So I’m still all flu-ed up, but I thought I would share one amazing internet thingy that’s cheered me up a bit: It’s called edges2cats, and it transforms your drawings of cats into photorealistic-looking cats.
Well, that’s what it does if your drawings are actually in the shape of a real cat. If you doodle something that’s only vaguely catlike you get a vaguely catlike creature that is equal parts adorable and terrifying.
So naturally I’ve been making a lot of these sort-of cats.
If you check out the hashtag #edges2cats on Twitter you can find some even more horrific-yet-endearing results.
i animated a cat (badly) and shoved it into https://t.co/uCxi8jlKy8 to make it even more catty#pix2pix #edge2cats #NeuralNetworks #cat pic.twitter.com/MPoMNWaCBF
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) February 22, 2017
WHO'S THAT POKEMON
It's
Oh dear GOD #edges2cats pic.twitter.com/ZlXtunWyum— [email protected] (@BlurTheFur) February 22, 2017
https://twitter.com/DaggestNabbits/status/834265904280170496
https://twitter.com/noronorii/status/834484336812556295
Jon
Why Jon?
Why do you flinch, Jon?#edges2cats pic.twitter.com/g806KoyZZl— Lucie Ebrey (@LucieEbrey) February 22, 2017
Other versions of the applet make building facades, purses and shoes, if you’re into that.
Post your own here!
H/T — Skiriki. Thanks!
Re: SoLiFiCo types
I don’t need you to be some sorta hardline socialist. I really don’t. As always, ‘purity’ can fuck itself. How the fuck ever, I can’t let you call yourself a trans ally if you don’t support expanding affordable healthcare in their direction. I can’t let you say you’re not racist if you think we should cut funding for housing assistance. I can’t let you wear a pussyhat and refuse to spend tax money on abortions, for ‘moral’ or fiscal reasons don’t matter. There are bare minimums here. She’s got a few years before she starts casting ballots. Plenty of time to do some growing and learning. Fingers crossed, and, on ending Milo’s whole career, you go, gurl! ?
Seems pretty clear that it stems from “good intentions” (I’ll remove the scare quotes when I can be sure that they’re all sincere about it, but I have my doubts) marred by a great deal of ignorance.
(As an aside, how much of said ignorance is willful ? I draw the line between ignorance and stupidity thusly : an ignorant person can learn if given the chance, but a stupid one will do everything in their power to cling to their own ignorance. What I wanna know now is, how many ignorant people are also stupid, and how many will learn ?)
In that girl’s case, well she’s young, and the way the world works most young people haven’t educated themselves about politics yet. So I can’t blame her for being under the impression that the right is actually relevant to anything. Apparently the default opinion is that the left is a bunch of idealists with unrealistic economic views while the right knows how to get shit done and keep the trains running on time.
Shit, that’s even the whole point of libertarians, if they actually were socially liberal like they used to pretend to be.
How do you dispel bullshit like that ?
I’m speaking from a lot of privilege here, but I don’t think one can. I think people like that will either spend their entire lives thinking that wealth equates to goodness, or else will be jolted out of it by a life experience. Absent such an experience, they’re either going to be what Axe called SoLiFiCo types, or just straight-up SoCoFiCo. Those are the two options; they’re not going to change their minds on the Fi axis because that’s the one that’s real, to them.
Sinkable John said Re:
I know this is true. Sad, but true. I read this just after waking up and before my coffee was done, so my bleary eyes saw “All fart in line eventually” somehow and it made me giggle.
Re: the article linked by Handsome Jack about the exposing of Milo – The part that stood up and smacked me upside the head was where it said that people like Milo aren’t conservative, they’re anti-liberal. They don’t really care so much about conservative issues, the just want to hate on progressives.
I think I’ll start calling them that, along with all the other things that they are. They’re also outrage peddlers.
That article Dalilama linked was excellent. Greta Christina rocks!
@Hambeast
And black people, queers, Jews… what does the author think ‘conservative issues’ are?
@EJ
http://static.yourtango.com/cdn/farfuture/J-lBGubPEAGUjb680arWvbxg2EhJkNspC3nADXlmgqs/mtime:1479690222/sites/default/files/2016%20Oct/gospel%20truth.gif
We’re not real, and they like it that way. Like @John said, they will hold on with both hands to the bubble. And bubbles do pop, but, in the meantime, they distort light just enough so they don’t hafta actually look. The SoLiFiCo is down to help, so long as it doesn’t cost them. Support for marriage equality doesn’t actually require anything of them, and, ime, it’s mostly for stroking their own self image as a Good Person rather than any genuine empathy *shrugs* Fuck em /rant
@Handsome Jack
Not in my books it doesn’t. When they actually do something helpful, that will count for something.
