a tumblr girl should have written this book.........................................

Why do you bend over for AI art so much? Genuinely curious.

"bend over" 🙄 sure this is a good faith question

the existence of machine learning based image generation is not the most important issue to me. it's a neat trick and I've had fun with friends generating pictures of joe biden in hell but if it stopped existing i wouldn't really miss it

but the arguments used against it are fundamentally incorrect and have implications for intellectual property law, the meaning of art, attitudes towards technology, capitalist economics, class struggle, etc.

is 'ai art' theft? why? what is being stolen? what implications does that have? do we call for stronger intellectual property laws? are we forwarding bourgeois or proletarian interests? is 'ai art' not real art? why is that? what makes something "real art?" do you actually understand what computers do or are you just lashing out at technology? do we need to "reject modernity, embrace tradition?" how does this inform your politics at large?

Welcome

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE YOUR AGE OR AGE RANGE (I.E. 20s, 30s, ETC) IN YOUR BIO WHEN YOU FOLLOW ME, I WILL BLOCK YOU. NO EXCEPTIONS

Hi! I'm Bitts, I'm 24, nonbinary, and I live in Colorado (in the US). I've been in the kink world for years (most likely longer than you), both domming and subbing. You can find me on FetLife under the same username, where all the stuff I can't post on here is located!

I am polyamorous and currently have one partner! Open to connections but not actively looking for them

I am 5'3"/160cm tall and my bra size is 30J in American sizing, 30H in UK sizing! My bras are all from the UK brand Freya because they're consistently the only brand that carries bras that fit me that aren't ugly. If you know of a brand that makes clothes or lingerie that would fit my proportions, please share it with me! I am always searching

If you're over 40 I may or may not block you depending on the contents and vibe of your blog. Please find people to follow who aren't half your age

If you are married and your partner would not be okay with you interacting with my blog, you are not welcome here.

If you post stolen porn and you follow me, I will not only block you, I will report your blog for sexually explicit material, violation of intellectual trademark, and identity theft. Respect the consent of sex workers or die

Notable kinks that you'll see on this blog:

Breeding, bondage, power exchange, primal play/pet play, a bit of ddlg, and incest kink (particularly sibling, sometimes others! this is my number one kink lately)! If the last one is an ick for you, feel free to block the tag #fauxcest

Now, for the people who have asked: if you'd like to donate to me, my cashapp is $bittsandpieces2, and my venmo is @bittsandpieces

You can find my original posts under the tags #bitts posts, #my pics, and #bitts answers for responses to asks!

week of june 9th, 2024

these are written predominantly for the *rising* signs but they are also intuitively "channeled" enough that they should work for any dominant energy you have! (try your sun if you don't know rising, or more advanced readers can try moon, anywhere you have a stellium, etc and see what works best for you!)

aries: mars is square pluto. for you it's on virtually all week. others may feel the effects wear off more quickly, though. they may not be very patient with you and you certainly won't be in the mood to remain patient with them. be very careful to avoid accidents or violent situations. otherwise, this is a good time for deep spiritual or shadow work.

taurus: mars has not been long in your sign but he's already squaring off with the king of the underworld, pluto. this can make for upheaval and turbulence in your public life or your reputation or can unearth (likely unpleasant) family secrets. stay grounded and keep yourself safe.

gemini: it's an intellectual week for you although you may find that you encounter some mental blocks or intellectual struggles, even in areas you normally find easy or flowing. this is, fortunately, quite temporary and after this week will be much more convenient and fluid.

cancerians: your inner world is rich and abuzz. externally, your relationships with others are given longevity if they are healthy, and may feel constricting like a trap if they are not.

leo: this is not an easy time for leonic sorts such as yourself due to a lack of elemental fire in the sky at this period. on the bright side, your ruling luminary the sun is meeting up with mercury this week, making you rather eloquent and charismatic, especially around friends and acquaintances who may well turn out to be helpful people.

virgo: an academic situation or philosophical belief you hold might make some chaos in your day to day life somehow, but this can ultimately be used for good things, especially with both ceres and saturn on your side. do yourself a favor and stay out of arguments this week.

libra: this is a wonderful period for personal development and brand new ideas. keep your mind open. not just to possible opportunities, but to the possibility that you are wrong about some things. that could even be a relief in some ways, couldn't it?

scorpio: your ancient and modern rulers are in a confrontational stance all week. you may likewise find yourself quietly seething over an injustice, engaging in a verbal altercation, or even in some dangerous situation. be especially wary of abusive relationship situations.

sagittarius: the focus these days is certainly to do with other people, and especially romantic partners, although not exclusively so. it may seem counterintuitive or simply irrelevant, but this week especially you can really bolster this by having your financial resources in order and keeping your home base stable, clean, and peaceful.

capricorn: guard your bank account and be careful about scams or identity theft issues, or regular old theft. on the other hand, the overall vibe this week is quite favorable for you especially if you stick to following your bliss.

aquarius: gemini season suits you anyway, even if it requires coming out of your shell (or secret laboratory, or whatever) a little bit. go ahead and gently expand your comfort zone. your usual haunts are not the best place for you to be this week.

pisces: if you need a break from family or roommates, you can fall back on your friends at this time. maybe some great idea or opportunity comes to you while you are out and about just having a great time.

Why Anita Driver should be Stopped - An Essay(ish) Post

Hi. So I don’t often do long posts like this, you probably know me as a fic writer and shitposter, but this situation has been irking me since I first read about it and so I only felt it right to explain why.

First off, I wanna say that I understand what she’s doing (I’m going to refer to Anita as she/her throughout this though I have no clue on the author’s actual gender identity). I think she’s very intelligent, using pastiche and parody to create content tailored towards a certain specific audience.

But as someone who knows their fandom history, and has moved in fanfiction circles for over 10 years, the attention one specific book I’m not going to refer to by title because I may throw up in my mouth a little, has received has me very worried for F1 RPF writers as a whole.

