quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Since I was using a new IP and MAC Gmail asked for an extra security check
Wait, how would GMail know your MAC? IMHO, their server should not have access to that. Nor should your browser tell them the MAC of your device. Of course, some proprietary spyware app from them could extract your MAC and sent it to the server, but even then it would be unsuitable for authentication purposes because your device could just lie about it.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Here is a Reuters article titled "Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic".
The article claims that the DoD (under both Trump and Biden) ran a social media disinformation campaign with the goal of convincing people in the Philippines not to take the Chinese COVID vaccine. Per the article, further countries were targeted, with screenshots in Cyrillic and Arabic stating that the Chinese vaccine contained pork gelatin and was thus haram for Muslims.
The article does not provide any independently verifiable conclusive proof for their claims, relying on unnamed DoD sources instead. Personally, I am somewhat convinces (p=0.9) that the key claims in the article are mostly correct. (Minor errors and exaggerations are always possible, perhaps one of the screenshot messages is not actually from a DoD bot.) From browsing other Reuters investigative reports, I get the feeling that they are woke, pro-Ukraine and pro-Palestinians and focusing on US-China relations and atrocities in Africa.
This leaves the morality of such actions.
I am not a fan of social media disinformation campaigns at the best of times. Burning epistemic commons to influence policy seems net-negative. However, I am also enough of a realist to see that a gentlemen's agreement not to use disinformation is well out of reach. So if the DoD is using disinformation to help this or that Philippine president getting elected (or Russia does the same for the US), that is sad by not particularly infuriating.
This is different. When that campaign happened, there was no offer by Western countries to provide Western vaccines on the same scale, time scale and costs as Sinovac. It was either Sinovac or COVID. The medical consensus seems to be that Sinovac is somewhat effective at preventing bad outcomes from COVID. Spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about available vaccines will predictably result in people dying from COVID. Just because your victims are hidden behind a veil of statistics that does not make them any less real. It is fitting that it was the DoD which ran that campaign, because accepting innocent deaths is kind of their dayjob. Morally, their decisions were not different from bombing Manila.
While all armies sometimes kill innocents, a key parameter for judging the morality of such killings is to compare the military effect of an operation to the civilian costs. If this social media campaign was a masterplan to turn mainland China into a liberal democracy, then one might notice that a few ten thousand dead civilians might be a price worth paying.
Of course, it was no such thing. From the article, this is what happened:
Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington. [...] China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.
So China made Duterte an offer which the West could or would not make at that time, Duterte paid the price in geopolitical concessions, and then the US retaliated by trying to make the payment he got for it less effective. This does not sound like a reasonable geopolitical strategy, but like the petty behavior of a five-year-old.
Most wars are not fought with a "any victory, no matter how small, for any price" frame. For reference, the US is not even in a shooting war with the PRC, just some trade war and saber rattling. Killing civilians of a former ally to punish them for defecting seems incredibly evil.
In general, I would like to see a norm that health services are sacrosanct in conflicts. The Geneva Conventions already forbid marking combat troops with the Red Cross or Red Crescent as well as the use of pathogens in war. By analogy, countries should also not use vaccination programs to hide their spy operations (at least Shakeel Afridi got his just desserts, 33 years in Pakistani prison) or attack medical infrastructure through either computer attacks or disinformation.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
I meant "from the article linked by the Guardian article".
The Guardian:
misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson
(Their link.)
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology.
Did either Khan or Hsu make a statement to that effect? Note that this is different from stating that there is a racial IQ difference but hedging for individual differences.
Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences.
I would argue that the process through which conclusions are reached generally matters.
If policeman A looks at a suspect, sees that he is white, well-dressed and looks innocent, and policeman B talks to the suspect and verifies that his alibi checks out, they may both conclude that their suspect is innocent, but the path which they took would matter to me.
I would consider writing a long, carefully reasoned article to be equivalent to our rule "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
If Darwin had just drunkenly jelled "Have you seen that hairy little man? I bet his ancestors were monkeys!" instead carefully curating his evidence for years before publishing The Origin of Species, the world would rightfully have judged him differently.
If we censure utterances like "all cunts are stupid", does this mean we should also proactively bar any research into any effect of sex hormones on intelligence? Should we try ethicists discussing the trolley problem for incitement to homicide?
