greenskye

The reason isn’t really silly, I get it, but the punishment was.

In high school I spent a lot of time reading. Basically every lunch, every study hall period, etc. I read a fairly significant chunk of the library.

Problem was that I also tended to read during boring lectures in class, which pissed off a couple of my teachers and resulted in not great grades.

But all of their punishments were designed to punish people who hated to read. So my math teacher finally snaps and sends me to in school suspension… where I sit in a room and the monitor on duty is absolutely delighted that I sat there the entire day to read and even lets me go early for such good behavior.

I was later kicked out of honors courses and put into a remedial study hall situation. Again with a monitor who was supposed to make sure people were actually studying. Only way to get out of this was … a library pass. Where I could freely read whatever I wanted. Never did spend much time in study hall.

And also we aren’t (or sometimes are) allowed to express our own displeasure at these actions. Like reacting to speech somehow isn’t covered by freedom of speech.

Something we already do for poor people. Violent criminals get held all the time and an arrested criminal waiting trial going out and committing even more crimes would result in jail without a bond option or one so high for that individual they’d never afford it.

If we applied the same logic to the rich, they’d be arrested, held for awhile, maybe released on bond depending on circumstances (which would probably be in the hundreds of millions or even billions to be equivalently painful to them). Then if they went out and did the same crimes again, they’d be locked up pending their trial, possibly with a new bond that’s set at something totally absurd like 50 trillion dollars.

One could argue easily available pornographic images of fake children increases the market and desire for pornographic images of real children and as such can result in more victims

Not speaking to any realistic images (which, if nothing else, make it harder for real investigations into child abuse to happen), only cartoon drawings and the like, but it’s hard for me to separate this logic from all of the calls about video game violence.

That moves things into ‘pre crime’ territory. “We’re going to jail you for having fake drawn images because we think those will cause you to commit a real crime in the future”. That’s also extremely problematic and has been rightly criticized when it’s used to censor violent games, movies and music.

I think there could be a better balance between taking time to get all the facts straight and taking immediate action to halt ongoing harm. The fact that the government can basically out sprint legal consequences because we have very few mechanisms to stop them in the moment is a problem.

We can stop a shooter or other violent criminal in the moment, but a more nebulous crime, like what most powerful and rich people commit is almost always left unchecked until long after it’s already over and done with.

It’s just another aspect of the class war really. The system handles poor criminals really well and is nearly useless in holding the rich accountable or stopping their crime sprees.

Yes sorry. My original statement was too vague. I was talking specifically about scenarios where there is no victim and the action was just a drawing/story/etc.

I’m not a free speech absolutist. I think that lacks nuance. There are valid reasons to restrict certain forms of speech. But I do think the concept is core to a healthy democracy and society and should be fiercely protected.

The problem is that in today’s world there’s always more content out there and there’s usually something good to read that doesn’t take forever to get good. Why would I spend time reading 3 books I don’t like when I can drop the series and get into something I do like immediately?

If this was still the old days where my choices were more limited, then sure it might be worth the effort. But I have multiple lifetimes worth of entertaining content out there. I couldn’t run out even if I tried.

This is how I felt with some book recommendations.

“It’s amazing!”

Ok, guess I’ll give the series that’s getting all the hype a shot… wtf this is garbage. When does it get good?

“Not till after book 3, but then it’s the best thing ever!”

… Nope. Not reading three trash books just to get to the good part.

To further clarify it’s specifically around thought crimes in scenarios where there is no victim being harmed.

If I’m distributing copyrighted content, that’s harming the copyright holder.

I don’t actually agree with breaking DRM being illegal either, but at least in that case, doing so is supposedly harming the copyright holder because presumably you might then distribute it, or you didn’t purchase a second copy in the format you wanted or whatever. There’s a ‘victim’ that’s being harmed.

Doodling a dirty picture of a totally original character doing something obscene harms absolutely no one. No one was abused. No reputation (other than my own) was harmed. If I share that picture with other consenting adults in a safe fashion, again no one was harmed or had anything done to them that they didn’t agree to.