RPF has always been a main stay of fanfiction culture. Though there are many ‘antis’ who think it’s wrong and inappropriate to write about real people, RPF fandoms, think One Direction, BTS etc have always been some of the biggest out there.

And I’m sure you’ve seen as popular fan works such as the ‘After’ series by Anna Todd and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ by E.L. James have transitioned from fan work into published original novels.

Because of this, fan works are booming. Fanfiction is less of a dirty little secret now, confined to locked sites and email chains, but is something that many people know about even if they don’t consume it themselves.

And so, enter Anita Driver. Capitalising on the BookTok trend of ‘spicy’ fiction (what I would call erotica), the author has taken it upon herself to self publish a novel in that similar style but using Daniel Ricciardo not just as inspiration, but as the main protagonist.

I get what she’s trying to do, I really do. I can see that it’s parody, it’s not meant to be taken seriously, but firstly it’s illegal and secondly it really puts fanfiction communities at risk.

Part One: Defamation

Legally, you can’t take someone else’s identity and profit off of it without their explicit consent to do so. There’s a reason Harry Styles became Hardin Scott, and Edward Cullen became Christian Grey. That’s someone else’s intellectual property, or their identity. You cannot legally make a profit out of that. The subject could quite easily build a lawsuit against the author, and the author would have no grounds for defence. There’s a reason AO3 do not allow you to share fundraising links or anything else similar to that, and it’s to protect themselves and the authors against possible lawsuits.

I’d also just like to add that there’s plenty of erotic F1 inspired books out there. I haven’t read them myself but I know that the ‘Dirty Air’ series draws inspiration from current drivers on the grid, but doesn’t explicitly mention anyone real by name! Every character is the intellectual property of the author, it is original fiction that can safely make a profit.

By using Daniel Ricciardo’s image and personality, Anita Driver is putting herself at risk, in this case, not for theft of intellectual property, but of defamation. I haven’t read the book, of course I haven’t read the book, but I can easily believe that the content within could be considered to be defamatory as it may damage public perceptions of him. Now I’m no expert on law, I took a semester of media law and that’s it, but people have definitely sued for less.

In U.K. law (which I’m going off because I know the most about it) “A statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant.” (x) It could easily be said that portraying Daniel in this way would cause damage to his reputation. We know his image isn’t squeaky clean, but having this book using his name could easily lead people to believe that he was in some way associated with its production. I don’t think anyone would like their public perception to be that they actively encourage and fund the production of erotica about them.

In a lawsuit, Amazon could also be held liable for this, as their website is the main distribution platform for the book, and Anita Driver is a pseudonym and and an unknown.

“It is a defence for the operator to show that it was not the operator who posted the statement on the website. The defence is defeated if the claimant shows that it was not possible for the claimant to identify the person who posted the statement.” (x) If Anita Driver remains anonymous, Amazon could easily be held liable in a court case. Because of this, it would be in their best interests to remove the book to avoid this. (I do not like Amazon, and while they would easily be able to fight the court case with their billions, it would be much easier for them to remove the book and avoid any possible cases.)

So honestly, it is easy to see why this book is a danger to the author. Now I’m not saying that Daniel would necessarily sue. I think he’d probably just laugh it off even if it does make him feel uncomfortable (which it probably does, it would me!) because he has more important things to do. But I honestly don’t know how F1 and Liberty Media might react to this, they would definitely be more likely considering Daniel’s Reputation in turn reflects their own.

Part Two: Danger to Fan Works

This leads me in nicely to part two, actually, because legal threats against fanfiction writers have been a real problem to various communities over the years. Anne Rice, creator of the ‘Interview with a Vampire’ series, had all works purged from the internet in the early 2000s, and threatened writers with legal action if they continued to post fanfiction.

Fanfiction has always been a niche. It’s a small part of the internet for those who want to put their blorbos in situations, or just to think about them fucking nasty. But fan works haven’t always been accepted. Many people still look down on fanfiction, particularly those feature OCs (original characters) or reader inserts.

Anita Driver’s book would be more at home on Wattpad than Kindle Unlimited. It is a fan work. It is written by fans, for fans, and should be kept to that specific audience (without paying for it of course, because as I said, it’s very illegal!)

A work of fanfiction being a book is nothing new, as I mentioned earlier, the ‘After’ series and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ started out life as fanfiction. But when published, they were no longer fanfiction, they became original works of their own.

Putting fan works out in the open like that only threatens the F1 RPF community. It leaves us open, vulnerable, more so than normal. Sites like AO3 can only protect us to a certain extent, we can lock fics, sure, but that only stops those who don’t have an account from accessing our works.

If this one book is out there, who knows what may happen next. All it takes is for someone to say ‘I don’t want works featuring me published online and I will threaten a lawsuit’ and we’re back to email chains and password locked neocities webpages.

So it genuinely makes me worry.

And with the recent development of Dax Shepard sharing the book with Daniel himself, I feel that it’s all just too close. Fanfiction is never meant to be seen or read by its original subjects. Sure, they may actively seek it out if they want to, but unless they explicitly consent to it, they shouldn’t be seeing it. Daniel has had no say in the matter, it seems. It is being forced on him, which is going to look bad for the fanfiction community as a whole.

Part Three: Conclusion

Honestly, I don’t know whether I’m just being overly freaked out by this whole thing, I hope it just nicely blows over, the book disappears from people’s minds and we get to just keep our niche little side of the internet safe. But part of me is scared.

I’m scared for what may come, if the book is popular, will people try and emulate it? Will people start ripping fics from Tumblr/AO3/Wattpad to sell on Amazon to make a quick buck off the back of this? And will we have another Anne Rice type situation which kills the community completely?

