By David Futrelle
You may have noticed a strange explosion of highly surreal memes hitting your Twitter home page of late. Blame the Artificial Intelligence-powered meme generator that you can find here, which will happily generate as many weird and baffling memes as you could ever want.
Now, the meme generator is a fairly basic thing, in principle: it takes in hundreds (thousands?) of human-generated memes in a variety of formats before pooping out something it doesn’t understand, but that we humans might.
Given that the AI-meme-generator literally doesn’t know what it’s saying, most of the memes it puts out tend to be a bit puzzling:
And sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand the meme format at all:
But alongside the surreal memes, the AI-meme-generator somehow manages to spit out others that make perfect (or at least only slightly imperfect) sense. I’ve been fiddling around with it for awhile and have been surprised and intrigued by these memes, which seem very much like the memes an actual human might produce on their own.
Indeed, these memes make a lot more sense than many if not most of the Men’s Rights memes I’ve run across (and written about) over the years — despite the fact that the MRA memes were generated by actual human beings who, at least in theory, should know what they’re saying.
Let’s look at examples from both genres — contrasting some of my, er, favorite MRA memes with memes the AI-meme-generator made for me.
Let’s start with this authentic MRA meme:
Apparently the thought process behind this, er, hilarity is: “Women are stupid! And rape is funny! Sharks!”
This AI-generated meme makes a lot more sense:
I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a nice hot dog once in a while?
Here’s an MRA meme taking aim at women in the military:
Contrast that with this cheerful and wholesome AI-generated meme:
Again, the AI hits the nail on the head. Everyone loves to see people talking about their cool stuff.
Here’s a dark and bewildering MRA meme:
I suppose the message here is supposed to be “even if she says she’s not a feminist, she might secretly be one, and falsely accuse you of rape.” But I’m not sure anyone not steeped in MRA-talk could discern that.
Also, why is “radical/white” in ironic quotes?
By contrast, this next AI-generated meme, while admittedly rude and perhaps a bit sexist, is as clear as a (school) bell.
This MRA meme may leave you scratching at your head as you try to puzzle out its strange “logic.”
This AI meme, by contrast, makes so much sense it hurts.
In the world we live in today, who has the patience to wait until you get home to get sloshed?
So why are MRA memes so illogical and incomprehensible? Part of the problem is that reality is not on their side, and so many of their memes only make sense if you’re already living in the imaginary world of the Men’s Rights movement, where black is white and mean, bitchy women rule over all. I know enough about this world from the many years I’ve spent doing this blog that I can usually make some sort of sense of most of their memes, but I still struggle with some of them. It doesn’t help much that many MRAs are bitter bastards choking on their own aggrieved entitlement; their attempts at jokes are undercut by their meanness and their barely developed sense of humor.
The AI may not have a sense of humor, but it’s also unencumbered by all this baggage, so when it pops out with something that’s funny, it’s genuinely funny.
Congratulations, MRA; it’s official now: You’ve failed the Turing test.
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@ redsilkphoenix
I suspect that would depend on the skin tone of the man.
It is frikkin mindboggling though isn’t it? I know I’m preaching to the choir here; but armed guys yelling at cops from inches away; don’t bat an eyelid. Black guy gets some cardio; lethal threat.
Redsilkphoenix,
Not wondering at all. In OH, the target is not the male governor, it is the female head of the health dept.
Maybe if we keep talking about LessWrong, Scildfreja will come back… Maybe?
Anyway, yeah, from what I understand, the “politics is the mind-killer” article is the origin of the use of the term “mind-killer” as MansVoice is attempting to use it. Here’s the original article for those who don’t want to go link-hunting for it from Naglfar’s link:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
The argument goes that you shouldn’t break the norms of “rational debate”, because otherwise you might find yourself defending arguments just because they agree with your “side”, i.e. being “mind-killed”. The problem is, the reasons political arguments and factions form in the first place can’t simply be dismissed the way the article does; for one thing, a lot of these arguments are, in fact, a matter of life and death. Someone who can simply avoid political arguments (and thus being “mind-killed”) is someone who has no stakes in such arguments, which is probably the exact opposite of who one might want debating such matters. It’s Rawls’s veil of ignorance, taken to an extreme. Calling someone “mind-killed” is, in essence, a variation on the “fallacy fallacy”; the person believes that they won the argument simply because their opponent committed a logical or informal fallacy.
I think a lot of people actually agree with the notion of “mind-killing” to some extent, including people in so-called “LeftTube” who tend to use “rational arguments” to help sway current and aspiring right-wingers to their side. I think there’s some merit to that approach, and it sometimes works, but ultimately I find a lot of political arguments boil down to getting the bigot to say something bigoted, and how quickly this happens depends on how willing the bigot’s opponents are to acknowledge this. I have been quite surprised at how quickly this devolution can happen, particularly one time when I said something so outrageously sarcastic in a chatroom that I figured it couldn’t possibly be mistaken as genuine, but it turned out the guy I was mocking was just that racist for real.
