A sort of extended comment section

Elizabeth 'Liz' Kendall is a Member of Parliament and a Secretary of State in the United Kingdom. She's an example of what I vaguely called 'wordcel' last time: faced with riots over deeply unpopular policies and mediagenic stabbings with a side of police failure ("I don't think you have"), she plans to make foreigners stop talking about it. Perception management and simulacra.

So there's now a tool to generate the 'painting process' for AI-generated images.

As some of you probably know, I've used AI image generation myself. I've downloaded Stable Diffusion and some associated tools and played around with them extensively in order to determine their limits - and they very much do have their limits.

I've posted probably a dozen or so AI-generated images by now.

When I was still getting a sense of the limits, I used Stable Diffusion a lot. (I also experimented with Midjourney.) Now that I know what the limits are, I don't use it all that often.

I feel that it doesn't adequately reflect my artistic voice.

I'm not ashamed of what I've used AI image generation for. You probably already figured this out, but the Monday Cat was AI-generated, and the text was added manually in a program similar to Photoshop. I feel no need to misrepresent this to you, because I'm not trying to misrepresent my artistic talent.

This new tool to retroactively generate painting process is the single most-damning critique of AI art that I have ever seen.

First, we know that there are art buyers and viewers in many mediums, such as oil painting, statues, films, and video games. Each of these mediums has its advantages and its disadvantages. If AI art is worthwhile, then viewers or buyers will seek it out for its merits.

Trying to steal the production process that traditional painters use to show that their work isn't computer-generated shows a total lack of faith in AI art as a medium.

Second, for the individual artist, it suggests that they don't know the strengths of their own medium! That's not a good sign for an artist, especially one whose strength is supposed to be in that medium.

Third, again for the individual artist, it suggests that they have nothing to say. This seems to be a recurring problem for AI art boosters on Twitter. Even people using AI to do fanart seem to be better positioned on this last one.

There's something of provenance here.

We see it with forgery: the realness of money is not merely whether it passes cashier inspection. We see it with boycotts: the product per se is not the issue, the producer matters. We see it in court: some kinds of evidence require documentation of the chain of custody.

this is a 100% factual statement! that is exactly what the disparate impact standard did and why it was so insane. "your business does not have enough black people, therefore, your business is unlawfully discriminating against black people" is a statement that requires you to either believe black people aren't more likely to live in poverty and aren't being failed by the school system, or to believe that neither of those things affect outcomes. it was part of the double bind where it was illegal to discriminate based on race and also illegal to not discriminate based on race. the famous FAA ATC scandal from a few years back was driven by this standard: black people just were not applying to be air traffic controllers, this meant the FAA was racist, they deliberately stopped accepting white and asian applicants almost entirely and gave the answers to the "biographic" test to black people ahead of time so that they could attain the correct racial makeup.

So if you see widespread abolitionism in fantasy, you might ask: "when was the British Empire here?" :^D

I feel like it's almost the reverse on this one - if you want to make a fantasy empire the good guys (or close enough), introduce slavery to the setting, and then have the fantasy empire ban it. In fact, this is probably one of the easiest good guys/bad guys dividers to apply, including to introduce tension within factions, make more primitive factions less obviously uniformly good, etc.

Anyhow, it sounds like you've done more reading on this than me, so I'd like your assessment of the following position:

Privatized slavery (rather than criminalized slavery, state slavery, or labor-as-tax/corvee) involves the disconnection of individuals from institutional/social networks, and the thick web of social relations and expectations that makes a serf a serf. We would then expect it to occur (i) to members of outgroups who aren't part of the same social system, (ii) in border or frontier regions, where two social systems interface and there is more danger of raids, and (iii) when there is a breakdown in the state, as by war, resulting in the shattering of existing relations.

(an earlier version of this post was eaten by Tumblr, you might see duplicate in cache)

I don't think that's standard terminology. Almost all slavery is at least backed by the state because it's very hard for one person to keep a slave when the one person is sleeping. Some large organizations may be nominally called private but have state-like functions and capacity, such as a dedicated enforcement branch that's always on call.

