or however it's formulated (as I'm not seeing any other real justifications being advanced). I say no.