I don’t know. And that’s what worries me. I hope that this whole thing blows over, that Daniel isn’t too freaked out, and that Anita Driver stops using ai image generators to make her book covers (Lance has waaay too many fingers on her most recent one. Caught you out babes x)

This is the end, for now. I suppose I’ll probably add to this if there are any more developments, and if anyone has anything to add (maybe some better law knowledge because mine is basic) please feel free!

Thanks for reading.

Are libertarian scholars shills and useful idiots for the rich?

Are libertarian scholars shills and useful idiots for the interests of the rich? Many people are saying this. My take:

Big financial interests, such as Koch funding, are responsible for some growing hazards to the integrity and quality of some academic professions such as philosophy. My own academic philosophy department (BGSU) received Koch funding several years ago, which has been a catalyst for endless insanely complex controversies.

There is some scholarly work which is bad or flawed, but which financial interests cause to either (A) wrongly come into existence in the first place, or (B) attain a degree of high status and influence disproportionate to its objective value.

This adds to an already considerable pile of non-value-tracking biases which wrongly influence the status of many scholarly works—such as the Matthew Effect, various careerist biases, barriers to access stemming from systemic oppressions such as classism, ableism, sexism, racism, and transphobia, as well as social trend feedback cycles (e.g. many philosophers write about X because a bunch of *other* philosophers are writing about it, even if X’s objective importance is questionable), and the fact that many philosophers believe X or work on X because their department mentors or peers do, etc.

As one possible example: Why are there so many capitalist libertarian philosophers? Sometimes philosophers disproportionately support a minority viewpoint because the viewpoint has serious intellectual merit which the general public irrationally fails to recognize. For instance, I think there are a lot of philosophers who support ethical vegetarianism because the arguments for ethical vegetarianism are objectively very strong-- despite widespread popular disagreement by people who irrationally fail to recognize the strength of the case for vegetarianism. Is libertarianism like this? No, I think it is questionable whether libertarianism is objectively strong enough to merit this degree of philosopher support on intellectual grounds.

On the one hand, I think a lot of libertarian scholars have done good work—often they have noticed many flaws in popular and scholarly pro-redistribution (and pro-regulation) arguments, and a lot of them have made important contributions to critiquing drug prohibition, immigration restrictions, and anti-sex-work laws, and they’ve advocated for Universal Basic Income. Sometimes they have noticed evidence for significant downsides to economic and business regulations, which progressives ignored. Robert Nozick, Michael Huemer, and other right-libertarians have shown that redistributionist arguments tend to be sloppy and badly oversimplified. Bleeding heart libertarians of the Steiner-Vallentyne school have made powerful contributions to the case for Universal Basic Income and other good ideas, and have built on the legacy of classical liberalism e.g. by exploring the implications of the "Lockean proviso" (which sets limits on traditional capitalist assumptions). Many progressives have failed to give credit to the diversity and sophistication of the capitalist libertarian tradition.

Rightwing and leftwing capitalist libertarians have also inspired progressive scholars such as GA Cohen (analytical Marxist) to develop improved arguments for redistribution. I want to give serious credit for this, similarly to how I give some gender critical feminists serious credit (despite the evils of their ideas) for inspiring trans rights advocates to improve their arguments for pro-trans advocacy.

On the other hand, libertarianism is a weird and sectarian school of thought, in some ways quite fringe, with a strong connection to insane beliefs like “taxation is wrongful theft.” In fact, it is very obvious that the horrors of poverty are much more severe and vastly more important than the mild badness of stealing from the rich.

...No, seriously, give me a break. Why does the stupid contrary view hold so much influence despite its being manifestly stupid? Overall, stealing from the rich to give to the poor is blatantly good, cool, and based. Who could disagree?

It is highly plausible that libertarianism is so high-profile in large part because a lot of rich people see it as supporting their interests.

Now, are all libertarian ideas pro-rich? Are they all anti-poor? No, that is a common uncharitable misperception. Some libertarian scholars, even some right-libertarians, have been at pains to show that many of their ideas would support the poor and not the rich. I think libertarians support a cluster of policies--some of which would benefit the rich, and some of which would harm the rich.

If libertarians were to win totally (i.e. make all their policy ideas into a reality), it might or might not overall benefit the rich, and it may even harm them—such as by allowing more small businesses to fairly compete in the market, and by ending government subsidies (corporate welfare) for (or deals with) vicious and mass murderous industries like coal companies, the war profiteering industry, the various prison profiteering industries, some surveillance industries, and animal factory farms.

Total libertarianism would also plausibly benefit the poor in many ways, such as by drastically curtailing the power of police over marginalized poor people, cutting off support to various prison industries, combating conservative and progressive forms of puritanism and paternalism, and ending the terror of deportation and associated abuses that hang over the heads of many migrants. It may also end some forms of day-to-day terror against homeless people, sex workers, and some other groups.

However, this may depend on how much power it hands to big business, and on how much of an interest big businesses have in screwing over marginalized people. Such matters could be highly context-sensitive. For instance, some "hostile architecture" (e.g anti-homeless spikes on places to potentially rest in public) are created by private industry, some by government. If libertarianism wins, will there be more or fewer anti-homeless spikes than before? Well, I don't know. Still, there is a good chance that libertarian polices would overall help the poor a lot.

There is also the problem of many, many high-profile libertarian crackpots—such as Walter Block (of the Mises Institute) who has argued in favor of legalizing workplace sexual assault, and Murray Rothbard who has argued in favor of legalizing the right of parents to starve their children to death (although his views on adoption rights may complicate this reading of his view).

