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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • You’re not wrong. There’s nothing that requires the two parties be Dems and GOP. But you’re not going to overturn one or the other in a single election, and that means losing to the farthest big party from you, likely a few in a row, while that gets resolved. Especially if you try to do it top down instead of building support from local/county offices up.

    Basically, if you could get enough third party support, you could either supplant one of the existing parties or force them to shift to stay competitive. The argument is that trying to do so with the office of president when doing so promotes a fast track to outright fascism is a painfully bad tactic.


  • Honestly, we need to reform our economic system and not continually rely on fertility to solve all of our problems.

    Fertility and demographic collapse aren’t about supporting an economic system. Even if we were a post-scarcity communist utopia women would need to average 2.1 children/woman to maintain the existing population (2.1 isn’t growth, it’s maintenance - if you wonder why it’s slightly higher than the number of people involved with making new people it’s because you also have to cover for infertility and mortality among those children) or the same population-level result would occur. The nasty thing about demographic collapse is that it’s subtle until it isn’t and by that point it’s really hard to fix. There is no economic system where people don’t need to make more people to have a stable population, at least not unless/until we achieve some kind of immortality.

    Ultimately you have three options when it comes to the topic, and they all have downsides:

    1. Get your people to make more people. Downsides: Those new people aren’t really contributing to society for a couple of decades, which means it’s a long term fix for a problem that might be a big problem in a shorter term than that depending on where we’re talking about. Also, there aren’t a lot of ethical ways to do this, and the ones that are ethical aren’t extremely effective.

    2. Import people from elsewhere. Downside: If you do this too quickly and/or without pushing for assimilation you will irrevocably change if not destroy your culture. This is why places like Japan and South Korea aren’t allowing unlimited mass immigration from anywhere people are willing to come from despite being on the cusp of the “until it isn’t” part of “subtle until it isn’t.”

    3. Do nothing, and hope it just fixes itself. Downside: This is essentially a death spiral for your people.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlSchrödinger’s China
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    4 days ago

    What exactly does “should” mean in this context?

    I think the implication is that it’s essentially being prevented from collapse because it’s so ingrained in international trade that if it were to collapse it would hurt you and your allies too much, so you don’t allow it to collapse when it otherwise might.






  • was seeded with the face of a 15yr old and that they really are 15 for all intents and purposes.

    That’s…not how AI image generation works? AI image generation isn’t just building a collage from random images in a database - the model doesn’t have a database of images within it at all - it just has a bunch of statistical weightings and net configuration that are essentially a statistical model for classifying images, being told to produce whatever inputs maximize an output resembling the prompt, starting from a seed. It’s not “seeded with an image of a 15 year old”, it’s seeded with white noise and basically asked to show how that white noise looks like (in this case) “woman porn miniskirt”, then repeat a few times until the resulting image is stable.

    Unless you’re arguing that somewhere in the millions of images tagged “woman” being analyzed to build that statistical model is probably at least one person under 18, and that any image of “woman” generated by such a model is necessarily underage because the weightings were impacted however slightly by that image or images, in which case you could also argue that all drawn images of humans are underage because whoever drew it has probably seen a child at some point and therefore everything they draw is tainted by having been exposed to children ever.



  • A more apt comparison would be people who go out of their way to hurt animals.

    Is it? That person is going out of their way to do actual violence. It feels like arguing someone watching a slasher movie is more likely to make them go commit murder is a much closer analogy to someone watching a cartoon of a child engaged in sexual activity or w/e being more likely to make them molest a real kid.

    We could make it a video game about molesting kids and Postal or Hatred as our points of comparison if it would help. I’m sure someone somewhere has made such a game, and I’m absolutely sure you’d consider COD for “fun and escapism” and someone playing that sort of game is doing so “in bad faith” despite both playing a simulation of something that is definitely illegal and the core of the argument being that one causes the person to want to the illegal thing more and the other does not.










  • Even then, a common bit you’ll hear from people actually defending pedophilia is that the damage caused is a result of how society reacts to it or the way it’s done because of the taboo against it rather than something inherent to the act itself, which would be even harder to do research on than researching pedophilia outside a criminal context already is to begin with. For starters, you’d need to find some culture that openly engaged in adult sex with children in some social context and was willing to be examined to see if the same (or different or any) damages show themselves.

    And that’s before you get into the question of defining where exactly you draw the age line before it “counts” as child sexual abuse, which doesn’t have a single, coherent answer. The US alone has at least three different answers to how old someone has to be before having sex with them is not illegal based on their age alone (16-18, with 16 being most common), with many having exceptions that go lower (one if the partners are close “enough” in age are pretty common). For example in my state, the age of consent is 16 with an exception if the parties are less than 4 years difference in age. For California in comparison if two 17 year olds have sex they’ve both committed a misdemeanor unless they are married.