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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Should 'deepfakes' be illegal because of these potential moral/ethical concerns? Should the act of making a deepfake be illegal, or just distributing it?

The fact that this is even a debate kind of sickens me. Only in this fallen modern era would it even be a question whether or not the discomfort of primarily women (which has been elevated in the current era not according to any reason but only according to an emotional hysteria, driven primarily by the same women who benefit from it (or at least feel compelled to use it to pathologically seek power that they can't even healthily enjoy as an expression of sadistic bitterness over the modern widespread weakness and hence unattractiveness of the opposite sex) and their male followers ("simps") who have often become so emasculated that they no longer even try to conceive much of a path to earning the favor of such women other than by slavishly obeying them for temporary headpats, that has amplified itself almost into a religious fervor) and their investment in the "sanctity" of their image (obviously highly debatable given how many of them choose to present themselves) takes precedence over the basic rights to freedom of expression, freedom to fantasize, freedom to create, etc.

The answer is obviously no. There is nothing about deepfaking that is categorically different from writing stories about someone, drawing/painting them (and even before the recent AI explosion, some people could make remarkably photorealistic artwork), Photoshopping (which has been possible for decades) their head on to someone else's body (and it's worth noting that modern deepfakes are essentially as primitive, just in motion, as the most used method at the moment just involves finding a video of someone with a body that is hopefully somewhat of a plausible match for the desired face and then inserting that face on to it, again just in motion), etc., and hopefully there is still a general agreement (not saying this to build consensus, just expressing what I have only ever been aware of the general consensus in the modern era always having been) that anyone who wants to use the state monopoly on force against people who do these things because the subjects of them might be made *uncomfortable* is a totalitarian lunatic. (I remember that before JK Rowling was a villain for opposing alternative sex lifestyle roleplaying (not a sneer, just my attempt to more accurately describe the phenomenon of "transsexualism"), she was a villain to some for vociferously opposing Harry Potter fanfiction, with the argument that Harry Potter sex stories for example would violate the rights of its movies' young actors by likely imposing their images on scenarios they didn't consent to being widely mocked.)

The whole "deepfaking" controversy is just using slightly new technology to launder into the public discourse the same old big brother bullshit that's been rightfully rejected many times before, except they may yet succeed this time (with "yet" being relative, as it's actually already illegal in a few states) because the rational faculties of their targets have been so broadly degraded and their discourse so thoroughly poisoned with mindless, kneejerk reactionary (which I've, ironically enough, almost always found those who are the most anti-reactionary in the political sense to be the most in the general sense) feminine emotionalism, safetyism, and exaggerated negative utilitarianism (so long as it's in favor of protecting the right demographics, the most sacred demographics, of course, as obviously this issue would not be one at all were men the primary subjects of discomfort here).

It is also quite ironic that it is mostly the side of people pretending to be highly opposed to/seeking a severe contraction of the carceral state pushing this. This is just more evidence to me of what has seemed obvious from the beginning, that these people are not against harder "crime and punishment" and "law and order" crackdowns than they've ever bemoaned, just against the punishment of particular crimes they associate with their favored client demographics (particularly/only when committed by members of those demographics who are also in good ideological standing, but they can't quite say that so explicitly yet) and the opposite for their disfavored ones. In their ideal world, Kevin gets 20 years of hard time for putting Pokimane's face on Viper Vixxen or whoever (especially if he seems like a "chud", maybe less if he has a history of serving the regime loyally, in which case he may get to lessen his penalty via subjecting himself to a routine of humiliation and self-criticism), but Tyrone gets therapy and cookies for stabbing him to death. (And does anyone want to bet how much they'd push for women to get punished for deepfaking Bieber or the BTS boys? Of course most men are still not invested enough in their egos to be incapable of separating fiction from reality, so they're unlikely to care anyway.)