@Axe
OTOH, anyone who supports people dying in the streets is filth, and anyone who is conservative, fiscally or socially, is in favour of people dying in the streets.(Although most ‘socially liberal’ types would rather the dying went on behind closed doors somewhere).
@Sinkable John
I’d call it more a salve to their consciences than actual good intentions.
That stood out for me, too. I really liked it. I’ll definitely use it too.
Hey, I said small, small way, like, basic human decency. At the very least they might not kick out their kid if they’re queer or call black people the n-word or wanting to kill all Jews or whatever. You know, baseline not being a terrible human being.
@Hambeast
I did not actually say that, Axe did :p
Though I agree.
@Dali
Hence the scare quotes, but I genuinely believe that at least some, and I’m focusing on them, have genuine good intentions and are just ignorant.
Now, those some ? That’d be the young, mainly. There aren’t a lot of other good reasons. I grew up assuming the right must serve some purpose or other, otherwise it wouldn’t exist, right ? Makes sense right until you realize that the only reason it still exists isn’t because we have collectively decided that it was relevant to anything, but because it’s kept afloat by the selfish assholes whose interests it’s meant to serve.
That was my question earlier, by the way : how the fuck do we dispel that assumption that the right belongs in politics at all ? @EJ, I wasn’t talking about the assholes who cling to the bullshit, but the young who’ve had that idea crammed into their head by society at large.
Further, how do you educate someone about how the right needs to disappear, without sounding like an authoritarian yourself ?
@John
Well, for one, you could stop calling it the ‘right’. It’s a neutral term for a deplorable grouping, and it establishes complementarity with the ‘left’. It’s why you assumed it had to be there, there must be a right where there is a left. Everything you know about how the universe functions tells you this. Don’t legitimize them that way. Worth a try 🙂
ETA : Okay, I kinda skipped an important thing there. I’m relying on the assumption that said young people, especially the privileged ones, will naturally stick to the ignorant path because they’ll never have the opportunity to learn. It’s kinda difficult to give yourself that opportunity when you don’t know there’s something to learn in the first place, and society at large prefers to mold us rather than teach us. Not to mention our own nature : as physical beings, it’s not that surprising that most choose the path of least resistance, especially when it’s the only one they can see.
Oh and of course, democracy. The west loves its democracies, and it loves to teach its kids about how democratic everything is. When I say that the right needs to fuck off, I sound pretty anti-democratic, don’t I ? We all know it’s not true, but it’s how it sounds to people without a thorough enough education in politics, and that education is hard to come by unless you have a hunger for it and a lot of time on your hands.
To sum it up, my point is : I’m extremely lucky (some weird-ass luck, sure, but I still wouldn’t have it any other way) to have some measure of political consciousness – if some things had gone differently for me, I’m pretty sure I would never have tried to get off the ignorant path. Not only that, but after all this time I still don’t think I’m out of those woods yet. Now how do I extend my own luck to others who might need it ?
@Axe
Yer right. The worst part is that I’m aware of it, but I call it that as a short-hand (ESL and mental pronunciation, yadda yadda), and also to reflect their actual presence in politics. Force of habit also probably doesn’t help. I’ma just go with “that bunch of dumb fucks” from now on.
I mentally call ’em “Wrong-wingers.”
I hadn’t actually realized until today, but you’re absolutely right. The effect of fiscal conservatism – whether intended or not – is a socially conservative outcome. I guess the socially liberal/fiscally conservative lot are better labeled (if one is feeling charitable) socially liberal and fiscally clueless
Thanks for that.
Speaking of kitties.
A mate is currently working in Baghdad. Turns out her new neighbours have a cat.
http://i.imgur.com/9fydfg2.jpg
To get rid of the right, you need parliament to sit on an unorientable surface. Like a Klein bottle or a Moebius strip. Left/right are based on the Première République parliamentary seating arrangements.
To get rid of “I got mine, screw you” thinking, you need communism to actually work. Good luck. Sweden seems to have gotten closest to the goal in a modern nation.
The Canadian libertarian kid is going to swing one way or the other upon reaching uni. If she’s reading Vox, I bet she’s ripe for recruitment on our team.
“Fiscal conservative” is a position that claims to be about making sure you don’t overspend and you care about efficiency and etc. Very appealing; I’m mostly a fiscal conservative by that measure.
Politicians and think tanks who wrap themselves in the flag of fiscal conservatism are generally lying, if perhaps to themselves first — they’re against government spending on social programs but in favour of government spending on the military-industrial complex. And they’re in favour of cutting efficient public-sector services for less efficient private-sector provisioning (or no provisioning at all, leading to downstream costs), on ideological grounds.
