domain:betonit.substack.com
2rafa
4m ago
When Amy Wax claimed that her father was unduly too critical towards Christians, that wasn't self hateful.
Sure, I agree with this.
How can you build a pressed steel weapon from machined aluminum parts ? I guess it was some sort of AR-15 playing dress up I guesss..
BTW, I think the FG-42 reproductions aren't that extra expensive, $8k or so.
Fix it yourself- It's not rocket science.
Does it misfire with all ammo? If yes, then the hammer isn't striking hard enough. Why isn't it striking hard enough? Is it dirty or clogged with oil or grease from storage?
If it's clogged up, You can take it apart and figure it out for yourself. and get it cleaned up and oiled properly.
It might even be fun if you're into the kind of thing.
No_one
15m ago
Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.
As many as 10-30% of younger generations can't even have sex. Sure they could 'technically' have kids through IVF but the idea itself is sitcom-worthy I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19m ago
There are also strategic uses for reviled and prohibited CSAM.
Political enemy? Put some CP on his computer and arrest him!
Your internet censorship and spying campaign isn't popular? It's needed to fight CP!
Intelligence and security agencies generally are full of pretty sinister figures and they have a lot of temptation to abuse their power. They've done all kinds of crazy chaotic-evil things in the past, injecting people with hallucinogens and plutonium. Weaponizing CP is to be expected.
The major issue here is that people aren't doing things to "help", they're doing it out of a narcissistic desire to defend their mental world view. That is what they really care about, material reality be damned.
They intentionally look away when their "efforts to help" produce the opposite of the their stated intentions and use all their mental prowess to justify their atrocities.
It's almost never that the bad effects couldn't have been reasonably predicted, it's that people actively avoided doing so because it threatened their self conception and world view.
This is a large part of what evil functionally is.
I agree that spreading such pictures around could reasonably be considered bullying and I would be fine for schools to punish it. Even in a university setting this applies.
I would also say that there ought to be different standards to "normal figures" and celebrities, focusing now on adults. Or else you are going to be putting a lot of people in prison for creating and if done in a discord server therefore automatically spreading over discord nudes that look like celebs. Another issue is where you draw the line. For example is a generated picture were it is said to be looking like a celebrity something that is going to qualify? One other facet of this is that celebrities become to an extend the faces of our image of attraction.
On the other hand, even celebrities deserve to not have their reputation be perceived based on the AI model, and someone pretending that such AI generated content represents them. There is also a moral question regarding commercialization that is a bigger issue than a random creating a voice model based on Obama, Scarlet, Trump, etc to play around and spreading it in smaller platforms. Such as the dispute about whether Sam Alatman used Scarlet Joghansson's voice for his AI tool. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/22/scarlett-johansson-sam-altmans-washington-00159507
On Monday night, Scarlett Johansson — who famously voiced an AI in the movie Her — alleged that OpenAI had appropriated her voice without permission for a new AI assistant tool. Altman and OpenAI say the voice belonged to a different actress,
No_one
55m ago
"When Chernobyl reached peak x power during its explosion it was about 350 gigawatts for a fraction of a second. This is 700 gigawatts continuously, right, it's a non-stop Chernobyl going on."
Chernobyl also released radiation from reactions that have taken place in the months before, so it's not really a good approximation of harm that'd be caused by using nuclear saltwater rockets for space launches.
It is, however, in essence similar to Orion launches, and the radiation release there was found to not be particularly bad by the engineers worrying about it. I'm not sure what approaches they used, but if they were using LNTR and got a figure of "may give 1 person cancer" then it's probably not a big deal.
In any case, it's one of those questions that can't be answered without a good simulation.
People say having kids is really hard but i strongly disagree with that. It's pretty easy, your life is just different.
If you're hellbent on travelling and partying then, yes, it's going to be hard, but if you're intending to care for your kids it's pretty easy, especially if your not trying to force them to become something they're not.
I think an issue is that some people don't actually want to have kids and they whine loudly and incessantly, with some other parents jumping on the bandwagon for clout. In my friend group it's 1 person that's actually had a hard time and some of that is self inflicted, and none of us were really aiming to have kids. In reality almost every single parent I know (including myself) are very satisfied with being parents.
Don't let the whine brigade fool you into thinking having kids is some kind of herculan endeavour, it's not.
ace
1hr ago
More bad law, because the computer-generated stuff (like drawings) doesn't have any age at all.
ace
1hr ago
Agreed that unwanted sexual advances can be frightening and quite unpleasant. But this is not that. If I construct porn in your likeness in private and you never learn about it, you can't be a victim. It can't be the creation or existence of the images that harms the girls. No doubt the girls in the story experienced suffering, but you and I don't see eye to eye on whether they should have any recourse beyond social shaming. They're victims in only the loosest literary sense of the word.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
If breaking the nuclear taboo isn't a strategic decision, nothing is.
The only thing Israel would gain from using a nuke over conventional weapons is the strategic value: A sign that they're willing to use nuclear weapons and a threat that the next move would be to cause massive casualties at the attacker's home front.
