btw even just regular sexual assault should logically be emasculating. You literally cannot get laid. Why is this not immediately made fun of? Why isn't this something men need to hide way more than women?
I get a spidey sense when something isn't being said. In both the criticism and defense of the Cornell sexual assault there seems to be a hole, and I cannot explain the hole without saying some stupid things. These holes, btw, I feel like they say more than the content, because often they are the things society doesn't want to talk about. Let me try and tease it out without losing too much respect.
1. OK so you've heard the term "sausage fest" before right? A "sausage fest" is an undesirable thing. Men want to hook up with women and having way too many men is not a good thing.
2. While there's nothing wrong with being gay, being perceived as gay is really bad for a heterosexual man, because it means women would lose interest in them, and / or they would be perceived as less capable of performing manhood, which is kind of important for women, and therefore for men's own perception in society. This is where the "when I snap my fingers you'll forget you were ever gay" jokes come from.
3. Men tend to ideate women as being virgins, or as having fewer sexual partners. The more men they have sex with, the worse. This is basically the central tenet of the manophere and incels. A good proportion of the incel argument goes away if your partner could just have a significantly higher body count than you.
4. Exchanging bodily fluids with other men (including one's own fluids) is seen as projecting gayness. At the extreme you can see the crazy reddit thing of "wiping your arse is gay".
So in what world is multiple men on an unwilling woman not perceived as extremely gay? (again: this is not consensual gay relations, these guys are trying not to look gay) Like the woman has had all of her autonomy removed. She's been drugged into being an object, so the only actors left are the men. This is the kind of behaviour that most men run from, but no one is making the argument here? Is it because of the conflation between gay = bad (individual heterosexual) vs gay = bad (societal)?
Apparently young men are making jokes about how great this would have been a great experience, except no it's extremely gay and you're denying a woman her autonomy and that makes it even more gay.
My point is: yeah, absolutely these scumbags should feel the full force of the law, but socially, they should also be laughed at, they should feel repercussions (including from any future female partners). The fact that the Jane Doe needs to protect her identity because society will be harsher to her than the men is just bonkers to me.
Humanity, and that includes western nations, have achieved so much. Mathematics, physics, the space race, medicine, archaeology, and on and on and on. There are so many people from so many places throughout the earth and they are all amazing.
But Pauline Hanson didn't do any of that. Pauline Hanson is a fucking idiot, and her implicitly taking credit for some branch of human progress is not something we should all let her get away with.
RE: https://aus.social/@bakuninboys/117216139224279368
Re: yesterday's toot(s), I try and compress a lot of anarchist / leftist thought so it can be argued or communicated effectively, and every now and then I hope to say something novel in the process.
But to be honest, the depth of my knowledge is also only really about as deep as these toots. Every now and then someone will just unload with a 2 hour video which honestly just leaves my analysis in dust. This is one of those videos. Ayman takes a while to get going, but there's just so much depth there.
There's a big problem with the paradox between leftist thought and leftist praxis. To go with an example here: "The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house". OK first, that's true. That's why it's theory. People saying it are being factual, but here's what happens when you turn it into praxis.
You start using your master's tools to try and dismantle their house, and people are like "heh, you idiot, the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house", except, no?
Firstly, you still need a credible plan to dismantle the master's house. If you don't have one, then fucking around with the master's tools is probably fine. At least people are learning something. Secondly, your master might just accidentally leave a hammer out and that will actually dismantle their house, and you need to recognise it as a *critical moment* for emancipation.
The theory does not preclude this, in fact the theory kind of implies that this is the right course of action: You need a plan, and plans are nothing without planning, and planning is nothing without trying things out.
However, and this is the paradox, if you just spout the theory, it sounds like you're saying the opposite "hurr durr the master's tools won't dismantle the master's house, so the sledgehammer was put there on purpose to enslave you further". That's not what it is.
The issue is that the master controls the system, so most things they "try" will end up succeeding, because all the pieces are already in place (until the pieces start to fall out of place, see the Arab Spring). For us though, most things will fail, because it's not our house. We're more testing the boundaries, spotting weaknesses. Again, the theory implies this, but the statement sounds like the opposite thing. Of *course* we'll fail; the master's tools won't dismantle the master's house, but that's the point.