Moreover, many lay non-scholarly libertarians are also insane crackpots, such as the “Mises Caucus” people who have apparently taken over the US Libertarian Party (although most libertarian scholars condemn them). The one anarcho-capitalist who has gained power, Javier Milei, is also probably a crackpot who seems on track to reinforce authoritarianism e.g. by strengthening the power of police to crack down on protestors (despite this move’s obvious incompatibility with libertarian principles). Such issues present a serious black mark on the record of libertarianism as a movement, and strengthen the case for thinking that libertarianism as a movement is unable to improve the world (despite the fact that many individual libertarians have good intentions and actively promote good ideas).

Nevertheless, many libertarians are immensely more principled and clear-cut in their stances on immigration, drugs, and sex work than are many liberals and progressives, and they should be praised for this. For instance, many libertarians explicitly support open borders, while many liberals waffle on whether to condemn the Biden administration’s treatment of immigrants. There may also be some underappreciated convergence between libertarians and leftists in critiquing the corporate capture of government. For instance, I wonder if there’s room for more cooperation between Marxian ideological critics and public choice theorists.

All that said, plausibly some rich people see the advocacy of libertarianism as overall beneficial to themselves and their financial interests in actual practice—perhaps because they think that libertarians tend to succeed in implementing their helpful-to-the-rich ideas but fail to implement their harmful-to-the-rich ideas. This may explain why rich people tend to support libertarianism. And there may be some evidence for this combination of trends.

For instance, over the last few decades, libertarians & libertarian-adjacent scholars (such as Milton Friedman) succeeded in advocating some kinds of big business deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and welfare-cuts (which helped the rich and hurt the poor), but failed in their advocacy of open immigration, medication patent reform (to lower drug prices), residential zoning reform (to lower housing prices), and the legalization of drugs and sex work—all of which would help the poor, and harm at least some of the rich, helping fewer of the rich. Much of this combination of libertarian success and libertarian failure constitutes what is commonly called "neoliberalism," which in practice consistently benefits (most of) the rich while hurting (at least many of) the poor.

Many of the global poor have also benefited from neoliberal globalization. If this is their best option, then it's a good thing overall, since we should aim to help the global poor the most. However, I wonder if better options (such as international unions, raising the floor of the race the bottom) may have been unduly closed off, to the benefit of the rich. Some comparatively good-for-the-poor deals may also have been implemented alongside bad-for-the-poor deal such as international debt traps. I'm not sure of the best empirical evidence on a lot of this and need to research it more.

I’m oversimplifying, but something like this overall view does seem likely to be a common pattern and plausible hypothesis. Libertarians have also failed in their mild advocacy for polyamorous marriage or civil unions (despite some version of this being obviously the correct position—anti-polyamory views are blatant bigotry), possibly because there aren't enough rich people who’d benefit from it.

Progressives have been uncharitable and mistaken in their view of libertarianism as a whole. However, progressives have been largely correct in their view of what effects libertarianism as a movement has caused. And, in some ways, this is more important than the nature of libertarianism as a whole. If libertarians resent being so negatively and unfairly judged, they should aim to improve the actual effects of their movement.

Here's what I suspect is really happening: Libertarians promote a combination of good ideas and bad ideas. In the real world, their bad ideas (the ones which only help the rich) are the ones that win—and the rich know this, and this is why the rich support libertarians. The rich have little to fear from libertarians’ harmful-to-the-rich ideas, because they can ensure these ideas won’t win. The rich can happily fund libertarian scholars to promote welfare cuts & deregulation and zoning reform & cutting subsidies to evil industries—perfectly content in the knowledge that the welfare cuts & deregulation will win, and that the zoning reforms & subsidy-cuts will lose.

(The zoning reforms, or immigration reforms, or whatever, may win if the economic situation changes so that these reforms will help the rich enough, but not otherwise—unless the poor can overcome their collective action problems and successfully fight for their interests and rights, which the rich want to use their power to prevent.)

In fairness, a similar pattern may apply elsewhere too. For instance, maybe bad (authoritarian) leftisms tend to win and defeat the good (non-authoritarian) leftisms, because e.g. (1) authoritarian leftists tend to be willing to screw over the non-authoritarian leftists (their former allies) after the Revolution (e.g. in the USSR), and (2) authoritarian leftist leaders may tend to more successfully prevent counterrevolution and/or imperialist regime-change, compared to non-authoritarian leftist leaders, via repression or suchlike. So maybe leftists, like libertarians, may also face a serious puzzle of how to raise the probability that their *good* versions, rather than *bad* versions, are the ones that will win—yet find that the bad versions have distinctive features which give them strategic advantages over the good versions.

I should also note that not all Koch-funded projects benefit the rich, some leftwing projects are also funded by billionaires (whether Koch or others, such as Soros), and it is disputable whether people should always turn down Koch or billionaire money when it is on offer, especially when other funding sources are scarce. Some people erroneously accuse Koch-funded projects of being objectionable even when they aren’t. For instance, Mich Ciurria insinuated that the Koch-funded project on “Grandstanding” (aka virtue-signaling) by Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi was biased against leftwing radicals, and I argue she is badly mistaken. In several ways, Ciurria’s description of the “Grandstanding” book is misleading. I defend the Warmke-Tosi “Grandstanding” work as important, even valuable for progressive advocacy.

However, the broader system of funding by rich people in general is an enormous hazard. Rich people have the morally least important needs, and they are the fewest in number. For this reason, their interests are objectively the least important. But they are immensely more powerful than all the non-rich people combined, in most cases. This situation is egregiously unjust. The rich people fund scholarship, in philosophy and elsewhere, largely in order to serve their financial interests—even if not all these projects in fact serve their financial interests.

The rich diversify their investments, and presumably some of their investments don’t pay off for them. The rich may also finance some projects which aren't expected to serve their financial interests, for reasons such as to improve their public image. In light of such facts, I say not all recipients of rich people (e.g. Koch or Soros) funding should be assumed to be shills or useful idiots. Also, on the grounds of my actual engagement with the relevant scholarship, I assert that Brandon Warmke & Justin Tosi’s “Grandstanding” work will not likely function to discredit the viewpoints and advocacy of marginalized people or their allies (even though Brandon and Justin are conservatives), contrary to common allegations. Again, some leftwing scholarship is also funded by billionaires such as Soros, but this does not necessarily discredit it.

