*sigh* Reminding all of you once again...

AI art is stolen art.

If you're pro-AI art, you're harming human artists. Full stop.

At this point, I don't care if it's "real art" or not because that's not even what the real issue is, it's that it's already hard enough to succeed as an artist without having our work stolen, thrown into a digital blender, and spat back out in our faces, so we can be replaced because the value of our creativity and skill has been reduced to "content" and dollar signs. Do we mean nothing to you? Is your convenience worth telling us we don't matter?

These programs and everyone who uses them no matter how many times we've told you this can get fucked. I'm done being nice about it.

Sincerely, your salty neighborhood artist.

I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I’ve often been told – maybe because I’m queer, maybe because I’m Asian American, I don’t know – that I should be grateful for where I am. Like, ‘Don’t be too ambitious, don’t ask for too much, don’t believe that you can have that dignity, or that seriousness, taking yourself and your work seriously from start to finish.’ But I think, meanwhile, the people who make weapons never tell themselves to be humble. The people who destroy our world, who milk capital from people and products – the people who design Amazon and atom bombs – they don’t say, ‘Let’s lower the blast radius.’ People who make automatic weapons don’t say, ‘Let’s have this gun shoot fewer bullets.’ Their ambition is always unquestioned and ever increasing. Meanwhile we keep telling our artists to, ‘Tone it down, don’t take your work so seriously.’ And I think it’s so refreshing, as a younger writer, to hear you say, ‘I’ve been taking this absolutely seriously from the beginning.’ It’s a powerful thing. To see the body of work reflect that as evidence, that to give yourself dignity in your craft is actually the most respect you can give to your field.

Ocean Vuong, from “On Death, Music and Motherhood: Björk & Ocean Vuong in Conversation”, published in AnOther Magazine, September 21, 2022

posting about frivolous bullshit so I won’t get tempted to wade into the discourse again

“Burke rejected the liberal idea of the social contract, as a deal agreed among living people. Society, he argued, does not contain the living only; it is an association between the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract but something more akin to trusteeship. It is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognise that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil but ours to safeguard for our dependents.”

- Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

jfc

exit polls today suck a lot

“The choice of which technologies to develop and how they are designed is primarily a political matter.”

Nick Srineck and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future

If you ever needed proof that the new hate crimes laws are a good thing lmao

Edit, disclaimer: Take this video with a grain of salt, y'all. I follow this guy on TikTok because we have a lot of shared leftist views, but you should know he frequently employs deadpan hyperbole for comedic purposes. Much of this is intentionally exaggerated to convey his point and communicate how frustratingly ridiculous this all sounds on paper. Those of you taking this as 100% accurate and literal are missing the point and exchanging one piece of misinformation for another.

Ao3 is not the first attack carried out by this hacker group and I doubt it will be the last. Cybersecurity experts have good reason to believe Anonymous Sudan is Russian and intentionally creating division between Muslim nations and the West, but that's roughly the limit of the information available to the public. As their attacks are a potential national security issue for the countries affected, not all of the facts are available to the general populace. We can make inferences based on what we do know, but assuming this narrative is the only possible correct one is fundamentally misguided. Please take the time to do your own fact-checking before sharing your opinion and don't believe everything you hear on social media.

For Žižek, provocation is a way of life and in one way or another his primary preoccupation is ideology. “Ideology is not a matter of belief,” he says when we eventually meet. “It’s a matter of rituals that you follow even if you don’t believe in them.”

Benjamin Cunningham, from his essay “Breakfast with Zizek”, January 26, 2015, Published in BODY

“Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce  itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by  one generation to the next.”

- Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition    

"Look at this video of a child disappointed at their expensive gift! Children are so spoiled these days!"

That's cool. So, why did their parents upload their small child being upset online? In a public video, shared to the entire video? Why did they even save the recording?

Like. The kid in that scenario could be saying the most entitled nonsense in the world, and if their parents post it online to be publicly shamed, I'd still support the kid 100%. Thinking your child's life is a toy to exploit freely for #content is "spoiled"; when faced with mommy vlogers, kids should be demanding three PS5s and a new Bugatti, and we should be applauding them for it

Sometimes I wish we would start calling out the performative radicalism on this site for the poser bullshit it is. "Remember, it's always morally correct to kill a cop!" "Don't forget to firebomb your local government office!" "Wow, it sure would be a shame if these instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail got spread around!"

Okay. But you're not killing cops or firebombing government offices. You are posting on a dying microblogging website to a carefully-curated echo chamber that has radicalized itself into thinking that taking the absolute most extreme position on any subject is praxis but that anyone discussing the most practical way to effect actual change is your sworn enemy. You do not have the street cred OR the activist cred to be talking about killing cops, babe.