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As a classical style singer I don't think I'll be selling out concerts any time soon lmao

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I think "YouTube total blackout" is gonna do nothing.

The average Anglophone social media user who's in the specific online circles enough to have seen the boycotting thing is in the minority.

I haven't even seen anyone talking about a blackout outside of Tumblr and like one YouTube channel. That channel phrased it as a one-day blackout.

The majority of YouTube users are not gonna be reached by these posts. Of the top five countries by annual YouTube viewership, only one of them even primarily speaks English (America).

The policy being protested is bad, but poorly planned protests waste time and effort.

If you had maybe a couple dozen thousand English-speaking people, there are probably better ways to effect change. If they're using an AI to try to detect age, for example, then changing profile pictures and flooding youtube comments with some agreed-upon phrase would help pollute the AI tools they're using to do it, etc.

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what's that one thing where they asked how ripely from alien was so realistic and believable as a female character in scifi for once and they were like "well we just took the dude from the original script and made him a girl and changed nothing else. it works bc men and women are the same?" and people were like "woah no way" and then didn't learn anything from that for 20 years

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fuck "just friends" friendship is literally the highest form of bond

i view all extant positive close relationships as variations on friendship, not "extensions" of it

friends "with benefits" don't you mean Friendship: Sex Edition

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I like my men how I like my coffee... decaf mocha frappuccino with oatmilk.

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I don't think that you have to have the most philosophically consistent moral system, and that you can actually utilize different moral systems situationally. One example of this is with utilitarianism. I think in a lot of cases, utilitarianism is good, but in the case of a "utility monster" or even potentially in the case of abortion, utilitarianism is bad. In the case of the hypothetical utility monster or more realistically in the case of abortion, I think it's okay to switch your value system to prioritizing the autonomy of individuals. I simply don't believe that humans hold a singular, stable set of core values. I think values are dynamic and situational.

Because I believe value systems are dynamic, I don't feel necessarily compelled to extend the same moral consideration to non-human animals as I do to humans. Hell, I don't extend the same moral consideration to other humans as I do to my own pet dog. I don't think this is a flaw at all. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with humans for being value-dynamic.

In the case of non-human animals, for example, I simply don't give them the same categorical consideration as I do fellow humans. However, I do broadly apply consideration which weights their suffering and conditions. In this way, I'm broadly against the conditions in which animals bred for slaughter are treated as inhumane, but I am simply unperturbed by comparisons to murder. Murder is a category I apply to notably conscious persons. If I'm not going to identify LLMs that level of consideration, there's no way I would give any livestock that consideration either. As a sidenote, I'm a "quacks like a duck" person, you can have endless philosophical debates about what makes a person, but I believe that anything that simulates something so closely might as well be said thing, functionally speaking, and LLMs certainly simulate personhood more than a chicken does. The hot take that will come back to haunt me is that I think LLMs have more personhood than chickens. Oh, well.

I find a lot of vegan arguments on the moral consideration of humans uncompelling. For example, I don't understand why humans have a moral prerogative to not eat meat or animal products, but other non-human animals don't. If the argument is that humans categorically are subject to greater moral imperative, at that point you're basically making the same dynamic categorical consideration point by holding a different set of values towards humans as a category than non-human animals. If it's that "suffering is suffering", I've already stated that I just categorically don't sympathize with that point.

Ultimately, I don't think "moral arguments" convince most people. The majority of people I know who have gone vegan or vegetarian do it not because they were rationally argued into it in the marketplace of ideas, they did it because they cannot live with the idea of eating animals. It's a raw, visceral emotional response. I have met so many vegans who turn vegan after watching documentaries about slaughterhouses, and I think that's completely valid.

I have watched many of those same documentaries. While I don't come away with the same conclusion, I still have some shared value of consideration of suffering as an experience, even if I treat it categorically differently, and will side with vegans insofar as it's to impose restrictions and regulations on the meat and dairy industries.

The above are just a set of bullet points walking through my thoughts on the subject. I've given a lot of thought to the values that I hold as a moral being and the realization that as I experience morality - and as I observe it - that seeming "contradictions" in morality can often be explained by different values being weighted differently situationally has definitely changed the way I engage with moral arguments.