A *lot* of theory reads like this, where armchair leftists will end up saying the opposite of what the theory implies for praxis. This (I feel) also creates the "left is divided" rhetoric from the left, and the "bleeding heart" rhetoric from the right. You name it, from cultural appropriation to intersectionality, etc etc. You read that theory and apply it "directly" and you'll get the opposite of what praxis should look like. Maybe this is a framing problem, but overall the left needs to be cognisant of this.
Aside: RAM prices being high is the definition of inflation. The rich having 50% of all wealth means they can enter a bidding war and basically price you out of any good. These hyperscalers aren't just getting magic money, this is how the rich spend. This is what happens when they spend against you.
Why yes, I am Cassandra, from the popular Greek management tale "Don't listen to the Cassandra".
I love the Kates. This season is a tough watch because the world just spirals but at least someone is speaking jokes to power.
"Physically frightening" lol.
I've said it before but I'll say it again, you can tell a lot about how a person lived based on how people react when they pass away.
I know fuck all about Dolly Parton, but the combination of celebration, the wail of despair, the stories, and that everyone is sharing it, wow, what an amazing human being.
The same way Cthuga is "kuh-thooga", I pronounce github as "gith-oob".
RE: https://meta.masto.host/@GamingNews/117078071851158010
Just replayed it. Charming and short. Give it a go.
On a less snarky note, something the ABC article doesn't really mention is that the reason diesel is essential is because Trucks run on it. If a proportion of trucks become electric, then the essentialness of Diesel goes down. "Running out" becomes a smaller problem.
> This year's federal budget included an $11.9 billion National Fuel Security Plan; $3.2 billion of that is to physically stockpile diesel and jet fuel.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-16/how-much-might-it-cost-to-electrify-road-freight/106956614
> Under the 2010 NBN Co corporate plan, it was estimated that the NBN construction would require A$27.5 billion in government equity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
So the Fuel Security Plan is 1/3 an NBN, and we argued over that for years and put the coalition in charge. I would like to argue the National Fuel Security Plan for 1 year.
There's a post up about AI by @bert_hubert and it's a pretty nice read [1]. There's a thread in there which is easy to miss but I think it goes to the heart of why detractors really dislike AI (though, I don't agree with the sentiment that they aren't experts; quite the contrary).
There's a video of professional dunce Jeremy Clarkson sitting in a car saying "if the car is steering and the car is braking, what am I doing?" This car wasn't a self driving car. It was just adaptive cruise control with steering assist (IIRC). So the answer to "what am I doing" is "driving the car". Just because you're not holding a button down doesn't mean you're not doing a job. You're still on the hook for all the decisions being made by the car, so actually the convenience is kind of specious, and your job is maybe harder because you've got less feedback from the system about how you're working.
I think people neglect or forget this, meaning that either they end up exhausted, or pushing the responsibility of work onto someone else. With AI, I've seen this manifest with people writing docs and just stressing about how much they have to review, or passing them on without sufficiently reviewing them. The existence of an artefact no longer guarantees the efficacy of the work. The actual workload hasn't gone down, but the noise has gone up.
This kind of brings back the some old criticism: What is AI supposed to actually do? If it helps you write (code, prose, whatever), literally everything it writes needs to be reviewed. You can either pretend that the writing is good and pass the responsibility of understanding it onto the reader, or you can subconsciously stress that you didn't quite understand what it wrote and assumed it made sense. The labour is the same.
There are a bunch of claims now that AI has solved problems in some domain. However, often this is:
- A novel model. That is, the model itself didn't solve the problem, the scientists involved solved the problem by inventing the model.
- An LLM which wrote a bunch of stuff which subsequently needed to be verified. (apparently happened in a maths algorithm recently)
Critics of AI do not put the former in the same bucket as "AI", as often these models are not LLMs (the size, the data pipeline, etc are usually completely different). The latter has the same problem "if the AI solved the problem, what did I do?". If the AI solved the problem, you wouldn't need to check its working my dude. No doubt it's a labour saving device, but all the metrics put on the thing ("Hallucination", "trustworthiness", "reliability") are human. The one definite fact: It has no interiority, should answer that these ideas aren't suitable for characterising what AI does. It's _extremely_ reliable in giving you plausible text, because that's what it _actually does_. (btw that's just Emily Bender / Timnit Gebru, it's not novel, I'm just re-iterating that this is the critique in reality).
[1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/ai-for-decision-makers/
Another thing to say here is: There are a lot of technical experts who are strongly against AI. There was recently a FriendlyJordies video spruiking AI and calling it "the next Internet". The thing is, basically every expert was a proponent of the internet, and it was the rest of society who were detractors. This time around, it seems the other way around (similar to crypto). People in the know are not backing this because it's not an elegant or scalable technology.
