banned
FtttG
7mo ago
Since you asked for modern works, a world without the film Tár would be poorer than one with it.
To me, it seems like it's useful to have that stuff around, just as a canary test that free speech is really working.
Of course, I'm not calling for creepy fetish art to be banned. Just like "hate speech" - I think that people yelling racial slurs makes our culture slightly worse, but I'm not calling for them to be banned.
FtttG
7mo ago
therefore a pornographic painting is no worse off than a landscape, a still life, etc.
I can imagine an erotic or even pornographic artwork which enriches human culture, if only marginally. Heck, I don't need to imagine: Klimt's The Kiss (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)) was attacked as pornographic in his lifetime, and it's one of the most iconic portrayals of intimacy the twentieth century has given us. Alan Moore's From Hell depicts sexuality and prostitution very explicitly, and it's my favourite of his works (and I think superior to Watchmen). Lolita was banned in many countries, but remains a masterpiece. It's been a long time since I saw Antichrist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist_(film)) and, while I don't think the film couldn't have done without the unsimulated sex scenes, I still think it's an impressively disquieting and thought-provoking film. There are many erotic, even pornographic, works of art which I will defend and which I really do believe have enriched human culture in ways great or small.
I just don't think the category of "creepy fetish art depicting non-human characters made for perverts on commission, and for whom the creator feels his livelihood is threatened by the advent of Stable Diffusion" contains any such works - I think 100% of works in this category had either no impact on human culture, or a negative impact. And I have no reason to expect this state of affairs to change at any time in the immediate future.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Interesting post, but I am reminded of how revolting and deleterious I find continental philosophy. Sure, they sometimes stumble upon true and interesting statements - perhaps even quite often, like a blind chicken, granted the leisure to peck at the yard all day because the farmer will spoonfeed it three times a day anyway, finding a good number of grains - but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence, hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out. Take, for example, the argument about incest towards the end. Stripped of its whoa-dude lingo, what's left of it seems to be some argument along the lines of:
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Marriage restrictions serve the point of creating the framing conditions for an economy where fathers sell off their daughters in return for other spoils. Sure, nothing wrong with that, because creating arbitrary systems of rules is cool in my books.
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However, you don't need to ban mother-son incest to enable the above economy!
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Some people say that there might be other reasons why incest is banned, such as biology. But that's nonsense! Farmers inbreed their plants and lifestock all the time, so how can it be bad?
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Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest. It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.
Disassembled in this way, the argument is clearly lazy and stupid. Human communities differ from the charges of a farmer in relevant ways - a farmer can breed 99 unviable monstrosities that he will promptly cull and 1 sort of viable semi-monstrosity with a desirable trait that can then be isolated in subsequent generations. The semi-monstrosity does not need to be healthy or fend for itself, because the farmer can just coddle and feed it until it is old enough to be crossbred with a healthier specimen in the hope of selectively getting rid of the deleterious traits only, at negligible cost to the farmer; neither the culling nor the coddling of the mutant impose any cost on the community of other farm animals/plants, because they don't really have a community or obligation to look out for each other; and neither of them will meaningfully resist their culling, introducing the choice between violence and dysgenic load, because the farmer is presumed to have an effective monopoly on violence.
This is not a particularly difficult counterargument to the counterargument to stumble upon. Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom that the lowly students must compete with each other to understand, which a Continental Philosopher is supposed to project; and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something. Maybe some other student could help him out by writing a longer Lacanian tract expounding on how he doesn't get it. Who would side with some beta nitpicker over the chad sage who has his own (surname)-ian adjective as a lemma in the Collins English Dictionary?
If the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art?
I have little doubt that the Eisenmans of the world would go for this if they could get away with it.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7mo ago
Seeing as how Functor is getting banned and won't be able to provide any evidence, I'd like to share this report which provides evidence for his claims: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-directive-kidnap-hamas-gaza-hostages-idf/104224430
The ABC is a major, mainstream media organisation and this reporting includes quotes from multiple Israeli news sources as well. He's straightforwardly correct when he says "got blasted by the IDF who started firing indiscriminantly" and this is the view of multiple Israelis, not just internet nazis. To be perfectly honest I find it a bit ironic, given that when functor said "is unfortunate but the civilian casualty rate was still well under what many other military operations have." he was actually trying to defend the IDF - only to get accused of hating jews and siding with Hamas even as he tried to defend their actions while stating a view which seems to be common knowledge among Israelis themselves.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7mo ago
"Drugged out hippies" is unnecessarily inflammatory and derogatory, and while you can feel how you feel about your outgroup, you need to inject some civility into how you describe people, whether you feel civil towards them or not.