OT: In case you also have friends or family who are insisting that this is true: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/does-covid-stand-for/
@An Impish Pepper
Interestingly, MV originally mentioned me being “mind-killed” after I criticized someone else’s position rather than defending my own.
I confess that I’ve become extremely cynical of “LeftTube”/“Breadtube” and its attempts to deradicalize alt rightists. It seems more often than not that this becomes an excuse to use racist and/or ableist slurs while telling bigots that they, too, can be real leftists without ever changing their bigotry. This doesn’t empower the left, it just makes it more welcoming to bigots at the expense of minorities that have traditionally called the left home. It’s like peeing in a bucket of water: you aren’t getting more clean water, you’re just getting dirty water.
@ impish pepper
Or point them to the WHO rules on naming human pathogens. Not that people who share ‘facts’ like that care I guess.
Actually I’ve kind of been meaning to ask: What exactly IS BreadTube/LeftTube? Some uses of the term seem limited to just Contrapoints and a couple of others, while other uses seem to encompass a lot of people who don’t really fit the negative stereotype of a BreadTuber, but they’re friends with other BreadTubers so something something guilt by association. A considerable amount of “discourse” about BreadTube seems kind of confusingly black-and-white to me.
@An Impish Pepper
In my experience the term seems to refer to a loosely organized group of left leaning YouTubers and streamers, including but not limited to ContraPoints, Peter Coffin, PhilosophyTube, Xanderhal, Vaush, Destiny, and a few others. The main overarching traits appear to be edginess and an explicitly stated focus on deradicalization of the far right (supposedly, how effective/worthwhile this is is up for debate). It seems to have had noble intentions but now appears to have a lot of transphobia and ableism. I’ve followed this discourse for a while and it just seems like a rather toxic scene that I would generally recommend avoiding.
So much for Ebola and Marburg, then.
Does this ruling make my Asperger’s Syndrome magically disappear?
Bye-bye bird flu?
So, no more coal miner’s lung either.
I, for one, won’t be sad to see the Black Death go …
Ebola and Marburg predate the WHO rules, Asperger’s hasn’t been a diagnostic term for some years now, and bird flu, miner’s lung and Black Death are colloquial names, not technical ones.
@Surplus
All of those names were problematic. That’s why those guidelines are there now. (Asperger’s Syndrome is not a “disease” anyway, but notably it rightfully isn’t called that anymore.)
@Naglfar
I’m surprised that hbomberguy wasn’t mentioned on that list, but Philosophy Tube was. I’ve also seen people like Shaun, Lindsay Ellis, and (bafflingly) Armoured Skeptic + shoe0nhead included. And I think that gets into the problem I’m describing, where the people who supposedly most represent BreadTube seem to be different to different people. I have a sneaking suspicion of it depending somewhat on who people think are bad or not so bad for whatever reason.
Another factor in this is that, at least from what I’ve seen, only some of these people actually have something like an unacknowledged problematic past, or a penchant for edginess, or unexamined transphobia and ableism, or even an explicitly stated focus on deradicalization. As far as I can tell, the extent of Olly Thorn’s crimes is that he’s collaborated with Contrapoints and Peter Coffin and won’t disown them or whatever.
I feel like sometimes too many people get lumped into a mold simply by association, and I think there’s something dangerous about that kind of mentality. Part of it is that these people are somewhat famous, so everything becomes a dogpile and they can only do so much to address incidents that they may not even be responsible for. Yet I see a similar thing happen in online leftist spaces in general. I’ve been in places where seemingly everybody is friends with someone problematic. Plus I feel like so many spaces’ only way of dealing with a problematic person is to disown them, which I don’t think is sustainable.
Too bad MansVoice stopped telling us where he’s going and what he’s doing when he’s not commenting here, since that truly was the most important thing in my life right now.
I’m puzzled with his dismissal of WWTH, since the matter of men (and MansVoice himself) just being mad that women get to choose their partners has been brought up so many times already and he’s been consistent in nothing if not in not addressing it, so I just assumed he agreed with it. But now that he did address it, it’s just to say that WWTH is not a serious person?
Too bad I didn’t think to save that AI generated meme where DiCaprio raised his glass and that caption read “When you are the only one who has a conversation”, it would have been perfect for this doofus, his so-called discussion and his non-rebuttals.
Oh no! What’s problematic about hbomberguy? I thought he was one of the few people I could watch and be entertained by without guilt.
@PoM
At one point he said some stuff that could be seen as apologism for someone else’s sexual harassment. More recently he defended ContraPoints after the pronoun fiasco last September, though I think he later walked that one back. I really don’t know enough about him to make a real judgement, so do with that information what you will.
@Policy of Madness
You might enjoy Replay by Ken Grimwood, which is basically a novel about your dream 🙂 Including the stock market stuff.