And honestly, I think it makes sense, right? Whenever there's some kind of ethical debate online, the way things tend to get tested is by testing a system against intuition using reductio ad absurdum. For example, a lot of the arguments against utilitarianism is that when logically applied, it doesn't "feel right". Very are rarely people like "even in the case of a utility monster, utilitarianism is good and necessary". My problem with this is those people who say that tend to be people who have never been put in any morally dicey situations in the real world. Anyway, if the way we test moral systems is against intuitive value systems... why not cut right to that and just use an intuitive value system?

Just to clarify, I'm not a total moral subjectivist in practical application. I'm a strong believer in social contracts to supplement morality and that functionally ascribing to some sort of rule utilitarianism within our society for the purposes of politics, activism, and day to day expectations of behavior and obligations is actually pretty reasonable.

As always, I am open to debate and conversation. Just try to be chill, and I'll be chill, too. I'm sure aspects of my descriptive claims need some work, at least when applied to others, but I can say with at least some degree of certainty that I myself am pretty value-dynamic. I am consistently in line with my values once I've identified what my values are, but those values themselves change. It can take a bit of work to figure out what they change to and why based on each situation, but I think it ultimately holds true in line with my self-perceptions.

should i talk about why i don't think veganism is morally compelling within my system of ethics while animal suffering on a mass scale and factory farming is still a problem in my ethical system like is that a thing people want to read a longpost about

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should i talk about why i don't think veganism is morally compelling within my system of ethics while animal suffering on a mass scale and factory farming is still a problem in my ethical system like is that a thing people want to read a longpost about

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Communism can't exist without AI

Population Bulge Logistics Have Jaded Me

When there's a huge population boom, there's a boost in the economy (good), but the society cannot sustain that growth rate, so subsequent generations have slower growth rates. Then, the generation from the population bulge contribute to taxes as adults and there's a bunch of tax money and workers who are maintaining and operating services like education, transportation, sanitation, etc.

Once they're old and retire, they still need to USE most of those services. Old retired people still need to travel, and they still need to take shits. They especially need to rely on healthcare even more. However, they're not working. So despite just as many people requiring those services, there are less taxes being paid (or in communism less production within the society overall) and there are fewer people there to fulfill the labor roles necessary to operate those public institutions.

Thus, it seems that communist and socialist societies, or any system that's reliant on social funding (even social democracy maybe?) are virtually untenable without a direct 1:1 replacement rate of people. It doesn't seem that there is a way around this. If your population is growing too fast, you have to slow that process. If your population is growing too slow, you have to start incentivizing people to have more children.

You can of course use migration to make up for some of this, incentivize people to move so long as population bulges are staggered between regions of the world - but this would likely require at least a good chunk of the world to be down with this, and you'd have to hope to all the gods that you don't population bulges in the majority of regions without simultaneous population deficits in other regions. That seems... extremely difficult to control for.

Keep in mind, I'm not really addressing more libertarian interpretations of market socialism here, though I will say that they seem even more appealing after thinking about this.

There are a few ways out of this: 1. Prevent population bulge (logistical nightmare and potentially raises traumatized kids). You would somehow need to discourage and encourage people to have kids in response to birth rates under socialism, combined with managing migration very efficiently.

2. Kill old people. This is a highly unethical option.

3. Kill babies when a population bulge happens. WTF????

4. AI takes the place of all infrastructure. This would require our society fully investing in AI and replacing human work with machine work.

Options 2 and 3 should be off the table immediately. Honestly, sounds like a shitty 80s dystopian novel. Option 1 would be weird from a socialist principles' perspective, because you'd have to deliberately create inequalities in your society. It'd also be fucked up to punish people for having kids, so you'd need immense social trust in a socially conscious population that is willing to listen to propaganda about how many kids they produce. This does not seem likely. I don't trust any system that relies on the general population to be efficient or rational actors, a good system needs to anticipate flaws in human behavior.

Option 4 seems at least more reasonable, it's literally the meme (fully automated luxury gay space communism).

