Why, thank you. I was feeling kind of lonely. Art really does connect, doesn’t it?

edit: Sometimes I forget that there are people who struggle to walk away from conversations like these. While normally I assume sufficient consent is given by virtue of people voluntarily posting comments in a public forum, you genuinely seem to be getting to the point where you might not be giving enthousiastic consent.

Unless your reply to this comment (if any) includes “I enthousiastically consent with continuing this conversation”, I’ll stop replying to you in the context of this post.

Ah, the true essence of bad art.

Euthanasia? Well, no. You can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

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That would make what I ask of you particularly easy, then.

but it’s also the bottom of the barrel when fishing for compliments.

I can see that you have good intentions…

Really, though, there is no bottom of the barrel. Self-awareness is something that some people in therapy genuinely lack. Good intentions are something that some people genuinely lack. Kindness is something that someone people genuinely lack. Being capable of being unobtrusive for others is something some people genuinely lack.

These are not the bottom of the barrel, but solid foundations you can build from. Someone with good self-awareness can give constructive feedback both in session and irl. Someone with good intentions will actually try to improve rather than use therapy as a place to vent. Someone who is kind will use the skills and motivation they gain in therapy to build a nice community for themselves because it is reciprocal.

Imagine OOP except without self-awareness. Their subconscious has developed countertools that make therapy ineffective but they are not able to describe those countertools or even know their functioning. All they can say is that the therapy doesn’t work. That sucks so much worse than the situation OOP is actually in.

So on matters of consent, the authorities you choose to cite are slave owners, misogynists, and homophobes?

Is there even one author among the sources you pictured who would have supported my right to exist as an atheist bisexual emancipated trans woman?

“All or nothing thinking” is also known as a paradigm shift. Or a revolution, when it comes to those thoughts becoming political reality. Those do in fact happen and often make things better.

I don’t expect perfection. A society that prioritizes abolishing involuntary hierarchies is going to have a lot of issues. But it’s going to be better for human survival than a society that prioritizes accumulation of capital.

You really need to expand your political horizons. Those false dichotomies are just… sad. There is an entire world beyond the line between state absolutism and libertarian individualism. But until you can conceive of it, you are incapable of comprehending my position.

There is a reason the age of dueling ended when the enlightenment and humanism became something our societies adopted as a whole instead of those things being just the pursuit of some airy intellectuals. And it is that, with the rise of democracy, people became aware that they have the right, but also the duty to shape the society we live in to be better. This - for me - is the central point of civilization, to actively construct and shape a society that grows continually more moral and drives us to listen to “the better angels of our nature” to say it in Lincoln’s words, instead of listening to our baser wants.

This development is the cause of the biggest extinction event in Earth’s history, the colonization and genocide of tens of millions of people, and the incoming collapse of human population due to apocalyptic climate change. It has criminalized, sterilized, and slaughtered queer people for being degenerate; it has massacred barbarian indigenous populations; it has enslaved, criminalized, and exploited racialized minorities for needing a firm guiding hand; and it has beaten, murdered, and systematically disenfranchised working class people because they don’t understand.

These are not the unfortunate mistakes of the rich and powerful who have a sadly mistaken view of what it means to be civilized. Civilization has always been a means to justify violent subjugation of the working class to those working class people who are reluctantly brought on board as “middle class” because if they sided with other workers the rich would be in danger.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal”, quoth the slave owners to white workers in order to get the white workers to help them avoid taxation on their slave plantations.

It is no accident that the moral progress of civilization goes in lockstep with the power of workers. Decolonization happened when the colonies could produce their own revolutionary militias. Feminism happened as abundant machines made muscle strength obsolete. Labor rights increased with ease of communication between laborers across wide regions so they could organize strikes. And now with automation the power of workers is receding, and therefore the privileges are getting rescinded.

When a farmer stops two roosters from fighting and puts them in separate pens, is that because the farmer is so civilized that he can’t stand violence being done to animals? Or is it because the farmer wants the roosters to be in good condition so he can exploit them for greater profit?

Hint: how does the farmer feel about the butcher that slaughters his hens?

“People can be peer pressured into both lethal dueling and sex, therefore they’re equivalent” is not a valid argument.

That’s not what I’m saying. what I’m saying is that the possibility of peer pressure is not a valid argument for banning it.

That it should be legal is the null hypothesis, which must be overturned by arguments that demonstrate that criminalizing it makes society better before we can determine that its illegality is just.

Again, lethal dueling and suicide are not equivalent. Someone deciding for themselves that they’re going to end their own life…if it’s something they’ve thought about and planned (as opposed to an impulsive attemps, which are 95% of actual suicides), there’s no realistic way to stop it.

If two people decide to duel each other in private in a place of their own choosing, why would there be any more chance of stopping them?

And even if you’re talking about punishing people afterward, so many murders go unsolved, imagine how hard it gets if the person who dies fully cooperates with preparing an alibi and a means of disposal and removing any real evidence.

Dueling involves killing someone else

With their consent. Do you oppose euthanasia?

, my man.

Incorrect.

People can be peer pressured into having sex, does that mean we should make sex illegal?

More people are going to give free, enthousiastic, clear-headed, ongoing consent to sex than to losing a lethal duel, but does that mean we should go after the ones that do?

And even if such willingness were a sign in and of itself that someone isn’t clear-headed, would it make more sense to ban the practice than to offer proper mental care and general material support to people considering it?

Do you think we should make suicide illegal?

Sure, and there’s not a realistic chance of reducing emissions to the point humanity avoids extinction either.

We have to destroy capitalism anyway if we want our grandchildren to have a chance at survival. Why not abolish other involuntary hierarchies while we’re at it?

Imagine replacing detail with the most common thing that mostly fits. Take a picture of a sculpture with a cool texture? Sorry, that’s incredibly hard to specify, but it’s marble so the AI knows to redraw it as a (smooth) marble statue.

Take a picture of your partner’s eyes? Geez, do you know how complex eyes are? Look, I’m not unreasonable, the eyes are sea green in high detail with flecks of brown and a slight shimmer in the bottom right corner. Now you can have a nice compact image of your partner.

Imagine a social media where images look weird and inconsistent unless they conform to conditions that don’t produce hallucinations. Expected textures, expected lighting conditions, expected locations, expected hairstyles and expected facial features.

And yes, I do know AI sharpening is already deployed. Every time I zoom in on pictures I took with my phone I feel grossed out by the hallucinatory soup.

Perhaps things changed in the past 38+ years.

Or perhapa a show produced by the British goverment that presents {the deep state as a powerful undemocratic entity and kind-hearted people in politics as naive bumbling idiots that fail upwards because they unintentionally serve the deep state} at a time of Thatcher dismantling public services is in fact state propaganda, no less insidious for being genuinely funny and sharp-witted.

Perhaps even both.

Doesn’t Ken’s wife have like a million different professions?

… Is this kink?

The point is also that this is the pre-enshittification version of AI, and any person or system foolish enough to become dependent on it will get exploited to the best of AI companies’ abilities.

The way it works with physical printers is that there’s a very feint pattern in ink that the printer puts on every page, which is too feint to notice by eye. But if you know the dimensions of the pattern you can cut up all the tiles and add them together and get something that is clearly visible. So with a detailed scan, every printed piece of paper can be traced to the printer that printed it.

This is one of the reasons you can’t print in black and white without color on certain printers: if the pattern uses colors, then it can’t do its surveillance job without color ink, so it refuses to work at all.

A similar thing could be going on here. A pattern that looks like noise unless you know what to look for, embedded across the entire image.

Depends, are you a lesbian?

If you aren’t, then I think the post made it pretty clear.