All that said, on the whole and in general, the rich are our enemy and we must fight against them. We should take a critical eye toward scholarship that they have an interest in funding.

I bought some Duke Cannon Supply Co. Soap (there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, don't @ me for being ideologically impure) and I've been badgered with emails about reviewing it since. Well, you fucking asked me to share my review on social media. Here it is:

I buy this soap because it's one of the few commercially available soaps that do not smell like flowers or aldehydes - it carries me through when the soap I buy from the renfaire or farmer's market runs out.

I really, really dislike how openly misogynistic, homophobic, and ahistorical the advertising is.

To be clear I mean ad copy like this:

"In the early days of the American Frontier, rugged pioneers indulged with a dry buffalo steak and a pull of whiskey, not a $12 appletini and plate of bruschetta." = ahistorical, glossing over genocide and land theft, homophobic/misogynist for implying that appletini and bruschetta are less masculine than and thus inferior to buffalo steak and whisky. Also if your steak is dry you're cooking it wrong.

"Duke Cannon's idea of a great night does not involve going to that fancy vegan juice bar downtown or binge-watching vampire dramas on the Internet." again, misogynist/homophobic.

Duke Cannon has never taken a professional sabbatical, or considered traveling abroad to “find himself”. - do you see the disturbing pattern yet? This adds a layer of anti-intellectualism, too.

When this was delivered to my email after I bought this product because I like how it smells:

Duke Cannon hails from a simpler time – when the term “handyman” was redundant. When chivalry and patriotism weren’t considered old-fashioned. When you never put the word “salad” next to “bar.”

I actively recoiled at how utterly repugnant it was. Why would you send a message that actively insults and belittles someone who gave you money for a product??

The hot second another soap comes on the market that smells like bourbon, fresh-cut wood, tobacco and leather, etc that does NOT insult me (an indigenous woman) I WILL buy that instead.

(Copied from my clock app post)

As the screenshot says, Meta is datascraping. Everything on Instagram, your faces, private photos, art, EVERYTHING, is being used to train AI, and they took away the option to opt out. there's a form you can fill out to protest this, but you can't opt out. I'm trying to spread word across all platforms so more people can join the boycott!!!! the other solution would be deleting all your data from Instagram and other meta platforms.This is theft of intellectual property and an invasion of privacy.

If you think AI is currently harmless or is only being used to make our lives easier, you're only thinking at the base level. imagine what certain demographics will do when the AI is trained with children's faces. And other communities online are already getting taken over by AI. AI also greatly increases water consumption. For years, deepfakes and AI generated corn of people have been made without permission. Etc, etc. I need you all to critically think about this and the impact it may have on the entirety of the world instead of just brushing it off.

No AI!! If you support AI, don't interact with my page. Don't interact with AI until there's laws and legislation regulating it and protecting everyone.

I can get why people would be uncomfortable with factkin of ppl who are still alive in this universe although being uncomfortable doesn't mean you get to call something fake, but I digress...but I'll never understand the issue with ppl being kin with dead ppl from this universe when past life beliefs are so common in the kin community?

Aside from that, if someone feels like they are still in some way another person/known animal who is alive here because of parallel lives/past lives/metaphysics/psychological factors etc like... that's not all too dissimilar to fictionkin or any other kintype. - Junji Ito (from Parallel Earth #105) /srs

P.s. I've never seen a factkin even like try and actually properly impersonate their kintype and take over this version of their life anyway so...the issue is just a silly moral one, again not dissimilar to 'fictionkin aren't real because that's a fictional character/creature that a real person made up so it's basically intellectual theft'.

My thoughts exactly!

The whole "factkin cause identity theft" business is misguided to say the least. The people who honestly believe that either A) have the assumption that all factkin behave like stalkers or B) have no idea what actually constitutes identity theft.

I agree that people being uncomfortable with the idea of factkin is understandable. I also agree that it's unfair to call something fake just because it makes you uncomfortable. Discomfort is not completely a negative feeling. It is natural when you don't understand something. Just because you're uncomfortable with an idea at first does not mean it is morally wrong or bad. If more people would make more of an effort to understand the community I believe they'd be a lot less uncomfortable with it!

The issue of dead VS alive facttypes is another thing altogether. I've seen people say they're only against factkin whose kintypes are currently alive. The dead ones are fine. What sense does that make? How can one type of factkin be acceptable, and another be bad or false?

I've been accused of stealing the identities of my facttypes both dead and alive and I would like to respectfully ask: Who honestly believes that Peter III of Aragon, who died in the early 14th century, cares whether or not I spiritually identify as him? Who honestly believes that I stand to gain anything, monetary or otherwise, from claiming this identity? Why, if I'm "actively choosing" to "steal an identity" did I pick a long-deceased obscure medieval king about whom only fragments of knowledge exist?

All of this to say: anon, I'm with you. You've got the right idea.

i just checked out the thieves blog and they're like "im more used to twitter's culture" IT DOESN'T MATTER? TWITTER IS LITERALLY TUMBLR IN A DIFFERENT FONT FACE. Like twitter is the comic sans ms of the social media world. (aka the worst font) reblogs and retweets are literally the SAME FUCKING THING with just a few different changes like the fuck are they trying to pull here?

FOR REAL, THANK YOU. Lmao at first the thief defended themselves by saying "I'm new to tumblr, I didn't know reposting gifs is wrong" when:

People have vetted they're not new at all; regardless, stealing was/is looked down upon in DeviantArt, Ao3, LiveJournal, etc. This isn't unique to Tumblr.

Stealing is still looked down upon on Twitter, even though there are thieves there too. I see people call each other out there more than on Tumblr.