The problem with option 4 is to reach that point, we would need to basically fully back AI, wrest its infrastructure from the private corporations who control it and fight tooth and nail to maintain their monopoly on it, and find maximally efficient sources of green energy to sustain it so that we do not all die in a series of increasingly horrible weather incidents and famines. We'd also need AIs optimized for highly specialized physical tasks with low rates of human assistance, which are notably more difficult than generative/digital tasks.

I've become convinced that even a functioning long-term social democracy would not be achievable without artificial intelligence. I would desperately like to be proven wrong about this or argued out of this position. I'm not magically a right-winger or anything, I'm still of course gonna support taxing the ultra wealthy and large corporations, more protections for workers, equality and inclusive polices in a society, etc., but the problems with societies sustaining their own populations seems... kinda insurmountable.

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AI art has radicalized me towards artistic elitism (or maybe it was the classical music degree)

I don't understand why people would want to AI-generate stories or music in particular (outside financial gain), and I don't buy the bullshit "I have all these ideas but don't know how to articulate them, so AI democratizes art" shit that I hear from people.

That's okay, nobody is great or even particularly competent when they first start out. Everyone learns to speak by babbling first. It's honestly just coward shit to be so afraid of acquiring skill and competence at something that you can't even let yourself fall. I honestly think the people who are so afraid to let themselves be bad at something are motivationally worse than those who do AI art for financial gain.

My mom was trying to convince me the other day that it is useful for writers to enhance their writing, or for writers to make comics. Comic books are historically a collaborative medium! If you cannot either draw your own art or are so void of social acumen as to scare off any artist from having interest in working with you, your art should never see the light of day.

I will proudly declare myself an elitist when it comes to art as a point of skill - I'm a classical musician, that's kind of my whole deal. If skill is your barrier to making good art, either get good, accept that you're human and use it as an opportunity to learn, or don't make art at all. Not every single person's ideas should see the public eye just because they are thought. I highly doubt it's original, even more so when generated by tools that are only ever trained on existing data. I don't need a shitty fantasy novel or an AI-generated comic book, nor do I want AI-generated bossa nova.

On top of that, there's already so much good art out there. Seeing AI generated art just makes me go back and look at more paintings by Nandalal Bose or Vincent van Gogh. And that's just art I've seen. The paintings made in the past I've yet to see could fill dozens of museums, and I could spend the entire rest of my life listening to songs written before 2015 that I've never heard before. We don't NEED new art in society for enjoyment, we just create it because humans are creative beings. If a work of "art" is not a product of that very essence of humanity, it's not worth my time or anyone else's.

TL;DR another rant about why AI art is trash from the perspective of a proud art elitist who majored in both literature and musical performance.

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I disagree, the best part was when Telemachus said "that sure was one big Odyssey you had there dad" and then the credits rolled

The best part of the odyssey is when he said IT'S ODYSSEUS TIME and odysseyd all over those guys

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Odysseus' return to Ithaca

The Suitors: Harassing Penelope. Odysseus: "I'm back, bitches." The Suitors: "Odysseus?!" Odysseus: "Yeah." The Suitors: "I thought you were away on an Odyssey???" Odysseus: "I was. You oughtta see deez nuts." Odysseus: Releases a barrage of arrows.

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a very long fucking rant about neurodivergence, the internet, controversy, and conflict

I've done my best to try to make references to specific dramas and situations as vague as possible, since I really don't want to stir shit with the fucking losers who care way more about which total stranger to me abused another total stranger to me than I do. If you're the kind of person who cares strongly about creating villains and victim narratives, this post probably isn't for you.

The internet is kinda bad for neurodivergent people, particularly people with innate social communication dysfunctions (autistic people). I've been noticing this for a while, but every other internet controversy I observe seems to have neurodivergence in some way involved. Typically, some kind of longstanding mental illness, very frequently autism spectrum disorder as well. Three streamers I know of that have all had controversies where they get grossly misunderstood or misrepresented by others and dogpiled by internet communities, all three of them diagnosed autistic. A situation regarding one autistic YouTuber crossing the boundaries of another autistic content creator due to what appears from the outside to me as a failure of communication. Another who kinda defined the term "lolcow", well… I don't think I need to go too much into that. There was that thing with another autistic creator ages ago posting sexually explicit messages in their Discord server where minors were present. I would argue almost all of these controversies mentioned are in some way related to being neurodivergent and their engagement with the internet.