There is a brand of utilitarianism called two-level utilitarianism. The idea is that you mostly follow well established heuristic rules for moral decisions -- perhaps even in system one. If a kid runs in front of your car, you don't calculate the odds of them being the next Hitler given the neighborhood you are in, you just hit the brakes. But under certain circumstances (like when speaking to a murderer asking you if you have seen his prospective victims) the usually good heuristic rules (like "don't lie") might cede to a more situational consequentialist analysis.
Likewise, I would propose a two-level handling system of utterances of opinions adjacent to verboten topics. Most utterances are low effort shitposts / tweets which can safely be dismissed out of hand. If someone posts "teh gayz should kill themselfs!!!1" it is valid to conclude that the poster is not contributing a method to fight demographic changes but just a bigot asshole.
Of course, every ugly sentiment can be padded with motivated reasoning and inflated into a scholarly-sounding article "voluntary suicide of non-reproducing individuals as a collective means of affect population dynamics" or whatever. There is probably someone out on the internet arguing lengthy that Nazi race "science" was 100% correct.
This is a pill I am willing to swallow as the alternative is to declare whole areas of research as verboten. Some Nazi rambling for tens of pages on skull forms or whatever will likely be memetically much less successful than someone who posts racist meme images. And in the odd case where the pre-decided societal consensus is actually factually false (it has happened once or twice in history!) we do not shoot the messenger.
In the words of Scott himself:
The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
Publicly linking an online pseudonym to a real-world identity which the pseudonymous poster wishes to conceal.
Okay, I may have stretched the word doxxed a bit, but looking on the about page of ACX, it seems to me that Scott Alexander does not prefer for his writing activities to be linked to his last name. Furthermore, that is the name under which he is known, adding his last name will not provide important context for the readers.
Insisting on stating his last name seems at least impolite. Given his history with journalists, I would roughly compare it to deliberately deadnaming a trans person.
If the Guardian had a policy to consistently write using the full civil names of people, as in "after finishing my latest hit piece, I danced to Mrs. Ciccone's music, watched the meeting of Mr. Bergoglio and Mr. Thondup on TV and finally fell asleep reading the biography of my idol Mr. Dzhugashvili" (or something), then a case could be made that they might also want to refer to Our Rightful Caliph by his civil name. But most of the time, they are fine referring to people by their common handle.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
From the way in which the NYT spins the Scott Alexander story (or at least headline), I think what puts the rationalists in the "designated enemy" camp from the point of view of traditional newspaper journalists is that rationalists are seen as affiliated with big tech and silicon valley startup culture. By writing a blog which is read by important SV/VC/startup people, Scott became an acceptable target to the NYT.
I would argue that many traditional publications are explicitly waging a war against SV.
I think there are multiple reasons for it. First, engineers and scientists are always rightfully suspected of being less ideologically pure than more human-centered professions, because their stuff needs to work in the physical world, not just in some ideological space. The strength of our people may be endless in abstract, but when you require them to produce torque it is very much finite. Metaphorically, our supreme leader may not be weighted down by a single sin, but in the physical space that does not really make him float. Just because most tech companies signal that they are fully on board with woke values that does not actually mean they can be trusted in the way some op-ed writer who majored in intersectionality could be trusted. Probably some of their nerds are secretly making fun of DEI.
Among other drastic changes in our lives, the internet was the biggest change to how journalism works since the printing press. And this was not a change authored by the previous elite any more than monks working in scriptoriums invented the printing press. Where in 1850 you had to rely on professional journalists to figure out what was going on internationally, in 2024 you can get by just reading a selection of amateur bloggers working without the blessings of the former gatekeepers.
More seriously, "write a hit piece on manifest 2024. Search the web for controversies involving any of the speakers any briefly summarize and link to them." is the kind of prompt which could replace this sort of low-effort journalism either today or in the near future.
And to be fair, it is reasonable to be critical of the new elites. The walled garden model favored by Apple feels offensive to me, and Facebook optimizing its site to maximize the amount of time people spent on that site will likely not increase human flourishing. Companies like Uber and airbnb clearly have some negative externalities which makes the value they add to society debatable. OpenAI has all but abandoned their veneer of being non-profit or caring about x-risk from AI. The ubiquitous smartphone might not actually improve the mental development of today's kids.