Everyone even outside of fucking of the internet as a whole knows stealing ideas/art/writing that isn't yours is wrong. You literally learn this when you're in, like, elementary school being taught how to write and it's later reinforced in high school when you're taught to cite people's work when you write research papers/essays.

Like, are people really learning and forming their ethics around plagiarism and theft from two of the most rabid/insane social media platforms on the internet? It's literally not a video game blog's or a stan twitter accounts' job to inculcate and teach you the ethics of art reproduction and intellectual property in these digital spaces. Go talk to a librarian, whose job is literally to teach children and patrons in their communities about this.

Second, even if she was living under a fucking rock her whole life and never heard of the term of plagiarism, then once she was fucking told to stop stealing, then she should stop stealing one and for all. No! After she stole/reposted @/collinnmckinley's work and then blocked @/collinnmckinley, she also later reposted from @/eurodynamic and @/ave661. She also reposted video recordings from Dan Allen Gaming as her own screen recordings (as if she were recording her own gameplay) and took screenshots from other people's TikToks.

So she can defend herself as much as she wants or claim that we never spoke to her or baby-fed her info on why maliciously reproducing other people's work is unethical. But if she's literally still stealing, then she's burying herself in her own grave and looks like a total clown.

Sounds like you have a problem with the implementation of copyright, not the inherent idea of copyright itself. Everyone knows Disney and other corporations end up abusing it. That doesn't mean copyright is inherently bad, it means there are loopholes in copyright that need to be fixed. Maybe learn the difference. Those posts of yours were shockingly ignorant and couldn't even pass themselves off as informed if they tried.

You do realize anti-copyright is an entire movement right?

The idea that there's such thing as intellectual property inherently limits people's freedom of expression and makes media harder to access in the long run. By reducing the amount of people who are allowed to share works of art, literature, etc. we make it harder for pieces of media to be preserved for future generations for example.

In fact archivists and others are asking to be exempt from copyright law.

In the case of things like patents it stops the global south from being able to do things like produce vaccines to prevent the spread of illnesses.

We also know that many people in many countries actually use piracy as a means to access information and media and be able to participate with each other globally.

In most cases of copyrighted works the money doesn't even go to the actual artists who made it after it's been made. We've already seen how little in residuals writers actually get from their work.

I'm not saying piracy is ethical as it is right now, because for example many authors do need those sales to be good to continue their lively hoods because the people who hire them don't want to pay them a livable commission. There's the fact that it's hard to quantify and identify the worth of someones labor when most of said labor is mental in nature. And the fact that there has to be some kind of cushion to fall back on for these jobs when you're waiting in between commissions.

But the fact of the matter is that that's what it IS, is capitalists not wanting to pay people fairly for their labor, not piracy that's making our lives shit. It's people not wanting to pay high commission prices for working artists.

It's people thinking that something already existing is worth more than the potential art we could get if we just paid people directly to make more art.

I don't want to live in this world where every new movie or whatever the fuck is just a corporate sponsored rehash of something that already exists because its more profitable to make something over and over again than it is to make something new.

I don't want to live in a world where what tv show gets to continue is determined by whoever paid for it to be made.

I want to live in a world of enthusiastic and free creative expression, copyright is antithetical to that.

This is not an endorsement of AI art, there's issues I have with it such as impersonating artists. But "theft" isn't one of them.

Namely because copying something isn't theft by definition.

The problem with nuance is that sometimes there is none.

Books and movies and video games all reinforce this idea that the villain is just a hero who lacked the right resources or support or what have you. Often, this is true. Especially if we're talking about poverty related crime or reactionary criminal behavior to systemic oppression.

But sometimes, it's not. Sometimes, it is that simple. Sometimes, people are just evil.

And it's easy enough for us to accept this when talking about pedophiles, or WWII Germany, or the terrible actions of the super rich (I'm looking at you, Bezos... and Nestlé) but other times we search and search for nuance where there is none to be found in order to prove... what, exactly? How educated we are? That we've learned our lesson well that villains aren't just villains, they're people first?

But in order to preserve our sense of objectivity, our moral superiority and our self-righteous intellectualism we oftentimes do the oppressed a great disservice.

Because life is not a movie.

And it's easy to say that Israel is just afraid because of their past. The common people don't want war, they don't even know what's going on. The heads of state are to blame. A new government would make things better. This is an overreaction to Oct. 7th. A mistake anyone could make. It satisfies our need to nod at both sides of the conflict and to signal that we are aware there is nuance here.

But all of those statements are false.

The virtue-signaling of inventing nuance where there is none, of trying to humanize the absolute evil of Israel's actions, is just as spineless as trying to humanize or rationalize the actions of nazi Germany.

The truth of the matter is that Israeli citizens set up lawn chairs to watch Palestinian destruction. Israeli citizens gather at the border to prevent aid from getting into Gaza. The calls for the absolute extermination of Palestinians coming out of Israel are innumerable - and have been since well before October 7th of last year. The large-scale theft of Palestinian land would not be possible without the overwhelming compliance of Israeli settlers who feel comfortable kicking natives out of their own homes in order to live there themselves.

And the sense of racial and nationalist superiority that is such an inherent part of Israeli and zionist culture is what allows them to commit all sorts of heinous crimes without remorse and - thanks to the shoulder-shrugging of world powers - without consequence. (Forced sterilization of black jews, active concentration camps, organ theft, genocide, kidnapping, torture, bait-and-switch murder of children, land theft, destruction of universities and hospitals, man-made famine, ethnic cleansing, etc.)

There is no nuance here. There can be no nuance when it comes to 80 years of ongoing genocide, displacement, and theft. The images you are seeing come out of Palestine are only the tip of the iceberg. The Israelis see all that you see and more and they celebrate it.

This is evil.