@Amtep
Nahh, I’m not sure I want to read about someone else fixing their life’s mistakes or getting rich on the stock market. I want that for me. 😀
Well, I’m memorizing all the Kentucky Derby winners just in case.
Go for the real money and memorize the quadfectas.
@PoM
Forget that, memorize the winning lottery numbers for each time the Mega Millions gets above $500 million. And remember to convince a certain real estate failure to not run for president.
@ naglfar and POM
I wonder though whether someone effectively having foreknowledge of a result could affect the result. Butterfly Effect and all that.
Let’s say, with your prescience regarding the numbers you buy a lottery ticket you wouldn’t have. As a result of that, someone has to queue behind you for a few extra minutes. That makes them slightly later than otherwise in giving their mate a lift to work. Their mate is a technician at the TV station. As a result of arriving a few minutes late they turn on the lottery machine at a slightly different time; the balls are randomised differently, so the drawn numbers change?
I wonder how remotely the chain operates. Can the results change because someone buys a lottery ticket from a filling station in the middle of the Nevada desert?
Stock market speculation might be especially vulnerable. There’s so much leverage with derivatives maybe a single additional share purchase could have chaotic effects? After all, that’s why stock market manipulation is such an issue in finance. A mere rumour can change the market. Seeing someone confidently make a particular investment might have all sorts of runaway feedback.
But only memorize the numbers for dates that have one anonymous winner; you minimize the potential for temporal damage or paradox by leaving open the possibility that it was you who won the lottery the whole time….
What I mainly know is that Berkshire Hathoway regular stock was about $200/share when I was a junior in high school, and was $900,000/share just before the financial collapse in 2007. I think I could make bank with tiny bits of knowledge like that, without seriously affecting the trajectory of the stock market.
@ gaebolga
But imagine if there then turned out to be two winners and in the days before a giant asteroid hits the earth there’s an interview:
Stop meddling with time people; you’ll get us all killed!
I used to fantasize about going back in time and buying gold with today’s money, but then I realized 2020 cash would be counterfeit currency. In the US, dollar bills are the only denomination that hasn’t changed much in the last several decades. You’d have to hope they wouldn’t look too closely at the year.
@Masse_Mysteria:
Yeah, that was an interesting meltdown. The “I Am Very Smart And I Dismiss You” defense always gets trotted out when they’re cornered.
WWTH’s point was perfectly valid. Modern hypergamy, in the sense that Jordan Peterson defines it, gets used to argue that we should restructure dating and relationships to redistribute women more equally (aka “enforced monogamy”). In other words: some men are upset that women are not freely choosing them, and want to interfere, incentivize, or otherwise manipulate women into choosing partners that they might not otherwise consider.
Belief in hypergamy rests on a number of faulty assumptions:
– an economic model of relationships, where women are commodities and men are consumers (Heartiste’s slobbering fantasy of women sneaking into car dealerships to have sex with the gearshift of a Corvette is an especially hadopelagically stupid example of this)
– all dating and attraction take place only through Tindr and nightclubs
– the only things that create attraction are looks and status
– wanting the best partner available is normal for men, but evil and degenerate for women
– men who use their wealth and high status to obtain an attractive partner are admirable. Women who use their attractiveness to obtain a wealthy high-status partner are gold-diggers.
– Chad is, in fact, monopolizing 80% of the women.
The data simply doesn’t support this. Women might say they find Chad attractive, but their behavior says otherwise. For example, there were those OKCupid studies that found that
men on dating sites tend to message only the attractive women, while women message the less attractive guys too. Maybe it’s men who should consider redistributing themselves more equally. If everyone flocks to Stacey, of course most men are going to get left out. But nobody’s chastising the men for their pickiness.
Then there was this OSU study of sexual and romantic relations at a high school, which did not reveal one Chad monopolizing all the women. Most students had only one or two partners. If you then look at the number of partners reported by adults via the General Social Survey, the distributions for women and men are almost exactly the same. Men report slightly more sex partners than women, for every quintile, but the difference isn’t nearly what you would expect to see if most of the women were in harems.
The whole thing is just a house of cards.
WWTH’s “point” was literally a non-sequitur and only makes sense as a response to someone else, or to a different comment than mine. This is more or less the tell-tale sign of the mindkilled, in (yes) the Less Wrong sense. Which is why I dismissed her. There is no use talking to the mindkilled, because they don’t talk to you – they talk to some imaginary version of you.
WWTH’s post was literally a non-sequitur and only makes sense as a response to someone else, or to a different comment than mine. This is more or less the tell-tale sign of the mindkilled, in (yes) the Less Wrong sense. Which is why I dismissed her. There is no use talking to the mindkilled, because they don’t talk to you – they talk to some imaginary version of you to which you bear only a vague resemblance, if that.
(As a rule, the bigger the distance between You and Imaginary You, the more mindkilled a person is.)
@MansVoice
So, basically, you win?