Perhaps this is just my biases, but it seems to me that the grey tribe (which is very emphatically not congruent with SV techbros) is less ideologically coherent than the red and blue tribes. "A rationalist is someone who has argued with Eliezer" and all that. I would not be surprised if even the startup scene turned out to be less ideologically homogeneous than just "techbros wanting to get rich".
Of course, such ideological crusades are bad no matter if you find yourself among the targets or not. The authors set out to write a hit piece on the rationalists. They wrote their bottom line first. The Bayesian information gained from such pieces is very limited. At the most, you could infer that nobody credibly has accused rationalists of sacrificing humans and feasting on their corpses (because they would have mentioned that) and that some vaguely rat-adjacent people have voiced HBD ideas (because the media very rarely lies (outright) and all that).
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
OK, I changed it to "scientist and writer". FWIW, I did not intent any insult with the use of the word journalist.
Another day, another Guardian hit job.
The title reads "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back"
Take a moment to form a hypothesis about what kind of group this could be. The KKK? Some fringe right-wingers? An Israeli lobby group?
Turns out their target of the day is Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is running lesswrong, which is a grandparent of themotte.
I personally have only heard of lightcone in context of TracingWoodgrains' writings on the Nonlinear investigation conducted by Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka. (TIL that this is a name different from the handle of a former motte mod. In my defense, I did not read a lot from either of them. Blame my racist brain.)
Of course Trace's critique could not be more different from what the Guardian writes about lightcone.
They start off by linking the NYT article on Scott Alexander. I think it is the one where they tried to doxx him. Apparently the NYT does not like my adblocker or something, the only think I get (besides a picture which indicates that the NYT designers have way too much time on their hand) is the text "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space -- Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared." -- I guess that is one way to phrase it. Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again, not that anyone cares (but it's the thought that counts).
Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!
Apparently they found no dirt on Eliezer, which to me seems like a failure of investigative journalism. EY has written a lot more than the six lines Cardinal Richelieu would have required.
Then they come to the "extreme figures" present at Manifest 2024.
Jonathan Anomaly is apparently pro eugenics. Never heard of him. However, given that anything from "select embryos which do not have a genetic disease" to "encourage smart and successful people to have kids" can be called eugenics, and given that the article would cite the most damning quotation, I will assume that he is not a Nazi.
Razib Khan is a journalist scientist and writer who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.
I vaguely recall Stephen Hsu being discussed on slatestarcodex and from what I remember my conclusion was that he got cancelled for a lack of ideological purity -- calling for research into increasing human intelligence is not acceptable, and talking about race differences is even less acceptable.
Brian Chau is apparently an e/acc and thus probably the most controversial person from my personal point of view. But then, engaging in honest discussion with advocates of other positions is generally a good thing, so if Lighthaven is more inclusive than Aella's birthday party, I am kinda fine with it.
Of course, the narrative would not be complete without the specter of antisemitism, here in the form of a quote "[Hsu is] often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people [...]". I think the rationalist community is a bad place for antisemites for the same reason why the marathon Olympics are a bad place for white supremacists.
In the end, the plug for this story -- lightcone having received money from SBF -- has no bearing on the bulk of the article, which is about how icky these ratsphere nerds are. It does not matter if SBF donated to the Save Drowning Puppies Foundation or to the Feed Puppies to Alligators Alliance -- either the donations can be kept or not.
Edit: fixed Khan's profession.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
I get what you are saying, but pointing to Hamas as an example of how to successfully de-radicalize young violent men is not entirely without irony in 2024.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
A war is fought not only on the battlefield, but also in the realm of propaganda.
As you point out, the size of Azov is trivial compared to the size of the army, and wearing swastikas does not actually grant combat superpowers.
But this should also mean that the possible battlefield gains from arming them with US weapons would be small.
On the propaganda front, it does not matter that they are only a small group. The USSR fought one big war, in which some 13% of its citizens were killed. In the end, they won, and it is a victory celebrated to this day in Russia. Their enemies in that war were flying the swastika.
Allowing a group of your citizens to cosplay as Nazis instead of drafting them into regular army units is handing Russia an easy propaganda victory. One would be better off supporting a brigade of child rapists and cannibals.
Also, the threat model is not that Azov declares its own state and sets out to conquer Ukraine by force of arms -- which is indeed silly given the power balance. There is a huge difference between having two thousand guys with military gear outside your borders and having them freely move within your country. It takes a lot more than 2000 men with guns to defend against 2000 determined terrorists.