It’s totally ridiculous to outlaw that. It’s punishing someone for having a fantasy or thought that you don’t agree with and ruining their life. And that’s an extremely easy path to expand into other thoughts you don’t like as well. And then we’re back to stuff like sodomy laws and the like.

Totally fair stance to take. I’m 100% on board with extra restrictions and scrutiny over anything that is photo realistic.

To me, those aren’t necessarily victimless crimes, even if the person doesn’t actually exist, because they poison the well with realistic looking fakes. That is actively harmful to others, so is not a victimless crime. Instead it becomes just another form of misinformation.

Making porn of actual people without their consent regardless of age is not a thought crime. For children, that’s obviously fucked up. For adults it’s directly impacting their reputation. It’s not a victimless crime.

But generating images of adults that don’t exist? Or even clearly drawn images that aren’t even realistic? I’ve seen a lot of people (from both sides of the political spectrum) advocate that these should be illegal if the content is what they consider icky.

Like let’s take bestiality for example. Obviously gross and definitely illegal in real life. But should a cartoon drawing of the act really be illegal? No one was abused. No reputation was damaged. No illegal act took place. It was simply someone’s fucked up fantasy. Yet lots of people want to make that into a thought crime.

I’ve always thought that if there isn’t speech out there that makes you feel icky or gross then you don’t really have free speech at all. The way you keep free speech as a right necessarily requires you to sometimes fight for the right of others to say or draw or write stuff that you vehemently disagree with, but recognize as not actually causing harm to a real person.

I get this and I don’t disagree, but I also hate that AI fully brought back thought crimes as a thing.

I don’t have a better approach or idea, but I really don’t like that simply drawing a certain arrangement of lines and colors is now a crime. I’ve also seen a lot of positive sentiment at applying this to other forms of porn as well, ones less universally hated.

Not supporting this use case at all and on balance I think this is the best option we have, but I do think thought crimes as a concept are just as concerning, especially given the current political climate.

For me at least, I’m wanting to focus our efforts beyond the goal of simply educating the unaware. A huge amount of effort over the last 8+ years has been in “awareness”. That if we simply made people aware of the bad stuff, that they’d correctly see it as bad and would want to take action.

It’s an entirely different problem we face when people are aware of the bad stuff and either don’t care or actively support it. The ‘solution’ can’t simply be awareness campaigns and the hope that people will react the way we want them to. We have to do something actually effective.

They can’t do anything if you stand your ground like these people

No, they still can. It’s not legal (for whatever that’s worth these days), but they can absolutely just bust down your door anyway. We need to start treating them like they lawless criminals they are.

The system will not save you, at least not immediately. You might get let go later, after they’ve sufficiently punished your resistance, but that’s it.

Moral of the story is that life sucks now and it’s harder and harder to actually get to do the stuff that makes you happy anymore.

I think this is because we’re missing our Aragorn. We need someone to rally us and nobody has yet risen to do so.

Also they throw enlarged salt shakers at cars, which are treated as if they now suddenly weigh more. So somehow making things bigger adds mass?

Personally I think of kobo as ‘I liked my Kindle but I just want a slightly more open ecosystem’. It’s still somewhat locked down, it’s just easier to load books from other stores and alter the reading experience on a kobo vs a Kindle.

Boox on the other hand is effectively an android tablet with a custom launcher and modified OS. You get all the good and bad that comes from a generic android device. It’s absolutely trivial to use the ereader app of your choice and it’s much easier to do things like read comics and stuff via your preferred app as well.

If you mostly stick to the stock reading experience and are just looking for ‘better than Kindle’ get a kobo. If you’re wanting full control over your reading experience and you’ve already got a preferred android ereader app, go with boox.

It’s so if we’re ever sued over anything then we’ve only got 6 months of history that we’re liable for during discovery.

Lawyers figured out it was a nightmare going through 20+ years of emails, so the ‘solution’ was simply to just not keep records for very long.

Technically you can archive important emails, but they’ve made that harder and harder to do and it’s not always like you know what’s going to be important later, so it’s really easy to not save something you should have.

I really hate that my work has a policy of deleting all chats and emails older than 6 months… And most of my projects last for longer than that, so you’re typically missing most of the emails from the start when you’re at the end.