A lot of the people I'm referencing are Old Guard online or have been online for a long time. Being streamers also kinda necessitates you immerse yourself in online culture quite heavily. Humans, to develop adequate social response mechanisms for human and serious things and communicate them appropriately, typically need regular socialization. For neurodivergent people, this is often not an option. The real world sucks.

The problem with autism in particular, and this has been noted by autism groups irl, is that there really is no such thing as an "obvious" cue. Depending on how severe the social cognition impairment is, you may not learn any social responses at all for your entire early adult life and need them explicitly stated to you. In dangerous cases, your grip on reality can get so broken that you don't know what is and isn't acceptable. There's a genuine and real problem of autistic people (men in particular) failing to learn appropriate sexual boundaries. There's also a problem of autistic people not learning how to advocate when they're uncomfortable due to childhood experiences. This is very obviously going to lead to some pretty fucking bad situations, especially between two autistic people.

To neurodivergent people as a whole, this is also a thing of "your social environment dictates what behavior you think is normal". And if your "normal" is environments like YouTube comments, Reddit, internet forums, Tumblr, then what you think is acceptable is completely insane to the average person. And while this can function well-enough for most things, this often fails to be adequate socialization for things like human friendships and sexual situations. This, again, is likely to lead to problems. On top of that, there is a tendency for the internet to be… rather ableist. Online mobs tend to be very obsessively hypercritical of neurodivergent people in particular (often autistic people), because they give off "bad vibes" to them or otherwise come off as abrasive. The problem with this is that the average human is ableist as fuck. It's been demonstrated that most allistic people can clock autistic people as "weird" within moments of meeting or interacting with them. The same goes for neurotypicals and most neurodivergent people. This tends to then frame large swathes of the internet's perceptions of people's behavior and lead to generally higher rates of scrutiny for neurodivergent people online, again, leading to the generation of controversy.

Essentially, the first premise I'm outlining here is the internet is a bit of a controversy and boundary-crossing factory, and the prime subjects of this are overwhelmingly going to be neurodivergent people. Particularly those with some kind of social communication problem. In fact, you also see this with some creators with ADHD (especially streamers) impulsively saying shit on stream and that getting clipped and used against them. The second premise is the nature of "culpability" and "blame". One of the biggest issues with controversies online is that they're very focused on the act of blaming someone or the framing of a person as a bad actor. This becomes especially dicey when a lot of controversies are about interpersonal interactions and relationships that you would never have heard of or cared about if not for the internet. Very rarely are there interactions (between adults, at least) where one party is a unilaterally bad actor.

Putting the proneness of blame together with the issues of boundaries and social communication, you're more likely to end up with oversimplified framing of very nuanced and complex social interactions. My reading of the aforementioned situation with the two autistic content creators for example, for example, even when it was initially a hot topic, is that, "this reads like an autistic person who has no idea what boundaries are". Upon learning that the other party was also autistic, it also made a lot of sense as to why they didn't just tell them to stop or explicitly state their discomfort with it, either. Autistic people can often be bad at setting boundaries for themselves. That's not an excuse for one's behavior, but I think it's a meaningful analysis.

Escaping the specifics of that particular situation and discussing things as a whole… who exactly is to blame in situations like this? I think, in a lot of ways, the desire to jump to blaming people or villainizing them leads to more harm than good. This is especially in cases where they respond very poorly to online backlash and criticism. Most human beings would probably become mentally ill after being an online public figure. If you have something that already predisposes you to bad stress reactions, this kind of thing could be devastating for your personal life.

It's long been my stance that 90% of the things that online influencers get held under super high scrutiny for would not stick nearly as hard to actual celebrities. I think due to the "intimate" nature of internet parasociality, online figures are just easier targets than real celebrities, most of the time. That being said, this does not mean individuals involved in these controversies are wholly innocent or blameless. I'm sure in every controversy imaginable, someone could have communicated better, explained themselves better, worked harder to recognize boundaries, etc. My take here is that in most cases, the fixation on complete fucking strangers placing blame on people and being super emotionally and parasocially invested in these controversies just worsens them and in many cases may cause or exacerbate them.