One of the scarier phrases from Weimar Germany is "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- uttered when the German army refused to engage paramilitary putschists because they recognized them as comrades in arms. Every army seems to have some fraction of crypto-fascists, and the Ukraine army is likely no exception.
At the moment, Azov are suffering the Jewish president Zelenskyy to live because his interests and their interests align -- both want to stop Russian aggression by military means. I find it highly likely that Ukrainian mainstream -- and their president -- will tire of this war before Asov does. From the situation on the ground, it looks like any peace deal would involve some concessions to Russia, Crimea if nothing else. At that point, Azov could turn against Zelenskyy.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I looked up the county I grew up in old FBI statistics. There were 0 to 1 murders a year. These days it's over 100. Per capita it probably hasn't changed as much as that might imply as the population grew a lot.
I don't understand the problem. If your population grows by a factor of 100, you will need to raise the number of policemen and lawyers also by a factor of 100, which you should be able to do because the number of taxpayers also increased by a factor of 100.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I think the costs on society for a criminal trial are likely high:
- You need police officers to investigate
- You need forensic experts
- You need a prosecutor
- You need a judge and possibly a full jury
- You need a public defender
- In the case of a guilty verdict, you need to pay for incarceration
I find the system to pressure defendants into guilty pleas by threatening them with much longer sentences if they insist on their constitutional right to trial by jury abominable. Giving them a discount of 10% of their sentence if the case is clear-cut as a cost saving measure might be reasonable, but any more than that seems silly. If your suspect is guilty of a crime which will earn them ten years, don't offer them a plea deal for three years, just drag them in front of a jury. And if you have reasonable doubts that they are guilty of the ten year offense, don't threaten them with it.
I would be surprised if the public defenders cost more than a third of the expected total costs of a criminal trial. (In fact, I think that there is an argument to be made that the prosecutor and the defender should receive roughly equal compensation -- both are experts which will require a similar amount of time to familiarize themselves with the case, and paying one side more than the other will skew the results.)
If a state can't afford a separate prosecutor and judge, it can't afford a justice system.
If a state can't afford a defender, it can't afford a justice system.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
If you were making a statement about the woke framework, where oppression is commonly used, then I think you meant to say that sexless men (like all men without redeeming features like being part of a minority) are considered oppressors.
I think the reason for that is that woke narratives are generally very simple monochrome narratives. If women are the good guys, then men have to be the bad guys.
Of course, just like the near east conflict is more complex than "evil Israelis are oppressing the Palestinians", the relationship between men and women in a society is also more complex than just one side oppressing the other side. It is more likely an inadequate equilibrium far away from the Pareto frontier.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
The fraction of total utility lost to mass shootings and the like is very small indeed. Anyone not caring about lonely men should also be fine not caring if one in every 100k of them commits a mass shooting.
I think the problem is more that having a lack of buy-in into society from a significant fraction of the population is a risk factor for all sorts of things. After all, these men can still vote, for one thing.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
Well, this is Krah from the far right AfD we are talking about.
"Come to the far right, we have pussy" sounds factually incorrect, mostly. If you think girls are finding you icky, wait how icky they find you if they know you vote Nazi.
I mean, the steel-man of that argument would be "we are in a situation in which too many men compete over too few woman interested in a relationship. The historically successful solution to that dilemma has been large scale conventional war which decimated the population of men."
Of course, most people don't really fancy to bleed to their death in some trench, so this would be a hard sell.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
FWIW, for my personal life I have concluded that relationships are mostly not worth the effort.
When I was 18, I did not worry about finding a girlfriend at all, just assumed that it would be something which would happen on its own eventually. When I was 25, I noticed I was wrong about that, became depressed and so on. From 30 to 40 I had a relationship which felt like net negative at least in the last years, in retrospect. About a year on, my feeling about relationships is "been there, done that".
I mean, both getting laid a lot and being in a good relationship would be net positive in an abstract way. Having a helicopter pilot license would also be a nice thing to have, I guess. But just like I don't have any big dream of becoming a pilot, I also don't have a big dream of becoming a sexual successful man or starting a family. Getting to either of these three goals would take perhaps a few years of work, with the helicopter thing being way more deterministic.