And in order for peace and freedom to have a fighting chance, we must first be willing to call evil by its name.

ROUND 1 / SIDE A / POLL 5

Chrysanta Drosdov (née Rosetti) (@lydthecoolkyd, art by @shmungles) vs. Jestiny Rook (@adelaidedrubman, art by @derelictheretic)

Chrysanta Drosdov info:

Description: This is my d&d character from a cowboy-samurai kind of setting. Chrysanta is a 40-year old Tiefling and a wandering Gravekeeper, part of an order of monks who deal with the dead in this setting—perform death rites, maintain graveyards, etc. Rather than stay put at a monastery serving one town, she wanders, burying those who died alone with no one to take care of their bodies. Since there was recently a 20-year-long war that left behind a massive desert in its wake, there are plenty of unburied dead to be found. She is driven primarily by guilt over the crimes of her past, as well as over being unable to be a good mother, and her lingering violent impulses.

Crimes:

Resisting the urge to write too much but there is a lot of context for all of this that doesn't exactly make any of this okay but she's really trying to be better I promise lol.

Murdering more people than she can count as a highway robber as a teen Getting her younger brother killed in a robbery gone wrong Lying to her husband about her past for a while Leaving her husband and daughter for seven months. Nothing but a note. She went back but left again and even though she's been back for every one of her daughter's birthdays she's still a deadbeat mom shot a (mostly) innocent woman in the kneecap to prove a point let a dangerous prisoner go without consulting anyone else in the hopes that it would get her close to her long-lost brother (who, surprise, is alive and trying to take over a town through violence) shot at a politician to keep her from escaping with what would most certainly lead to weapons of mass destruction. she was trying to do a good thing here, but she was stupid about it and now she and the 15yo kid in the party are on wanted posters. killed already-unconscious guards after we were already out of combat

Other notes from the submitter: I have written a novella of her backstory. Legit it is almost 80k words. I'm so happy to share so much more info about her and the setting in general. Perhaps I will make another account solely dedicated to this lore.

Jestiny Rook info:

Description: jestiny is an overgrown gifted child burn out and self-described “normal human person” slash future “america’s sweetheart” who is in actuality widely locally hated in her canon material (far cry 5). a girl with no moral compass but a deep fondness for dying on every hill she’s ever come across, she initially attempts to abandon her position as a deputy (cop, strike one) after the county she’s sworn to protect is seized by a violent doomsday cult, but has a quick change of heart after seeing how much her friends and neighbors need her help — just kidding, she has no friends and only got invested for the sake of playing 5D chess with a middle management cult leader slash torturer to feed her own desire for an unearned sense of intellectual superiority. and once she IS invested, she is ramping up war crimes and endangering the civilians she swears she’s doing this to protect while subjecting them to her childish tantrums, violence, manipulation, and generally awful personality! described by the characters who know her best as “vicious, ruthless, heinous, condemnable, merciless, insufferable, deplorable, irredeemably violent nightmare of a woman” “harbinger of destruction, force of ruin” “not fucking special, fucking pathetic” and “a very difficult test to be faced with,” she has an undeniable devilish charm!

Crimes: impromptu torturing a man seeking her help to flee a cult, callously prying into the trauma of her crush’s past victims to sate her own morbid curiosity, countless murder of civilians (including for singing a song she didn’t want to hear), grave desecration, attempting to make the deceased’s surviving family member feel unreasonable for criticizing the grave desecration, theft by false pretense, ordering pointless raids resulting in foreseeable unnecessary deaths to impress her crush, deceiving and manipulating allies, revealing sensitive information resulting in a deadly siege of a stronghold, destruction of sentimental property, and throwing self-victimizing tantrums any time she is called out on any of the above.

Other notes from the submitter: she’s just a funny little guy.

Excerpts:

"Case and Deaton documented an astonishing fact: unlike virtually every other demographic group in America (and other rich countries), the death rate of white, middle-aged Americans was rising instead of falling. And that this macabre trend was being driven largely by a rise in what they would call "deaths of despair" — from suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol abuse — especially in the population without a college degree."

"When Deaton first came to America in 1983, he recalls being gobsmacked by how indifferent his fellow economists were to rising inequality, and how ideologically opposed they were to government intervention in the economy.'

"I was appalled when one of my new colleagues (publicly) proclaimed that 'government is theft,'" Deaton writes. "I had grown up in a country where I, my parents, and our friends saw the government as benevolent, a friend in times of trouble, and I found it hard to believe that a distinguished academic could be so cynical and so libertarian. I still do not agree with his sentiment, but I have come to understand the extent to which state and federal government in the United States often work, not to protect ordinary people but to help rich predators make ordinary people poorer."

"Deaton writes that "the decline of good jobs" is a crucial driver of despair. "This decline, in response to globalization and, more importantly, technical change (robots), is made much worse in the United States than elsewhere by the grotesquely exorbitant cost of healthcare," Deaton writes. "Beyond that, when bad things happen and people need help, the safety net in the United States is fragmentary compared with those in other rich countries."

"In all this, Deaton sees economists as largely as complicit in the changes that have made life harder for millions of Americans. He argues that many (but not all) of the people in his profession have provided an intellectual legitimacy for a range of policies that have stripped away support for working-class Americans and forced them into an increasingly cutthroat labor market."

"They are apostles for globalization and technical change that have enriched an elite and have redistributed income and wealth from labor to capital, all the while destroying millions of jobs, hollowing out communities, and worsening the lives of their occupants," Angus writes. "And when confronted with deaths of despair, they blame the victims and those who try to help them."

(I get it... Donald Trump didn't come out of nowhere and he pandered to this MAGA demographic. I am sympathetic to a degree: they feel like they don't have anything to lose, by trying to shut down the government, and all the other stunts they are doing around the country. But the problem is they are out for blood and attacking everyone with the same vitriol, even people who are not their real enemies [like gay rights issues, and womens rights issue, and other minority issues, etc... using these groups as easy scapegoats, instead of correctly identifying the problem. The entitlement mentality of the dominant hegemony of white nationalism also plays a role in this dysfunction.]