"Got blasted by the IDF" is a claim that contradicts pretty much all reporting (and my own lying eyes, since I saw the videos) on the events at the Nova music festival. I'm aware there are claims that civilians were accidentally killed by the IDF on October 7, and probably this did happen, but your description is such an extraordinary and inflammatory claim that the requirement to Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be applies here.
Generally, your participation in this thread is bad. It's bad because once again you can't contain your hatred of Jews, which leads you to write inflammatory polemics that contribute nothing but seething and spittle.
Because hating Jews and siding with Hamas is not against the rules, we've given you a lot of slack, but you still do not get to write posts about how your enemies have it coming as you make up fictional narratives, and you have been warned before and last time you were told you'd start earning tempbans.
Banned for three days. When you come back, if you want to write Israel Delenda Est posts, you need to put more effort and a lot more civility into them.
hydroacetylene
7mo ago
I think it's a successor to dominionist, a stance held by an extremely small number of protestant theologians in ultra-fundamentalist churches that thought the law code spelled out in the bible, judicially, for ancient Israel was binding today, but in practice mostly used as a slur for anyone who didn't jump in whatever progressive bandwagon rolled out. The idea that 'American' is a thing with defining characteristics- any of them- pushes leftist berserk buttons like nothing else, the twitter democrats dominate their messaging, and so add it together.
but c'mon people, this is not representative of the mainstream of Christianity in the US, even in the most Christian parts, which are Baptists who come from a long tradition of church-state separators.
Baptists don't like an establishment of religion because of the 'establishment' thing- it's too much of an institutional church. Requiring a religious test is a part of baptist history; in America before the supreme court banned them baptists often supported laws which required elected officials to be protestant. Today I suspect a 'Christian nationalist' law would ban Muslims/Hindus/atheists from office and require assent to the divinity of Jesus and maybe some Christian moral ideas.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Right, well, moderation compounds. If in two weeks you were to ban somebody else for making posts like this, maybe the user you just banned would be there to complain that you are being too harsh.
If providing a home for it was not the goal, the sneering and blatant culture-warring from the forum's right edge should have been contained much more relentlessly from the outset. Now that they have numbers and precedent on their side, it's natural that belated attempts to moderate this behaviour away will result in defiant "community sentiment". I'm sorry that I'm joining in on making your life hard, but I see no better way to level the incentive landscape.
ulyssessword
7mo ago
Don't laugh, it's already happening in other countries.
I'm not laughing, because it's happening here in Canada.
The federal government banned free news posts on large websites (literally just Facebook and Google). Facebook decided it didn't want to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to host paid links, so it chose to not be a Digital News Intermediary under the new regime and was therefore required to block all news links. Google negotiated an exemption for itself in exchange for $100M/yr paid to the Canadian Journalism Collective, so there are literally zero companies covered by the Online News Act.
The end result? News as a whole is worse in Canada, with smaller outlets (particularly ones that won't get funding from the CJC) hit the hardest.
They had the gall to complain about Facebook harming Canadian journalism by "not paying their fair share" and "unfairly profiting". Now that Facebook is drawing zero profit and their fair share is consequently zero, the journalists are still complaining about how harmful the ban has been. Of course, they blame Facebook for following the regulations rather than the Federal government for creating them.
Ideally, journalists would even receive state funding to spread regime propaganda more directly, removing the need for subscribers at all.
Yup: "(8)...the groups wants 70% of news costs paid for government or through government regulation." If that had actually occurred, then Canadian journalists would barely have had to provide anything, nevermind anything of real value.
News organizations absolutely want to regulate business which is one of the reasons they are in the bag for Harris. Regulatory capture is a godsend to corrupt, dying companies.