If they were really against the worst excesses of modern surveillance authoritarianism as they claim, the last thing they would do is try to invent a fifth horseman of the infocalypse to give glowies and spooks yet another reason to treat any bit flowing through any digital system as a possible if not likely piece of illegal contraband on the run, "justifying" even more invasions of technological/digital freedom and privacy. But this is again because they're not actually against hammers as they claim, only against them being used on certain nails. This is after all the side that invented the "No bad tactics, only bad targets" mantra.

I think part of this is because so many have forgotten what rights are, or at least what they should be in practice, that is how they should function. They have fallen into the trap of, because "rights = good", consequently thinking that rights can only protect fundamentally also 100% good, squeaky clean, Reddit-certified Wholesome™ Mr. Rogers behavior (or at least what they see as that through their ideological lens), or at least not what they see as its opposite, which is how nonsense like "Hate speech isn't free speech." spreads even though such a statement is blatantly contradictory on its most basic semantic level. In actuality, as a loose heuristic, rights are more appropriately understood as restrictions on power (as they are formulated in the US Bill of Rights for example).

Rights are rules where giving authorities the power to violate them would likely make those authorities shittier and more prone to causing problems/hurting more people than whatever problems they could solve by violating them. Rights are when giving authorities the right to search anyone's asshole at any time is worse than whatever people are smuggling in their assholes, thus we say "no searching assholes except in very strict, limited, and justified circumstances", thus "people have a general right not to have their assholes probed for contraband." This isn't based on any determination that most of what anyone is smuggling inside their asshole is any good; indeed most people who have to smuggle things in their asshole probably aren't smuggling much nice (depending on your stance on drug use anyway, though I'd say at least fentanyl which is probably a very common asshole passenger nowadays is close to objectively evil).

So to tie it back to deepfaking, the choice comes down to preventing women from occasionally feeling uncomfortable about fiction about themselves vs. trying to protect what's left of the chastity of all of our digital, informational, expressional, and private assholes. Again, I think only in modern femworld would this even be considered a choice worth pondering for more than a second.

Women's feelings are not god. They don't even warrant being taken that seriously in many cases (to be fair the same is also true of men, though not as often I don't think). That's really all that needs to be said about it. Sorry you're uncomfortable ladies, but that doesn't mean that the entire boot increasingly stamping the human face for what seems increasingly like it might be forever needs to be at your beck and call. (Of course me or anyone else saying this will accomplish nothing at least in the short term, but the decay of society cannot be reversed until these ideas are fully absorbed by modern men.)

People find you attractive, including those whose attraction you might not reciprocate, which you know because even if your content is "SFW" you've built your whole career on it (and you've never objected to it when they were giving you money, which is also part of the issue here, as this style of deepfakes has been around for years but now many of these creators have Fanslys etc. and are making money off of them), among other things (like at least 70% of the reasonably attractive ones not infrequently walking around in public half naked nowadays). Get over it.

(I remember that before JK Rowling was a villain for opposing alternative sex lifestyle roleplaying (not a sneer, just my attempt to more accurately describe the phenomenon of "transsexualism"), she was a villain to some for vociferously opposing Harry Potter fanfiction, with the argument that Harry Potter sex stories for example would violate the rights of its movies' young actors by likely imposing their images on scenarios they didn't consent to being widely mocked.)

You remember incorrectly. Rowling never opposed Harry Potter fan fiction, and in fact is one of the more pro-fan fiction authors out there. She did object to porn fics being available on sites predominantly visited by young fans, but afaik never took any kind of legal action.

As for your rant about deepfakes, I don't think they should be illegal, per se (I think specifically using them to perpetrate fraud or damage someone's reputation is, at the very least, cause for a civil action), but I also think people are entitled to demand sites remove deepfakes of themselves. Like, if you want to create your own personal wank material with Emma Watson, or your neighbor's daughter, keep it to yourself. What's in your head (or on your hard drive) is nobody else's business. 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).

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.

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