PatrickStar

The EU has recently decided to crackdown strongly on deepfakes, whether you're a citizen or a celebrity. This falls under abuse of AI and self-autonomy. Wouldn't the same exact rationale also work for creative media, whether it's corporate or civilian? What you make is just as self-autonomous to you too, or so I would think.

I'm unsure if this question comes from what many of you would refer to as skepticism. The inspiration to put pen to paper so-to-speak and ask the question comes from an interesting exchange I witnessed yesterday. Yesterday was the Ides of March, and someone chose the day to ask a question about people acting upon some kind of acknowledgement of the Overton Window due to the political environment we live in today, and someone joked about the irony of asking the question on the Ides of March, which is the day of the year when Julius Caesar was assassinated. Though the conversation then kind of evolved into a conversation after that where people talked about if the Overton Window was a "thing" in ancient times, with there being an understanding among us that the political activity of ancient times didn't benefit from any kind of acknowledged "moving window". Anywho, that made me think more vividly of asking this, and it can be seen as a follow-up to a previous question I had asked.

As a recap, the Overton Window is the phenomenon where people say there is said to be a window of acceptability on the political spectrum that decides how a community will act in the face of certain societal issues. If the political spectrum was a slit where a lever is stuck into, the Overton Window would be the lever. If you think about it more, in a way that reminds us that politics is meta, historicity, classical ethics, and certain non-governmental aspects of different cultures are enough to go so far as to add a layer of scrutiny to the Overton Window. How would you phrase your answer if you were having a discussion about this and someone mentioned their acknowledgement of the Overton Window was shook by thoughts like this, as one might perceive is happening here?

A very troubling revelation for International Women's Day.

Even some of those who said his murder was technically wrong still said they celebrated Brian Thompson's death on the basis that he caused people harm. Admittedly it got to a point where a lot of it was semantics.

"Ayatollah" is the title of the ruler of Iran (or Persia if we want to call it that for historical consistency), similar to how Egyptians had pharaohs or how the Greeks had archons. Until the end of February, the Ayatollah was Ali Khamenei, who was said to have dictatorial tendencies that ended with dozens of thousands of deaths. American president Donald Trump had the military sweep in and killed him. Was the broken clock right twice that day? A lot of people say no and stand by the Ayatollah.

I bring these two people up in particular because the logic seems exactly the same. They caused people harm for their own gains and were killed by someone acting out of their bounds, but [insert political party here] only supports one and opposes the other, and this is what is constantly shared on the news. The types of coverage both get is completely parallel too. The only difference being the sides switched. The parallels are strong enough to a degree where, in the groups of all the people I am associated with (apparently this is a spreading trend), people as a rule often use "Brian Thompson", "Ayatollah", and "Ali Khamenei" interchangeably or refer to both as "Ayatollah Brian Thompson" or "Brian 'the ayatollah' Thompson", often sharing art of Luigi killing the actual Ayatollah or people asking Luigi what his views are on the Ayatollah being killed (someone should do that last thing).

Is there a difference from the perspective of someone who opposes one but not the other?

I could technically explain the context as I go along with the question, but I'm generous, so here's a rundown.

Tuvalu is an island nation (or was an island nation) in the Pacific Ocean, a part of Polynesia. If there was ever absolute proof of climate change that you could show climate change deniers to disprove them, Tuvalu would be it, as Tuvalu is so flat all across its surface that the rising sea levels are swallowing it extremely rapidly. A whole nation disappearing beneath the ocean, where people could no longer call it home, was considered unprecedented long ago, so here you have a nation disappearing like a rabbit in a magician's hat and people who still identify with it (as cultures do, if you're a sociologist) wondering what to do. So while the people of the island physically change residences to places like Australia and New Zealand (which I guess technically makes them an ANZAC nation now), who have welcomed them with open arms, they decided to upload a replica of the entire island into the digital sphere and use that as the foundation for their nationality whenever someone in the United Nations questions the real-world foundation for their nationality (I guess they never heard of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta). Representatives of Tuvalu have explained it better than I can.

A lot of this isn't new knowledge to many people reading this, though the thought that we are slowly deconstructing the definition of nationhood might be. Along comes the fediverse. Anything with the right format can be federated. And here you have an actual nation that has taken on a projection of itself in digital form. And so a thought arises: in return for its protection, can we federate it (mainly as the fediverse, though some people ask it in the sense of whether we can federate it into either the United States as a state, the UK as a commonwealth nation, Russia as an oblast, etc.)? And assuming it hasn't already been federated (wink wink), what do you think would happen?

I'm helping to build an instance, and we had a debate recently on whether Platonism is left-winged or right-winged. It's an ancient philosophy, mind you. Created by Plato. One small side said it was right-winged, one small side said it was left-winged, and the majority said it couldn't be either. Someone remarked "what do you mean it's neither? Marx cited him!" Admittedly it's frustrating when you're researching these things so you can give it a respectful comparative review and someone says "you can't judge people of ancient times based on your left-right mode of measurement" in a world where something like whether Obama can do a public prank April Fool's Day is a "political" issue (remember when he said he was building Iron Man as an April Fool's joke and everyone on the right claimed it was unprofessional while the left enjoyed his sense of humor). That's somehow more worthy to put under the microscope than Plato, the world's first "public" philosopher (after Socrates and Thales who weren't of specific opinions and Ptahhotep who was more of a superior advocating an approach that worked for him)?

In my eyes at this point, as well as the eyes of the groups I help out in, everything is equally politicized as a default; that is, "politicization" is what the individual makes of it at a given moment. But I know that isn't how the world operates. Marx himself was known to write about an enormous number of topics, from faraway cultures to appropriate punishments for oddly specific crimes. How does the inherent potential of everything that exists to be politicized square with the idea that certain things are also inherently seen as non-left-or-right based on the circumstances that they hold in their own setting?