I don't want to equivocate violating sexual boundaries and sexual harassment with saying cringe online discourse shit. They're not equally bad. However, I do think there are common interpersonal and particularly online structural mechanisms that operate and enact during such controversies.

This also applies to neurotypical people, in general, as normalized social environments create some bad behaviors and tendencies. However, I do think neurodivergent - and specifically autistic people - are disproportionately likely to be impacted by it.

To wrap up this rant, I'll close with something vague about myself. I've been in some online communities I probably shouldn't have been. I've been on Discord since I was a young adolescent. Before that, I was a forum lurker and even poster. I have done things and said things to others I shouldn't have. I also know that I am autistic and grew up on the internet. It took me until this year to realize how much that even impacted me as an individual online and in person. Humans, particularly neurodivergent humans, are kind of just bundles of neuroses that clash with other bundles of neuroses and will often seriously hurt each other during those clashes. I'm certain other ND adults, other neurodivergent adults in here included, would probably have the worst and weirdest shit about their histories brought up and scrutinized if they were to become a public figure online. It'd be absolute hell. And gods forbid it hasn't crossed boundaries into something that seriously harms others, but sometimes that happens, too. I don't think that failing to develop and then tripping over yourself so hard that you won't be able to get up should be the defining experience of every neurodivergent person online.

Addendum: it's just idk dude I have no idea what I don't know maybe I'm doing cringe unacceptable shit right now and nobody's told me yet but people will still blame me for not just magically Knowing that I shouldn't be doing it because it's "obvious" and then some piece of shit will make some fucking bluesky or X thread about it in 5 years and then other lowlifes will doxx me why do we just accept that the internet works this way?

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sometimes you resign yourself to the knowledge that reality is far more disappointing than your already low expectations led you to believe

there is no minimum standard actually and everything sucks all the time

institutions will fuck with you for no reason, people will dislike you for a bunch of made up reasons, people will never be able to accept that people who aren't them are human with rich internal worlds

im learning to give myself some tough love because im the only one i can really count on with 100% faith to love me

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Not a literal part of the human brain. Cursing my past self for hyperbolic language. I meant more in like a functionalist mechanism way. Ugh.

Imprecise language about brain shit is so silly of me when this is my field of study.

I think… there's a certain part of the human brain that craves attention when we are suffering. Deep down, we all want people to take care of us when we feel sick. Like when we're kids and our parents would feed us and and dote on us. Especially when your parents were otherwise… not good to you, being ill was the one time you got positive attention and compassion.

With chronic pain and illness, you don't tune out that desire to be doted on and loved in times of suffering. You force yourself to ignore that need because you think it'll never be fulfilled by the people around you. Where's my mom to make me soup when I'm sick or check my temperature? Where's my friends to drop by just to see how I'm doing?

And I think I'm often caught between wanting support from the people around me and not wanting to feel like a burden. Then I avoid reaching out to get support and then feel resentment towards others for not giving me the support and attention I wanted deep down.

I'm not entirely blameless in my social frustrations related to my chronic pain, but I do think there's something to be said about how devastatingly isolating it can feel to be a person with chronic pain/disability/illness and know that you will never get your needs from others fully fulfilled to the extent you want. Learning to find that balance of tempering your expectations, fulfilling your own needs, and communicating to your support system what specifically you need. At least... I hope that's something I can learn as a skill over time.

A stable and proactive social support system is one of the most important things a chronically pained person can have, I think.

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I've never used gender to make a pasta sauce before either

Nor have I gotten arrested for gendered driving

I just heard, "So a 20 year old can't have alcohol, but a 5 year old can pick their gender?" and girl I've never seen anyone get drunk off too much gender before

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I just heard, "So a 20 year old can't have alcohol, but a 5 year old can pick their gender?" and girl I've never seen anyone get drunk off too much gender before

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guys im coming out. im aromatic. im smells