In this, I think the MAGA people are being manipulated and being misled by those who want to confuse or conflate the real issues to service their own personal agendas.

And Donald Trump is a false Messiah for them. True, he tapped into the problem but used it for his own benefit and helped create the false narratives using these easy scapegoats to feed the flames.)

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No colonization Question

A relative of mine was recently speculating rather wildly about what Africa and the Americas would be like if there had been no European contact/ conquest/ colonization or what have you at all. He seemed to think these areas would be fantastically prosperous and advanced and I did not agree based on my understanding of their past history. I was not really very sure how to respond or put this into words. Wanted to ask what your broad strokes take on this would be? No contact Africa/ Americas would mean they would look like what in 2023? Thanks, great blog all around! 

Thanks for the nice words. 

No contact and no colonization/conquest are two very different things. No contact would mean no diplomatic missions, no trade, no intellectual exchanges, no technology transfer, no defensive agreements, no military alliances, no foreign politicking that spills over into backing rival claimants in territory, etc. I’d argue that no contact in the Americas would be almost impossible - European powers looked for alternative routes to reach the valuable spice trade routes have to go through America at some point. Similarly, Silk Road and spice trade routes will land in East Africa by the Horn by ship, so no contact is also impossible. But let’s ignore what we can. You specified no European contact, so the Arab conquest of Northern Africa still happens and trade cities are established in East Africa. This means that technology transfer still happens in Africa. The Americas, owing to their geographic isolation, are avoided because of some quirk of geography where the European powers are able to secure trade routes to Asia without sailing west. I’m not sure how exactly to go to 2023, since no contact would mean essentially rewriting the 20th century with no United States and making the Cold War wonky, as well as speculating on philosophy arising from these new nations. So this is just a rough draft of civilizations that might rise to be major powers in those areas.

In West Africa, several large empires did arise, like Mali and Songhai. So I would imagine that West Africa would be dominated by the Maghreb in modern-day Morocco and Algeria and further south by the Ashanti Empire in modern day Ghana. They would have relatively sophisticated cultures, military prowess, and especially architecture. Further east, you’d probably have Yoruba states along the Niger Delta which would struggle against Ashanti hegemony, at times being a client state, at times rebelling. In East Africa, you’d probably have a powerful trade kingdom on the Red Sea which would duke it out with expansionism pushing southwards from Ottoman Egypt. Modern-day Somalia and Kenya would probably have city-states and hinterlands, much like our own history they would be powerful trading hubs for ivory and slaves to the Arab world and India. You’d also have city-states further south along the coast, near modern Tanzania. It’d be difficult for a centralized Swahili kingdom to emerge, but if it did, it would be a regional powerhouse that struggled with ethnic differences, much as the East African Federation struggles with today. In South Africa, the Zulu reign supreme as a strong, militarist empire, I don’t see other contenders that could really challenge them, but I’ll admit my knowledge there is limited. Given regular contact with other civilizations and diplomatic ventures, everything from students studying at foreign schools to technology theft, capture in war, and industrial espionage (hey, it worked for Justinian with silkworms), technology is at a rough parity with the civilizations they’re in contact with - especially in capitals and major port cities; there are no Wakandas. My knowledge of sub-Saharan religion is poor, so I’ll let others speculate on how sub-Saharan religions might change in response without having to rely on the mechanics from CK2.

Guns, Germs, and Steel has many flaws, but Diamond is correct in that steel is an incredibly useful metal for civilizational development, both in its utility for warfare and for tool use. Since I understand metallurgy, I’ll primarily be looking at it through that lens. In the Americas, the Andean civilization never developed steelworking, and was typically limited by their terrain (making mobility difficult especially in bulk transport of goods) and lack of high-weight draft animals (llamas only carry around 60 pounds). Plows were very useful in Europe to increase agricultural yield, but don’t really work with terrace farming and no draft animals, so neither agricultural nor transport demands would be a strong driver for metalworking. However, the Andean civilization did have advanced metallurgy in regards to bronze so if the demand for better weaponry and more advanced tools becomes evident, they could develop more advanced bronzemaking techniques due to the very abundant copper in the area. If they start smelting in bulk, then they can start using useful iron from mined ore, and from there, steel. West Mexico similarly had indigenous cultures with advanced metallurgy, primarily for decorative objects like bells. Given that the Mayan Empires fell primarily for reasons of overpopulation, drought, and disease, developing metalworking to improve agricultural yields would be feasible in Mexico, and there are iron and coal resources in the area for a Mesoamerican civilization to develop steel weaponry, so you’d see what we saw in our own history for the Aztecs, a collection of city-states and their hinterlands, perhaps even allying into a sort of Peloponnesian League of sorts in response to external invaders from the north or south.

Further north, in North America, you’d probably have a large civilization building around the Mississippi, and the need for transporting goods over long, vast distances would spur development for boat transport, the lack of draft animals here hurting again. So you’d have a long, narrow civilization, but given how long the Mississippi is, that could be quite vast indeed. In the Northeast, there’s plenty of iron and coal, so if technology transfer of smelting technology happens, the Iroquois Confederacy might turn the area of Pittsburgh into an industrial center just like it was in American history if it extended its control and incorporated the Susquehannock into their people and moved west toward Shawnee territory, but that’s provided they develop the technology to mine and smelt iron and from there alloy out steel. Given the lack of demand to develop these techniques in the most advanced metallurgical civilizations, I don’t think they would develop in technological parity in that regard without major changes from our own history. So metalworking in that regard would be limited mostly to copper, which was mined and used extensively throughout North America.

Thanks for the question, Captain.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King