I mean, if I got stuck in the 18th century, I might conclude that cleaning up my act enough to attract a partner would be the best way towards happiness. But today, I have the whole internet at my fingertips. Video games, netflix, porn, whatever. Yes, all of that is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that everything a human does is irrelevant in the great scheme of things.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I think there is a spectrum of behaviors going from "bad optics" to "corrupt" to "treason".
If you are accepting campaign donations or gifts from some foreign, state-sponsored NGO that is mostly bad optics (unless your constituents are on board with that). (Depending on local laws, INAL, don't accept bags of money based on something you read on the internet.)
If you do the above, but with a clear understanding that you intend to influence policy towards your money-giver, that would be corruption. If done correctly, this can be hard to prove. Did you vote for that trade agreement with the country sponsoring you because you were bought, or just because you genuinely believed that to be a good thing?
I would use the word treason in cases in which you also violate vital interests of your home country. Passing on secret military information, unsuccessfully participating in a coup and the like.
Over here in Europe, getting gifts from foreign nations (such as Azerbaijan) is not unheard of. More recently, Krah (AfD) and some of the people working for him have been accused of taking money from Russia and China, respectively. Typically, the worst offenders get prosecuted, but it is not like the voters really care.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I have a personal policy of not engaging deeply with the writings of individual loons whose main claim to public attention is some atrocity they committed. I typically don't even read manifestos of random people who manage to not shoot up elementary schools, so why would I give preference to the ones who don't even clear that very low bar of basic human decency?
That being said, I can totally see the cops deciding to hold back the manifesto based on the content, in a way which they might not have done if the perp was a right wing loon instead.
For CW purposes, I think both sides would spin it.
Either you have the young woman caught in the dangerous culturally transmitted delusion that gender is malleable which set her on a path which eventually saw her kill kids (bonus points if she was on testosterone at the time of the crime).
Or you have the trans-man who was denied essential medical interventions for religious/ideological reasons while he was a minor, which eventually lead him to snap in a most unfortunate way.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
The problem with classifying Ra'am as far-left is that this is that it flies very much in the face of common usage.
I guess German opposition parties vote against bills proposed by the governing coalition. Perhaps more so if the bill would contain a lot of messy details to nitpick over, and less so if the bill reflects a wide consensus in the population.
In times of stable majorities, the votes of the opposition do not matter for the outcome. It is mostly public perception "How could you vote for this?!" vs "How could you vote against this?!". One way to square the circle is for opposition parties to introduce their own bill -- which generally won't pass, of course. This signals "we care about this topic" without any risk of getting blamed for negative outcomes of the coalition bill.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
The FDP is kinda libertarian. On economic issues, I would place them to the right of the CDU/CSU.
But on purely social issues, they are clearly left of the CDU/CSU. For example, the Ampel recently legalized cannabis (with some caveats). This is not a position currently compatible with the CDU/CSU.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
Associating the radical departure from HBD to race denial in the early 20th century to Protestantism also does not make sense given the fact HBD was invented within White protestant culture, and the eugenics movement was also invented there and more advanced than anywhere else in the world. The United States, Germany, Scandanavia all had comparable eugenics programs and the Nazis were not even an outlier in that regard.
Are you anti-HBD? From where I stand, you do not pass the intellectual Turing test for the pro-HBD position. Saying that HBD was invented (not discovered, invented) within White protestant culture makes it sound like like you simply wrote "'Scientific' Racism" and then did a search and replace with HBD.
Only an icky minority of HBD proponents would claim that HBD is a refinement of whatever the Nazis thought.
The more sensible position would go:
The Nazi race ideology was based on Cargo Cult Science. Dilettantes who had not read the Sequences went out and "proved" exactly what they wanted to prove. Thus race denial was a directionally correct update. Later on with much better statistical methods, understandings of biases and confounders we discovered that race actually plays some role, after all. By analogy, first people said that the Sun circles around the Earth. They were very wrong, and the update towards "the Earth circles around the Sun" was the most significant step towards a correct model of the solar system ever. However, with further theories and precision measurements, we were able to determine that actually, the Earth and the Sun circle around their shared center of gravity (which happens to be within the sun) and are also subject to the gravity of all the other planets. While to some tiny degree, the Sun thus circles the Earth, this does not mean that the geocentrists were right all along.
