This isn’t true. AI can generate tan people if you show them the color tan and a pale person – or green people or purple people. That’s all ai does, whether it’s image or text generation – it can create things it hasn’t seen by smooshing together things it has seen.

And this is proven by reality: ai CAN generate csam, but it’s trained on that huge image database, which is constantly scanned for illegal content.

I guess my question is, why would anyone continue to “consume” – or create – real csam? If fake and real are both illegal, but one involves minimal risk and 0 children, the only reason to create real csam is for the cruelty – and while I’m sure there’s a market for that, it’s got to be a much smaller market. My guess is the vast majority of “consumers” of this content would opt for the fake stuff if it took some of the risk off the table.

I can’t imagine a world where we didn’t ban ai generated csam, like, imagine being a politician and explaining that policy to your constituents. It’s just not happening. And i get the core point of that kind of legislation – the whole concept of csam needs the aura of prosecution to keep it from being normalized – and normalization would embolden worse crimes. But imagine if ai made real csam too much trouble to produce.

AI generated csam could put real csam out of business. If possession of fake csam had a lesser penalty than the real thing, the real stuff would be much harder to share, much less monetize. I don’t think we have the data to confirm this but my guess is that most pedophiles aren’t sociopaths and recognize their desires are wrong, and if you gave them a way to deal with it that didn’t actually hurt chicken, that would be huge. And you could seriously throw the book at anyone still going after the real thing when ai content exists.

Obviously that was supposed to be children not chicken but my phone preferred chicken and I’m leaving it.

While you’re not wrong, it’s important to retain a global perspective. There are “communist” leaders that were total pieces of shit and while they did have help, that help wasn’t always capitalist. Stalin is an example here.

And then there’s pieces of shit who were supported by external forces, but not by capitalist regimes seeking to undermine them. I’m not 100% confident in this history, and there’s no way I’m going to spell his name right, but, the Romanian piece if shit, Caucescu (???) came to power riding a wave of support from the Nazis. Hitler didn’t do it to destabilize Romania, but because he was like, “there’s some good old fashioned fascist genociders down there, let’s give them more guns.” And those fascist genociders were technically communists.

What I’m getting at is that the enemies of a worker-ruled communist state are many, and many of those enemies are within their own systems. Communism, like every other system, suffers from the fact that there are humans involved. Just because a communism exists doesn’t mean it’s going to be utopia.

But that also doesn’t mean that communism can’t be good, or at least better.

I’m not opposed to the idea but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can just try one time. Isn’t there some kind of preparation phase to be able to handle …“stuff”?

That person didn’t suggest it, it’s in OP’s list.

There’s no benefit to that. Removing the limit on house representatives, that’s huge and real, but merging Congress is dumb. There’s a few dumb things on the list (eg “abolish gerrymandering” is like saying “abolish speeding”). Choose your favorite!

Edit: Now that I’m not trying to hurry to get ready for work:

Chapter One: the HoRs.

For those that aren’t aware of how it works:

There’s are two lawmaking bodies with two different purposes. The Senate is equally split among states. There are 2 senators for each state – as a result, those seats are elected by their entire state (more people voting on each person), and the seats are more competitive (more people want to be elected to that seat). So Senators tend to be more serious politicians, more “universally appealing” (aka centrist). This also makes the Senate the one that gives smaller, or less populous states, more power, because both California and Wyoming get 2 senators, no matter what. These factors contribute to the Senate being a more deliberative body.

The House Representatives are determined by population – so California has many more senators than Wyoming. They’re elected in their district, which can be quite small, so the profile of voters in a district is often very different than in an entire state. (This is why all the crazies are in the House.)

There’s a minimum, obviously – the smallest state will always have at least 1? Or 2? I don’t remember. But you can’t have a state with no representation, that’s not ok.

The problem is, our national population is very very different from what it was. The difference between New York and Maine is much more drastic than it was 200 years ago. But we haven’t increased the number of Representatives. And there’s a minimum. As the oopulation grows, and the House doesn’t, it’s becoming more and more unbalanced, in favor of smaller states.

Imagine trying to get smaller states to vote in favor of decreasing their power.

(Also: electoral college votes are on the same system. The electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power, but because there’s a minimum, and we haven’t reduced the total, it’s become super imbalanced. It was a mediocre idea to start with, and now it’s even worse. Abolishing the EC is pretty popular, but it might be easier/better to just follow the rules and increase the total number of EC votes. But, again, small states won’t agree to it.)

The Constitution says we’re supposed to increase the total number of Representatives (and EC votes) but at some point (1929 to be specific) Congress was like nahhhh

Chapter two: why we can’t Abolish Gerrymandering.

First of all, it’s already illegal.

Secondly, it’s hard for outsiders to tell the difference between appropriate “gerrymandering” and actual gerrymandering. If you look at Chicago, where I’m from, there’s a weird vote assignment on the west side of the city, it looks manipulated and weird. But if you live here, you know, there’s a huge highway that cuts through there that’s very hard to cross, so populations on one side are very different from on the other. One side of the highway is there a bunch of Latino immigrants and settled, and on the north side are more affluent (white) people.

(The fact that a highway cuts through a neighborhood isn’t an accident, but that’s just regular systemic racism, unrelated to Congress.)

If you made the voting map a simple grid, the Latino voters might be split up in a way that reduces their voting power. So the map is weird, but it’s actually good that it’s weird.

(This is why I said it’s like speeding: one, it’s already illegal, but two, it’s something everyone is doing (and traffic would be super shitty if everyone followed the speed limit), but some people are taking it to an illegal extreme.)

If you look at a state, calculate a percentage of the minorities, and check that number (those numbers – since there are more than one minority) against the number of districts that vote the way those minorities vote, then, that’s what we’ve decided is “fine” – and, for real, what else are you going to do.

Illegal gerrymandering is when those blocks of voters (“blocs,” is you want to get into Gramsci), are intentionally divided so as to reduce their power. The voting rights act of 1965 made this illegal, and every ten years, after the census, districts are often redrawn. In 2010, we ended up with a lot of gerrymandering. Now,finally, were starting to see some corrections to badly gerrymandered maps, like Alabama, Florida, New York, Wisconsin, Georgia… Louisiana…idr the others, but it’s a lot. 2024 is going to have a very very different House of Representatives than the one we have now.

This last point is worth underscoring. The current Republican house majority is due to illegal distract maps. It is, technically, an illegal Congress. So all these ridiculous shenanigans the House Republicans are up to shouldn’t be happening. (And, in fact, one could easily make the argument that the high percentage of insane and stupid Republican Representatives is because of the maps – because the the “depressurization” caused by fair maps would have dialed Congress back to a more centrist stance.

If you want to learn more, check out Democracy Docket, which is a news source from a group of people (lawyers) who are taking bad maps to court.

I’m not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that they’re not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I don’t hate IRC but it’s definitely way less user friendly.