Do you mean when the slave works in a private household, or has his contract held by a single person, or what? There is a very long continuous spectrum here with a lot of varying implementations that are hard to cleanly classify, like the Spartan helots who were nominally owned by government but practically assigned to households, or the Ancient Near East hierodules who were owned by the approximate equivalent of a NGO and were nontransferable.

Your statement of who slavery occurs to is spot on, AFAIK, but not the disconnection from social/institutional networks. Some examples:

Through history, the vast majority of people and cultures have only opposed slavery when it happens to the ingroup. "But what if you were the slave?" Well that line of argument was thoroughly tested with Ayuba Solomon Diallo, who was first a wealthy slaver in Senegal, and then he was captured and sold into slavery and shipped off to America to work on a plantation, and then he managed to get his freedom and come home, and he went back to slaving again. The actual experience of being enslaved in the very bad way didn't convince him slavery was wrong, only that it should happen to his enemies. The idea of mass convincing people by mere argument is absurd.

Abolitionism, in the sense of broadly generalized opposition to slavery, was historically extremely rare. There have been many lords and rulers who rescued friends and neighbors from slavery out of personal interest, or manumitted some slaves to show off their wealth and charity, or declared Jubilee for a great celebration, but they did not reason that they should end slavery as such. The fact that abolitionism is widespread in the present is a bizarre historical fluke.

Abolitionism popped up only about three times and places in history independently: First in medieval Western Europe around people like Queen Balthild, which died out when the Renaissance brought slavery back because all the cool people (Romans) had been doing it. Second in medieval Korea, which didn't spread beyond the border of Korea, and I say "border" in singular because their sole neighbor for much of that time was China. Sometimes they were adjacent to a mongol horde too, but those didn't care much for borders anyway. ;-)

Third in Renaissance/Industrial Age Britain, which is the one responsible for pretty much all other abolitionism in the world through the power and prestige of the British Empire and its influence through the colonies. Sometimes a country like Japan would decide to westernize by copying everything from Britain including the ban on slavery, sometimes the Brits forced it on other people at gunpoint. The general course of the latter was that the British would sail the Royal Navy over to Mwambaland and say "Hey, you're going to abolish slavery now" and the King of Mwamba would say "Fuck no I'm not, I need those slaves for my mines" and then the Brits would kill the King of Mwamba and most of his army and family tree and find some grand-nephew to put on the Throne of Mwamba as a puppet ruler and tell him "You're going to write a constitution abolishing slavery now, also we get the tariff revenue from your ports".

[insert nuance and caveats because I'm summarizing centuries to a paragraph, history has a lot of detail that you can read about in longer books.]

Also it would be very funny, also he's a great American who loves America and the American people (as opposed to a lot of people who love what they imagine building after they dismantle America for parts), also @daisukitoo's other reply:

This would make Donald Trump's face the symbol of unethical, clandestine financial transactions.

this story is the current obsession of those who believe in race war, most notably the owner of twitter and the rubes who follow him, and in some ways it's even dumber than the George Floyd obsession, not least because people should have learned better by now.

if I was the cop in that situation I would probably have assumed the guy on the ground was drunk! which is what British cops usually have to deal with when they get called to deal with someone being disorderly; murders are rare and the perpetrator doesn't usually call the cops.

and when the cops realised he had been stabbed they arrested the murderer and jailed him for life; this story is only an outrage if you believe cops should be clairvoyant, or arrest anyone of Indian ancestry on sight regardless of what's happening.

They arrive on scene to a call having been told that some drunk dude was being disorderly, find him delirious under a windowsil, drag him out, gently lay him in the recovery position. He says he's been stabbed, the guy who called the police says nobody was stabbed, police agree it doesn't LOOK like he's been stabbed but that they'll still check. And then they check, and then one minute later they call an ambulance. And once they figure who stabbed who the stabber is promptly arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Anything the stabber says to try to weasel out of life in prison (that the stabbed guy was racist and hate criming him) are swiftly dismissed.

The evidence of 'Two Tier Policing' here is that a murderer attempted to play the race card. But failed! The attempt to avoid a life sentence for murder by claiming the guy was racist and playing the victim didn't work, and they guy who did that got a life sentence.