I also don't get the paranoia about crypto-Jews. I think Jewish culture places a great value on arguments, and a disproportionate amount of intellectuals with outspoken opinions are of Ashkenazi origin.
However, they do not have mind-control superpowers which enables them to argue gentiles into anything they want. Thus, an argument by a Jewish-origin person is not an infohazard, and I can read it and judge it on its merits the same as I would any other argument.
Of course, if there was a Jewish World Conspiracy, the DR might be worried that if too many of their leaders are crypto-Jews, they might bury the story of How The Jews Secretly Control Everything. A council of Jewish Leaders which has directed every public Jewish-origin person from Karl Marx to Scott Alexander in a giant Kayfabe performance for the gentiles.
Personally, I find that notion silly. Occam's razor would prefer the explanation where Bernie Sanders is really a socialist, Eliezer is really worried about x-risk from AI and Ayn Rand was a true believer in capitalism or whatever.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
CSAM is one of the least rational areas of politics.
In the dark ages before the sexual revolution, there were all kinds of sexual deviants against whom upstanding, proper citizens could unite. Gays, interracial couples, unmarried women having sex, kinky people, people using birth control.
Today, most of these targets have been swept away by a big wave of sexual tolerance. Saying "it is wrong to have sex before marriage" makes you sound like a cringy old person.
However, we have also established that adults having sex with kids is bad because it causes severe psychological issues for the kids.
So pederasts and pedophiles become the lightning rod for most of these innate drives to police the sexual relations of their neighbors -- which did not magically disappear.
This is obviously a very emotional topic, and such topics often allow you to score big political wins. Under an evidence-based system, the focus would be on preventing the actual sexual abuse of children both by exclusive pedophiles and other men who act opportunistically. This would entail de-stigmatizing pedophiles who did not commit any sexual offenses with kids (which in turn would increase the odds of them willing to risk therapy, which would reduce the odds of them becoming child abusers) and trying to get the shared social environment of both perpetrators and victims to speak out if they suspect sexual abuse is going on.
CSAM would be treated like snuff videos. Commissioning a snuff video is commissioning a murder and should be punished as such, and paying for them should be a felony to discourage their production, and if you want you can also criminalize distribution and possession. But if half of your homicide department works on possession of snuff video cases, then I would argue that you have your priorities wrong -- most murders do not happen for the creation of snuff videos, nor does their consumption precede most murders. Fake snuff videos lack the thing which makes them immoral in the first place -- a victim. Even if you want to regulate horror movies, it would be a good idea to not simply classify them as snuff.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I would argue that the crime (or "crime", if you want) is distribution.
If a horny teenager creates fake nudes of their (realistically, 'his') classmates, that is creepy and sick and kinda pathetic, but should not be a crime any more than substituting the name of his crush for a protagonist in some lewd fan-fiction.
It would also be difficult to enforce laws against these things because nobody would even know that a "crime" had been committed.
However, things are very different if that teenager then goes to spread his deepfakes among common acquaintances (who are the only ones for whom these images would be different than "yet another nude person"). More gravely, he might not mention that they are deepfakes.
I would argue that American prudishness is a major driving force here. In a society where everyone went to the beach and the sauna naked, his classmates would just reply "What is the big deal? I know how Tina's boobs look." For whatever reasons, Americans are big on "purity" and slut shaming. (I guess having an OnlyFans as an 18yo would likely get you kicked from the Cheerleader team for ethical violations.)
Under that -- admittedly silly -- framework, a nude -- even a fake one -- is a direct assault on the character of the victim when shared.
Even in a more enlightened society where people don't judge people based on sluttiness, there are probably other things which would be just as damaging. For example, I would very much prefer if a deepfake video of me in full SS uniform chanting Nazi slogans would not go viral, and I would feel violated if it did.
Now here is actually something I can disagree with Oliver about: the choice of medium.
I am not even asking that people use fully open standards implemented by free software personally blessed by Richard Stallman running on open-design hardware they personally control, but twitter does not even allow the reading of a thread without being logged in (so that people don't train their LLMs with all that sweet high quality content without cutting Musk in). Nitter was the useful way to read it, but that is gone. x.com feels like it eats as much RAM as an 1000 reply OT on ACX before substack got their shit together (kinda) for showing me a measly four lines text and a single reply.
More options
Context Copy link