If anything, this technology pretty much decreases victimization via two means:
-
If AI nudes become widespread and indistinguishable from real ones (and they're close), the danger/penalty/threat of blackmail/etc. of having real nudes leaked becomes basically zero. (Given how much many if not most women in my experience love sending out nudes cavalierly and are only stopped from doing so by concerns about exposure, I believe, if they could think one step ahead of inventing a new form of victimhood to decry in the NYT about this technology, they'd be tithing 10% to its developers.)
-
AI "CSAM" (reverse the first two letters and you have my opinion about this modern newspeak term and its relation to the perfectly fine term CP that didn't need any replacement) holds the potential to completely destroy any markets in or sharing of actual CP, again if it's indistinguishable from it. If it's indistinguishable, then even people who specifically only want the real thing will have to give up, because even they won't be able to tell the difference. It'd be like flooding a drug market with a 100x cheaper to produce version that's indistinguishable from the real thing. You would put the dealers of the original stuff straight out of business, even if there were still a demand for their product on authenticity grounds, because that demand for authenticity can't be satisfied if nobody can determine authenticity.
But this just further reveals the character of the modern woke system of American "law and order" (and those are definitely scare quotes). It's not about actually improving the world, protecting anyone, or anyone's safety; it's about punishing people for being morally impure as considered by the privileged classes.
Pursuant to my second point, with a modest government investment in AI models specifically for the purpose and agentic AIs to spread it around the usual chains of CP distribution, the US government could probably end or at least curtail by 97-98% or so (casual estimation) the genuinely criminal distribution of actual CP by drowning it in mostly if not entirely indistinguishable AI forgeries. No living, breathing, sentient child (or again at least 97-98% less) would ever have to be sex trafficked or exposed by the production of such material again. Those who have already would, much sooner than would occur naturally, have the memories of it buried under hundreds of pounds of dirt of digital disinformation. (It is worth noting that every time somebody is caught with CP featuring a person known to the US government, that person has an opportunity to get payout from the confiscated assets etc. of the convicted, with the most famous "CP stars" sometimes making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of this. So, perversely enough, they may not like this change. Presumably most would be relieved however.)
They can't/won't do this though. Why not? Why because the people who are inclined to like CP might still like the new, AI-generated stuff, or might even think some of it is real, and still masturbate to it. Their filthy little perverted minds will still be free to get off with impunity (if not better than before with a state-of-the-art government AI pumping out content catering to their every fantasy for them), and that's the real crime here, their corrupt pleasure and satisfaction, even if it harms none, not what happens to real flesh-and-blood children or anybody else.
And it's the same with kids generating nudes of their schoolmates. There's no actual analysis or consideration of the boundaries of freedom of expression, private fantasizing, the balance of rights between people, etc. involved. They're dirty little "incel chuds" or some equivalent, as proven by the fact that they've done something to offend a female, and that's it. (And of course the likely general unattractiveness of the nerdy guys who have adopted AI technology for fake nudification this early is a major factor. If it had been only attractive guys found with this technology, there would be no NYT article. As usual and again, it's not about principles, it's about the fact that, as the famous graph shows, many if not most women are statistically illiterate (or at least in this particular area) and thus consider 80% of men to be below average and therefore unworthy of the baseline of respect and consideration. Thus the fact that these men have sexual urges at all is an abomination to women, something to be policed as forcibly as is necessary (unless money can be made from them on OF).)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Well thats because most people are not hard consequentialists.
Neither am I. None of my reasoning is based on consequences. At most, they're a signal that should have told you that you're going too far.
And if you think about that makes sense. If i just want to honestly help Jews then there is some set of information that can persuade me I am not helping. If i mean to kill the Jews then that avenue is closed.
Neither of those things is true. Plenty of "well-intentioned" people axiomatically reject the possibility of being wrong. They view everything through the lens of their ideology, and nothing you say to them will make them reconsider. OTOH there are people motivated by hate, who are open to changing their mind (see: that dude befriending KKK members).
EvanTh
3hr ago
Truck Insurance Exchange v. Kaiser Gypsum Co.
8-0. (Yes, eight. Alito recused himself.)
Apparently it's unclear why, or at least I haven't been able to find out why in a little websearching. But the best guess from Twitter is that Alito owns stock in one of the litigating companies.
Tomato
3hr ago
There are no victims
Whether or not they’re victims in a strict legal sense the girls are clearly victims here.
More generally I feel like men wildly underestimate how bad it can feel to be the object of unwanted, intrusive sexual desire/advances due to “men be horny” type attitudes. I spent most of my life rolling my eyes and thinking “how bad can it be to be DESIRED” but over the years I acquired a few stalkers and have had a few women make aggressive and clearly unwanted sexual advances. It actually feels pretty shitty and occupies a lot of your idle thinking. It makes you feel guilty! Like you did something wrong. And this was the mildest stuff imaginable. Having my peers make (even fake) nudes of me would be insanely, ridiculously disturbing and cause legitimate anguish.
aichanuwu
3hr ago
tldr: multiracial universal conscription and shameless racialization.