Legacy media's dream is to get X banned before it completely replaces them. Ideally, journalists would even receive state funding to spread regime propaganda more directly, removing the need for subscribers at all. Don't laugh, it's already happening in other countries.
They want more regulation and government interference, not less.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I’m personally a bit skeptical of the idea of stolen elections. I said so before. My concern is that if all discussion of the idea is banned, that this will be seen as confirmation of the truth of a conspiracy to steal an election. There’s a danger in my mind that doing so and potentially convincing people that the government is suppressing the discussion because the theory must be true.
I think you're misunderstanding the point I'm making. I'm not saying "disgusting fetish art isn't part of human culture": of course it is. I said that human culture isn't enriched by this content. It isn't a net-positive contribution to human culture: it's one of those parts of human culture that we are (or should be) profoundly ashamed of, like child abuse, drug addiction, or pizza with peas and mayonnaise.
I am 100% willing to plant my flag in the earth and say that human culture is worse off as a result of the existence of creepy fetish art, child porn, depraved erotica in the tradition of de Sade etc. Not calling for it to be banned or censored (except for child porn involving literal children, which is already illegal per age of consent legislation), just saying that it makes our culture worse. All things being equal, a culture or subculture which celebrates disgusting fetish art is worse than a culture which doesn't.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Do you really think that a person's private motivations for being in favour of/opposed to X are identical to their publicly stated motivations more often than not? At every point on the political spectrum?
Well, it gets very complicated. People can be unaware of their own motivations, they can believe one thing for multiple different reasons, they can tell half-truths, they can believe something one day and not believe it the next.
I would just say that, as a general methodological principle, one should start by trying to find where the authentic principled disagreements are, rather than immediately jumping to cynical conclusions.
If AI visual art was banned but AI voice acting was seen as fair game, it's only a matter of time before lots of people start noticing that this seems kind of arbitrary and unfair.
Sure. But this isn't a psychologically realistic model of AI detractors. I assure you that the people who feel passionately about AI visual art feel equally passionately about voice acting.
It's interesting that, as fevered as the opposition to AI art is today, it's nowhere near as hysterical as the kind of Luddism of previous generations. I read an article once that when the player piano was invented, a prominent musician wrote an article calling for it to be banned, arguing that if recorded music became the norm, eventually people would stop singing, our vocal cords would atrophy and we would become a mute species. Apparently he meant this quite sincerely.
The best way to understand people on the other side of a culture war issue is to start from the assumption that they really do genuinely believe what they say they believe.
I believe in the virtue of charity, but - come on. Do you really think that a person's private motivations for being in favour of/opposed to X are identical to their publicly stated motivations more often than not? At every point on the political spectrum?
Also, people who have objections to AI painting also tend to have objections to AI music and AI voice acting, even if those areas don't overlap with their personal skill set. Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.
Alternatively, they believe (correctly, in my view) that generative AI is a war with multiple fronts, and if you want to win a war you have to win it on all of these fronts lest you fall victim to a rearguard action down the line. If AI visual art was banned but AI voice acting was seen as fair game, it's only a matter of time before lots of people start noticing that this seems kind of arbitrary and unfair.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
I have noticed. A lot of hobby spaces have actually banned AI art, and if it's not banned, it's treated with extreme disdain. Any boardgame publisher caught using AI art, for example, gets a social media pile-on. It's a big deal in RPG and self-publishing (where authors and publishers operating on a shoestring obviously find it very tempting to cut costs with AI art). A few traditional publishers have caught flak for using AI art on their covers.
As a bit of an AI enthusiast (I even bought a chunkier GPU for Stable Diffusion), I obviously do not buy the "unethical" argument, but this has become kind of like "Actually, I think racial IQ differences might be real" - not something I can talk about openly with a lot of my circle.
There are a lot of anti-AI arguments, and the ethical/copyright issues are ambiguous, but the bottom line is that artists are, rightfully, afraid of being replaced by a machine. When they complain about how AIs were trained "unethically", ask them if the algorithms improve so much that an AI can be trained entirely on open source or public domain artwork (there have been some efforts to create so-called "ethical" AI models) and produce equivalent results, if they'd be okay with that? They will usually hem and haw and hope that doesn't happen.