Remember what kicked off this whole AI thing? It was the observation that AI models got better if you made them bigger and fed them more data. Put a different way: You don't need to pay for human ingenuity, you just add more data and you get more betterer. Then, people started competing for the biggest models, so now these companies need to overpay for things like Memory or GPUs. After that, turns out we basically farmed out the entire internet, so we needed to do ever more fucked up things to get access to data. Then, it turns out there's a ton of slop already on the internet and that shit is like poison for training.
So now, in order to get "guaranteed untouched by slop" content, these companies are buying up old books to destroy them and scan them in for the content. At what point do we call this a loss? At what point do we just decide that actually even getting to this point has required a hell of a lot of human ingenuity, and things aren't improving as fast as we'd hoped? At what point do you look at the entire global economy brought to its knees with the debt, the entire energy industry not being able to answer the call of "moar power", and say "actually maybe this whole idea is a wash now that we're literally hitting the earth's limits for data. Maybe human ingenuity would have been cheaper after all?"
People on proprietary systems: I pay so it does what I want, not so I have to learn about it.
Also people on proprietary systems: why won't it do what I want.
Friends, I beseech you once again to not use "Copyright" as what AI steals from us. Copyright is law, and the ruling class controls that law. Almost every time we have used copyright to discuss what is stolen, lawsuits get settled, palms get greased, and supposed allies are brought into the fold. Some will get their pound of flesh, but this still leaves the rest of us in the cold. What's happening here is total appropriation of all art, and it needs the language of culture and the commons to defend it.
Copyright is phrased for individuals, and what is stolen is collective. When copyright is negotiated, it's done so collectively in the sense that companies which sit on a pile of copyrights will negotiate in their own interests, not in the collective interest of the people creating work.
To use one case study, I'm sure you've heard of "digital blackface", where people are using AI to appropriate black culture for their own ends. Sometimes this is directly and shockingly racist, portraying black folk as animals, or otherwise feeding into stereotypes. But other times this appears benign but still dresses in a culture with a history to dress up whatever is being sold. There are AI rap & RnB songs created to sell things now, AI black people being used to legitimise an idea. Both this supposed innocuous use and offensive use are the same: They are using black culture as a tool to make a point. The (de)humanising has a tone to manufacture consent. To choose a black voice over a neutral voice carries meaning, and that meaning is exactly what is denied when it comes to the theft (ie: there's no infringement).
It isn't just black culture. Art needs context, and so does AI art. The majority of AI "artists" have to fake that context. That context is what the technology steals. That's often why the "artists" don't want to reveal who they are or whether they used AI. They want to feign that context. Actually the exception proves the rule here. There are AI artists who really do want to bring in the context that it's AI which generated an image, the context is the alien nature of the work and how it relates to us. But mostly, it's theft. Theft as in appropriation, not theft as in infringement.
Similarly with source code. It doesn't launder an individual's code, it launders the entire FLOSS movement. It is a collective theft, and it's collective privatisation of that work. The workflows of FLOSS are breaking, and these companies start to become part of the ownership fabric of the system. Like facebook "took over" forums and then eshittified, so AI is trying to walk into FLOSS software to build fences everywhere.
Australia's largest data center under construction is the one at Marsden Park in Western Sydney[1]. It is 500MW. A nearby one at Eastern Creek is 200MW. In the hottest part of Sydney. In an era where climate change is going to push these temperatures further upwards. These AIDCs also consume an enormous amount of water.
Contrast this with a traditional AWS data center. I can't find solid data but IIUC they are about 50MW each location[2]. That's still large, but completely different from basically having 10x that usage in a single building.
[1] https://cdc.com/locations/sydney/
[2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/amazon-planning-new-data-centers-in-melbourne-and-sydney-australia/
Re Albo's AI plan, I think it's really important for everyone to get to grips about data centers, and specifically how AI data centers differ from regular data centers. This High Yield video lays it out and it's incredible. The smallest AI data centers are 100MW, and the largest 1GW. Not only do these data centers vary wildly in consumption (which can easily break even the strongest grids), but basically all the "computation" of these DCs is *heat*. Imagine having a 500MW heater in your community? This impacts the local weather, increasing local temperatures across wide distances. This is like the "urban heat island" effect on steroids.