Singaporean integration is facilitated by brute-forcing an overculture onto disparate local cultures extant at time of independence.It was difficult enough to bend the Cantonese to the Hokkiens or Gujus to Tamil, much less Malays to Chinese. The solution was twofold: a nebulous banner of Singaporeaness with instrumental rewards as carrots and massive punishments as sticks to 'encourage' cooperation in the project. It helped that technocratic leadership successfully delivered economic growth and visually tangible projects at multiple stages within each generation, mollifying dissent that could from failure.
Carrots and sticks are fairly well understood, but what is this overculture and how does one participate in it? @Preformancepretension is correct in identifying housing and conscription as key ingredients in forcing mixing of races, but these would have been resisted if negative effects cropped up, since people could still malinger, buy private property or emigrate, but more importantly if the benefits were not available to all. Malays were initially excluded from conscription due to (extant) fears that Malay muslim solidarity would result in a fifth column should military conflict arise. Racial tensions started lowering slightly once Malays were conscripted as well, with all men basically understanding the suck is common regardless of skin. The advantage of Malay conscription is that it improved their economic prospects, for employers were worried about uneven Malay workforce participation due to the possibility of them being conscripted in future since the State had not actually forbidden malays from conscription, only not conscripted them. Once the fruits of economic progress were available to Malays as well, racial animus from Malays visibly diminished.
(Private property is a totally different ball game but minor compared to HDB flats so I'll ignore private for now) Housing in Singapore is also slightly unique in that it is not only the residences that are ethnically heterogenized, but also hawker centers and to a lesser extent shop lots, as kong as the two are administered by Town Councils. Hawker centers are ridiculously underpriced for their food quality, with each center having a mix of Chinese, Indian and Malay food. They are always full of all races eating in common spaces and eating each others food. It is impossible to maintain racial ignorance when seeing other races every day visibly in normal circumstances.
Nevertheless, the beast of disparate impact that plagues the West raises its ugly head, so how does Singapore solve it? Basically by making the Malays policemen. Most Malays are conscripted into police and civil defense, so they are the ones who respond to incidents the most, and they therefore have firsthand view of the problems within their community. You cannot have a racial firebrand complain about uneven policing when the family members themselves see for themselves what happens. When the Malays themselves acknowledge the extant issues their culture faces, the room for racialized dissent from leaders. Extremely aggressive laws help too, of course.
In the end, what does this mean for the west? Very little unfortunately. Public housing exists in Singapore because there is no plot of undeveloped land just beyond the city people can escape to even if they wanted to. Conscription exists and is supported because of technocratic leadership, existential extant threats just across the border and universal participation. Food works because all local palettes are fine with each others food. You can't have any of these in the West. Land is too available, conscription exclusions will be exploited to the hilt, low cost food in the west sucks and has no ethnic heterogeneity. If I were conscripted in the German military I would wonder why I'm learning to die in a ditch while migrants get to come in freely and will likely be a fifth column against me and my kin.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
3hr ago
because Bubba was told that they will eject the bolt in your face
Translation: they will eject the bolt into your face if you're stupid like Bubba.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I'm certainly not trying to claim a special genius or anything - on the contrary, I think the implication that being Blue Tribe is desirable or preferable to being Red Tribe is probably just prejudice or tribal bigotry. I'm just trying to be honest about being firstly a believer and secondly from a stereotyically Blue Tribe background.
As for the other half, I'm not particularly inclined to debate theism with you in this moment. If you're an atheist, well, good for you, I suppose? I disagree, and would gently suggest that if you think that atheism is so obvious that any halfway intelligent person should immediately conclude it's true, you might benefit from a little bit more intellectual humility. I'm not going to argue that theism in general or Christianity specifically is definitely true, but I would suggest that a sufficient number of undeniably intelligent and introspective people have believed that you shouldn't be surprised. Again, theism might be untrue, but it is not so obviously untrue that any intelligent and reflective person would automatically realise that. There are too many intelligent theists out there for it to be so.
jkf
3hr ago
If you just extend your grasp to include 'straight pull battle rifles' you just need to add Swiss, Austrian + a Ross as I recall -- Rosses are really neat and go cheap because Bubba was told that they will eject the bolt in your face. (not particularly true)
jkf
3hr ago
What were you using for ammo? If it was anywhere near in the ballpark of the age of the Luger, I'd look there first -- especially if as you mention 'hangfire'.
Other than that maybe the firing pin is clogged with strudel or something? This could cause a misfire but not a hangfire -- not exactly sure how this runs on a Luger, but cleaning the century's worth of gunk out of the bolt would be DIYable. Quite unlikely that there's anything broke that would require a gunsmith unless there's a very unusual amount of miles on the thing.
Stellula
4hr ago
He was brilliant at reddit and twitter, but he looks like a clown on stream.
He literally covered himself in bandaids, put on a fake cast, and played a "flatline" sound effect in the background. If he looks like a clown, I think that was on purpose.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
4hr ago
Tradcath integralism? But I suppose Fuentism is a sub branch of that.
Where on earth did you get that figure, presuming you mean they're physically incapable of doing so?
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