I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you. High end artists will still have jobs, and AI can't really do competent composition or graphic design or a series of pictures with a consistent theme (yet), but the DeviantArt and ArtStation kids are getting hungry and desperate.
It ultimately boils down to money, and they are trying to make it a moral crusade to preserve their livelihood. It is only the threat of being dragged on social media that's preventing more publishers and companies from using AI art, and as AI art gets better and less easily detectable, and more widely accepted, that will change.
I will say that a lot of AI art is just lazy. Like, if you just give a prompt, run 50 iterations, take the best one, and slap it on your cover, it's still probably not going to look very good and it will look like obvious AI generation. Even for my hobby art I do some photoshopping and have learned enough composition to blend elements together - it might still be detectable, but it doesn't just scream "AI." (Then again, I'm not generating anime waifus or furry porn, which is like 90% of AI art as far as I can tell.)
This is coming to other industries as well. Audiobooks, for example, are now pretty lucrative for most authors, and AI voices are becoming nearly as good as human voice actors - and human voice actors are expensive. For self-published authors, it's a no-brainer economically, so narrators and readers are doing their best to make it morally unacceptable to use AI. If the disapprobation fails to kill sales, that entire niche is going to be dead.
It will be some time before AI can replace a lot of other industries, but low-end software development, customer service, and other industries are already being affected. This is what the artists are fighting - not subjective esoteric notions of whether AI art has "soul" or qualifies as "good art."
Botond173
8mo ago
Since the poster is banned and thus cannot respond, I'll ask the question here: what failures in East Hastings and Kensington is he(?) referring to? What is the significance of these places, wherever they are?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
Everyone loves a nice hot dump on progressives. It's practically the easy-mode for scoring upvotes.
You still need to actually be making an argument or saying something factual and defensible. This post is just pure boo-lighting with a bunch of uncharitable straw men. Do you think any progressive would agree with your characterization of what they believe and what their real motives are? It's one thing to argue that "This is the end result of their policies," it's another to argue "Actually, progressives are all zombie idiots with a worldview that says crime doesn't exist and minorities only ever do bad things because they are oppressed."
If this was a one-off, I'd chide you for weakmanning and ask you to put more effort into your inveighing against progressives in the future. But this isn't a one-off. You have a long, bad history of this sort of post, and being told to stop it.
You actually have a couple of notes to the effect of "last warning, permaban next time." Somehow you skated in the past, and then you went and earned a couple of AAQCs.
You seem to be able to post interesting things when you aren't choking on bile about your outgroup. We would like you to focus on your strengths. By that I do not mean "entertaining rants about how your outgroup is pure stupid evil."
Banned for 2 weeks, and next time will be a permaban.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Some previous discussion here, second header.
The steelman is that StarLink was genuinely new technology at the time, and dependent on a number of other downstream systems that were in turn new technology -- if you cut this chart at late 2021 numbers, a lot of people would not guess remotely accurately the later ones. But given that Starlink has, as far as I can tell, completed the requirements now, still before the actual time target, and that awards to 'settled' technologies aren't always retracted even after a due date has come and gone, it's not a terribly strong steelman.
((By contrast, the EEOC-SpaceX lawsuit is probably politically motivated, but the underlying principle that some types of legal residents are not banned from access to ITAR-covered materials predates the Biden administration. So it might not be politically motivated, albeit unlikely.))
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is nice I guess, though experience shows me that "fixing" other civilization often results in the death of the one being fixed, or in making it much, much worse.
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You imply Earth is their garden? How comes if they never been here before?
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Only if you happen to be very close exactly at the time it's tested, and open tests have been banned a while ago, very unlikely
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That would be weird. It doesn't allow one to neither physically join any galactic communities nor even communicate with them meaningfully, why would that be a threshold? I'd expect if not FTL transport/communication than at least Expanse-style long range propulsion that makes at least populating the Solar system possible. Without it, the only think nukes allow us is hurt ourselves really badly. That's not a good criteria to join anything but an extreme introvert BSDM club.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
In the case of Hlynka, his rule-breaking posts were generally highly visible, and usually when he broke the rules he did it with gusto. He simply was not willing to abide the rules, so eventually he ran out of second chances and was banned. I don't think him having a "fan-club" of reporters mattered much one way or the other.
jkf
8mo ago
"He was banned because the (actual) Nazis followed him closely and reported every faux pas" is the argument you're running with now?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
8mo ago
Why are small tactical nukes banned by treaty, while large strategic nukes are allowed?
