Links 23

Shell shareholders, and revenge porn

Shell Shareholders Laughing

From @WattsWilma:

The war in Ukraine is a decisive battle over the future of Europe

Andrew A Michta notes that Europe is turning eastwards:

The war in Ukraine is a decisive battle over the future of Europe, its geostrategic reconfiguration and, ultimately, its new security architecture.

It marks a tectonic shift in the Continent’s evolution, caused by both Putin’s historic miscalculation as well as the resistance of the Ukrainian people. And the swift, almost instinctive, response of the United States to provide military and economic assistance only accelerated this change.

This is a system-transforming war, for it has exposed the calcified skeleton of Europe’s power distribution, seemingly submerged under an overlay of institutions, generated by decades of supra-nationalism to offset the Continent’s military weakness post-1945. It has also uncovered competing intra-European interests and alignments, while forcing front and center the question of whether the existing institutions are still up to the task.

The European Union is turning eastward in its foreign and defence policy, which will increasingly be led by nations like Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and (when it joins) Ukraine. All of these nations have recent experience of being dominated by Russia and are determined not to repeat the experience.

The Great Logging Off

Lars Doucet thinks that as social media gets full of AI-generated spam accounts, real humans will leave:

Up until now, all forms of spam, catfishing, social engineering, forum brigading, etc, have more or less been bottlenecked by the capabilities and energy of individual human beings. Sure, you can automate spam, but typically only by duplicating a rote message, which becomes easy to spot. There's always been a hard tradeoff between quantity and quality of the sort of operation you want to run. With AI chatbots, not only can you effortlessly spin up a bunch of unique and differentiated messages, but they can also respond dynamically as if they were a person.

What happens when anyone can spin up a thousand social media accounts at the click of a button, where each account picks a consistent persona and sticks to it – happily posting away about one of their hobbies like knitting or trout fishing or whatever, while simultaneously building up a credible and inobtrusive post history in another plausible side hobby that all these accounts happen to share – geopolitics, let's say – all until it's time for the sock puppet master to light the bat signal and manufacture some consensus?

Brexit harms UK economy

Bowler Hat Man notes that Brexit is harming British businesses' productivity:

Another win for Brexshit!

Deutsche Welle on Brexit

On the subject of Brexit, here's Deutsche Welle:

Don't the Germans have a word for pleasure at others' misfortunes?

RIP Unionism

Wee Ginger Dug writes:

2022 will be remembered in the Scottish history books as the year that the UK Supreme Court put a stake through the heart of traditional Scottish unionism. There are no unionist political parties in Scotland any more, only parties which seek to maintain the political and constitutional subordination of Scotland to the dictates of English nationalism and a Westminster parliament which is its creature.

Quack Lives Matter

Radley Balko writes that after every well-publicised case of police brutality in the USA, police collaborate with local media to produce puff pieces of them saving baby ducks:

I’ve written quite a bit over the years about how local media cover police, but until today I was unaware of this particular trope. So I did a quick Google search of my own. And, my goodness. I had no idea!

I found 30 — yes 30 — separate stories from just the last two years before I decided I’d spent enough time on this post. I’m sure a more thorough search would have turned up a lot more.

What’s incredible is not just that so many baby ducks keep wandering into storm drains, but also that there are so often police officers nearby to save them, and that word of these rescues keeps finding its way to a local news reporter. It’s quite the fortuitous string of coincidences.

In any case, please enjoy these 30 stories about police saving baby ducks.

Old weapons become useful again

Seen on r/NonCredibleDefense:

The gun in this picture is a Soviet ZU-23-2, designed in the 1950s as an anti-aircraft gun. By the 1980s aircraft had got faster, and could attack the ground while flying higher, so the ZU-23-2 was no longer useful. But come the 2020s, there are lots of slow, low-flying drones on the battlefield, and the ZU-23-2 is an ideal weapon to counter them, particularly if updated with a modern fire control system.

You're more likely to be killed by a lawnmower than an AR-15

HWFO points out that if you live in the USA you are more likely to be killed by a lawnmower than by an AR-15 or similar gun:

AR-15 murders are somewhere between “Death By Bucket” and “Death By Lawnmower” in the United States. They’re a little bit more common than getting struck by lightning, a little over half as common as “Death By Bees,” and less than a tenth as likely as “Death By Falling Out Of Bed.” Over twice as many people kill themselves during masturbation as die from AR-15 murders, and triple the number of people die by hitting errant deer with their cars at night as are murdered by AR-15. Feel free to check the sources, they’re in the graph. I have never yet heard a politician claim we were experiencing an Epidemic of Death By Lawnmower.

This is for the simple reason that if you want to murder someone, you're far more likely to use a handgun: it's smaller, easily concealable, and just as good at doing the job.

Andrew Tate's a Muslim

Did you know that the kickboxer and sex trafficker Andrew Tate converted to Islam in October 2022? Shadi Hamid says:

In October, the British-American ex-kickboxer had converted to Islam.

Why? Hamid explains:

But it was intriguing. 

Tate’s conversion to Islam is the most striking example yet of a growing phenomenon—the rise of what the theologian Massimo Faggioli calls “political conversions.” Consider that, when Tate explained why he chose Islam, he didn’t mention theology, salvation, the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad—or anything to do with spirituality or faith. 

“Islam very closely reflects my personal beliefs,” he said in an interview with the Muslim polemicist Mohammed Hijab. “In my personal life, I’ve learned that if you don’t have standards, and if you’re not a strong person who’s prepared to defend his ideas, you’ll get crushed.”

As Tate sees it, where Christianity in the West is weak, undemanding, and devoid of firm rules, Islam is exacting, masculine, and vigorous. It refuses to be mocked, and it refuses to accommodate itself to progressive norms -- particularly when it comes to gender and the family.

I am reminded that Hitler was pro-Islam and anti-Christianity, for much the same reason.

Will image generation AI end revenge porn?

Jon Stokes thinks it will:

I’ve been tracking the trials and tribulations of a project called Unstable Diffusion — this is essentially an effort to take the Stable Diffusion code and train a model that can generate “erotic imagery.”

I think there’s a point that’s very fast approaching — maybe a year or two out, at most — when any nudes that circulate of someone without their consent are by default assumed to be synthetic and not real. These NSFW image generation models will be so common and so easy for anyone to use, that there will be a flood of fake nudes so large it will drown out the real nudes. And when that happens – when synthetic nudes are so easy to generate and ubiquitous that everyone assumes all nudes are fake – it will no longer be possible to threaten or humiliate someone by circulating nudes of them (nudes that everyone will assume are fake, and that the circulator cannot prove are real).

If you want to try out making AI-generated porn, there's pornpen.