I suspect this young woman is at risk for noticing the fraud. At which point she’ll start to vote Liberal, if not NDP.
The conflict between fiscal conservative and social liberal that you see is largely a result of the fraud.
If you’re actually worried about economic efficiency, you notice a large part of the population sit around underfed, under-educated, and suffering poor health outcomes — that’s the population where your marginal government dollar does the most good! Providing low-cost child care to everyone — big win! Lead abatement — 10x ROI! Shutting down coal-fired power plants whose effluent affects the poor the most — save millions a year per plant!
A lot of good social policy is fiscally advantageous, provably so, with returns far better than what the market provides. But the benefits aren’t easy to monetize, so the private sector can’t do it.
The conflict comes when you decide whether to feed grandma or not in her retirement. I haven’t seen an argument for why that saves money compared to sending her out to get eaten by a polar bear. So there we need to appeal to social conscience.
@numerobis
That doesn’t necessarily make it an ineradicable feature of the political landscape.
Communism works perfectly well, thank you very much. It’s just that usually when people try it the capitalists and/ or aristocrats send in thugs to brutalize and/or kill them.
Not even close, mon ami. Sweden isn’t and doesn’t pretend to be communist. Sweden is a prime example of social democracy in action, and it works as well as a capitalist system is likely to. As I always point out in these discussions, and frankly am getting sick of doing so, the most successful scale implementation of communism in the modern world is the Emilia-Romagna province of Italy, where a large, and increasing, portion of the economy consists of worker cooperatives.
This claim is of the same nature as telling minority activists not to be so angry. It includes base assumptions about what is and is not a valid use of money which exclude the needs of oppressed populations. It is also contrasting itself against a position which doesn’t exist: that we ought to spend ourselves into oblivion without a care. It automatically casts things progressives want funded as luxuries, unnecessary, extra, wasteful.
Yes, that’s what I explained above. It is an essential charateristic of conservatism, fiscal or otherwise. And this is a perfect opportunity to talk about efficiency. Efficiency isn’t a concept that exists in a vacuum. A given process or system isn’t ‘efficient’ or ‘inefficient’. A process or system accomplishes stated goals in an efficient or inefficient manner. So before we can talk about the efficiency of government programs, we have to agree on what we want them to efficiently accomplish. Progressives generally want to increase human well-being, and would prefer that government programs do that in an efficient manner. Conservatives want the government to punish minorities and funnel money to the rich, and prefer if government programs do that efficiently. It’s not a difference of efficient vs. inefficient, it’s a fundamental difference of goals.
It’s a matter of goals.
This is the “define conservative” thing again, isn’t it ?
“Trying to save money” has never been on a conservative’s agenda. Dali is right, it’s not a matter of efficiency, but of goals, and here efficiency is simply the tired old excuse they use whenever they hold funds away from those who actually need it.
Fiscally conservative means keeping as much money as possible away from the poor, then spending that money tenfold on oppressing said poor.
That’s only efficient as far as vested interests are concerned.
Meaning it has no fucking place in a government.
@John
re: getting rid of the right in politics: a key part is to never pretend they have legitimate points. Other good alternative terms: authoritarians, bigots
There was a video by Alexandra Pelosi IIRC that did man on the street type interviews with self identified fiscal conservatives. She ran down a list of all the main things the federal government spends money on them and asked whether or not they wanted these programs cut. They said no to each thing. When asked what specific things they wanted cut, they couldn’t come up with anything.
Two potential explanations. The message that taxing and spending is bad is so entrenched I’m our culture that people have internalized it and will say they agree with it even if they don’t.
Or they like spending as long as it goes to the right (white, Christian, etc) people but don’t think it should go to “those people.” However, they are unwilling or unable to express this for fear of looking like an asshole.
Gonna have to get rid of a good chunk of the left too, then.
I’m… not sure I wanna call them authoritarians. I mean, sure, that is what they are. But so was one of the few nation leaders I can have respect for. Though to his credit, he was planning on having real elections at the end of the “mandate” he’d given himself after his coup. History will never know if he was actually gonna do it, ’cause he was assassinated.
Bonus points to whoever finds out who it is I’m talking about.
Hint : Africa, in the 80s. One of the major rivers on the continent goes through the relevant country.
@Sinkable John
Ooh! I wanna guess! Is it… Anwar el-Sadat?
@John
How do you figure? Liberals ain’t part of the Left, never have been. They’re part of the authoritarian system, they just want ‘capitalism with a human face’, if you will.
And if you mean tankies, they’re not meaningfully different to fascists. Wanting a new boss, same as the old boss, that’s the sme okd shit in a different pile.
@John
I’m not seeing a problem…