Tactical nukes are not banned by treaty.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
She was not banned, and while I feel bad that she decided to leave, she was not "chased away." Like Hlynka, she was told over and over again that the rules still apply to her even if we like her, and she decided that was intolerable. It was too important to her to say exactly what she wanted to say exactly how she wanted to say it.
BahRamYou
8mo ago
You need to think about this more deeply, not just reduce it to a single number like a highschool physics problem.
Why are small tactical nukes banned by treaty, while large strategic nukes are allowed? Why is a 1kT nuke more dangerous than a megaton? Because the smaller ones would get used. At least with the larger ones, we have a chance at achieving a balance of terror and never using them. But it's a dangerous, slippery slope to start messing around with the bottom edge of that scale. And like you mentioned "ground-penetrating rather than an airburst" so it's a lot more dangerous than a nuke of the same yield would be.
Think about this from the Russian perspective.
"Marshall, we have a big problem."
"What is it, comrade?"
"Radar shows a huge incoming wave of American missiles coming from outer space! They'll arrive in 10 minutes!"
"What!? Are they nuking us?"
"There's no way to tell! It looks like ICBMs! But they Americans say it's just a conventional weapon."
"Where are they headed?"
"It appears to be targeting all of our underground missile silos."
"Fuck. That's a first strike. ... How long do we have remaining?"
"Five minutes."
"fuck fuck fuck. um. launch."
Degrowth Greens are getting absolutely crazy, easily 10x as radical as any far-right European party. More radical than Putin too.
A (biased) source on what one German Greens thought leader wants to see, noting that it isn't all Greens but a formidable brand of Green thought: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/in-which-a-leading-green-intellectual
New construction banned, train travel rationed, 50 sqm living space per person, meat rationed, end of banking (because money is basically worthless since everything is rationed)... This from an apparently respectable political voice, editor of a newspaper, who basically wants to destroy the Western way of life. These people have influence in the real world, their fellow compatriots get into power and start shutting down nuclear plants for no good reason.
It's in the UK too. Some imbeciles passed a law mandating net zero emissions by 2050. A think tank gave serious thought as to what that would actually look like if we take the laws and climate scientists seriously:
https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/75916920-51f6-4f9c-ade5-52cbf55d5e73/content
TLDR, they conclude that technology is too unreliable, the only path to success is crushing austerity. No air travel for 30 years. No shipping for 30 years. 40% less heating. No meat.
What I find most revealing is the mindset of 'well we don't really have any known methods to get CO2 out of the atmosphere besides planting trees and there's not much space for more trees so let's take a low-risk path to absolute zero, using only known technologies'. And then the low-risk path they propose is shooting yourself in the foot with a 50 cal. No shipping and no air travel ON AN ISLAND? Famine is locked in - they add that 'fertilizer use is greatly reduced'. This mindset is absolutely toxic.
The correct solution to climate change is directly controlling the temperature by releasing sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. At a cost of $5-20 billion per year we can hold temperatures in place or reduce them, even as CO2 levels rise. These people want to destroy industrial civilization over a glorified nothingburger.
And I think Russia might be trying to assist them. These Degrowth Greens can be viewed as purely destructive agents, Stalin's mythic wreckers that were deliberately harming the economy by submitting false instructions or damaging machinery. If you want to induce chaos and dysfunction in Europe, help them out! They might shut down a nuclear plant or commit some other blunder and cause right-thinking people to panic-buy more natural gas or oil (which in a global market will increase Russian income). Russia probably doesn't have much ability to help them and doesn't spend much time doing so but I think it's part of their agenda.
Suffice to say that with no air travel and no shipping, the VDV could probably take over Britain by themselves. Inducing stupidity and self-sabotage in your rivals is usually a good move, even if it hurts you occasionally. Just because Russia exports fossil fuels, it doesn't mean they don't want division and incompetence in their targets. Nuclear power is still the primary threat to their energy exports IMO. Nuclear France produces fewer emissions than 'Green' Germany' per $ of GDP.
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