
Mastodon WTF timeline (2017) - zdw
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/335
======
moomin
Wow, this is a classic case of "don't trust someone who describes themselves
as neutral".

To take the principal example under discussion, either you think lolicon is OK
or you don't. "Neutrality" is actually the former position. The exact same
thing holds true for the "Red vs Blue" thing. Either you believe Red harasses
Blue or you don't. If you don't, fine, but don't pretend you didn't just pick
a side.

"the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality"

~~~
Cthulhu_
I never thought of neutrality like that - thanks, +1 Insightful and such!

Although I wonder if that can be applied to other issues too. Like, if I were
to have no opinion / consider myself neutral in the pro-choice / pro-life
debate, which side would I actually be on? Or is there a neutral / indifferent
ground there?

~~~
moomin
The quote at the bottom is from Desmond Tutu, who explicitly said that
neutrality is a vote for the powerful/status quo. So if you were in Denmark,
not caring that much could be treated as a pro-choice position, but in Texas
it would be the other way around.

~~~
jtbayly
Wrong. Not caring anywhere in the USA would also be pro-choice since Roe v
Wade overturned laws in all 50 states against abortion.

~~~
guelo
That was before 40 years of culture wars on the issue. Today the majority of
the country is pro choice.

~~~
jtbayly
Which, if true, only further proves my point, which is that to "not care" is
to be fine with the way things currently are—abortion being legal.

~~~
moomin
Just because you don’t understand that availability matters, people getting
shot because they do legal things matters, and your entire entire Supreme
Court being defined by and chosen on their attitude to a subject matters,
doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

Attempting to obtain an abortion in Texas will have dramatically different
outcomes to that of Denmark. Appreciating this is true should not be
controversial.

~~~
jtbayly
The people in Texas are actively fighting against the status quo of Roe. If
the people in TX simply took a neutral position, the status quo would reign.
Thus, the example is a bad one.

------
kennywinker
I really don’t think describing two sides of the “culture war” as red and blue
is healthy for anyone. Most people have a mish-mash of beliefs, but lumping
people together creates division and solidifies factions, rather than allowing
people to be swayed or make up their own mind.

~~~
Taniwha
I think that 'red' and 'blue' are just plain confusing because the US has
relatively recently taken its own bindings of these labels to political
positions that are completely arse-backwards to the long term historical uses
of these colours in the entire rest of the world.

I think it's best to use more descriptive terms that everyone can actually
agree on

~~~
nl
Blue/Red in the US used to be (deliberately) switched on TV broadcasts in
every election until the 2000 Bush election where the continual coverage of
how close it was locked the colors in for all time.

~~~
18pfsmt
This wikipedia entry takes 6 paragraphs to explain the nuances involved and
they are far more complicated than you state (not that I think you intended
that way):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Contemporary_use)

~~~
Taniwha
Which basically gets back to my original point in an international forum like
this (or the one described by the above article) these colours don't really
mean anything you can talk about and they're best avoided unless your goal
actually is to sow confusion

------
mabbo
Setting aside the author's clear but oblivious bias in the English speakers
"war", he documents a fascinating problem: how do we globally integrate
societies that have very starkly different reactions to specific topics,
ideas, etc? We aren't even good at answering these questions within the same
culture (liberty vs discrimination, public safety vs 2nd amendment, 'Red' vs
'Blue', and so on).

Given the internet's existence, the lowering barriers to trade, immigration,
and travel, Pandora's box isn't going to be closed here- we need to figure out
how to approach the topic of cross-cultural disagreement on moral quandaries.
And it's not fair to just say "Our culture is right and theirs is wrong". That
just demeans them and silences the minority.

My favorite example: I go to a small men's barber shop usually staffed by two
or three male barbers. A woman enters saying "I want a man's haircut". All
three barbers are devout Muslims who cannot touch a woman, by their religious
beliefs. Yet the customer has a right to be served even though she is female.
This isn't hypothetical, it really happened. They sorted it out amicably, but
this sure could have gone to court- where a decision would probably be made
that makes a lot of people angry.

In the case of "ロリコン and 児童ポルノ", can Western culture even perceive that a
difference might exist? Or are we bound by laws that grew out of our cultural
view that the two are both the same horrible concept?

~~~
Forge36
I think the line is sightly fussier in the United States.
[https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-
fede...](https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-
child-pornography)

>Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated
images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adapted, or
modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor

I am not a lawyer, but given that language it gives the impression that even
art may fall under the scope of U.S. law. Am I correct? Possibly not, however
that ambiguity will cause many to avoid crossing the implied law to ensure
they don't break the actual law.

~~~
vertexFarm
"...depict an identifiable, actual minor."

So this doesn't apply to cartoons of the fictional character Mitsuki, a tiny
blue-haired girl in a school uniform who is totally 21 years old and not 9
according to the dating simulator's lore. So this would probably be legal in
the US.

See, this guy isn't even right about that. He lies about the idea that it's
totally non-controversial and accepted as ethical in Japanese culture, and he
lies that it's universally illegal in western culture. This whole thing is a
big pile of straw men invented by an otaku who thinks he's an ambassador of an
entire culture for some reason.

------
BadassFractal
Moral psychology is fun. Lolicon is one of those odd moral black holes for
westerners. Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind talks about a bunch
of similar examples of victimless but "immoral" actions that we find wrong and
will desperately try to find a victim for when one doesn't exist.

Similar examples: incest with 100% guarantee of no conception. Consensual
cannibalism (edit for clarity: of someone very well cooked). Eating of a dead
dog. Sex with a dead chicken and then its consumption.

We find all of those repugnant, immoral, and will try to come up with victims,
even when there are none to be found.

It's a good example of how morality for humans is much more than just about
harm. It's about conformity and cohesion with a set of rules that identify a
specific tribe, regardless of harm.

~~~
azeirah
I understand your point, but I feel like I should point out that consensual
cannibalism does have a victim, the cannibal.

Humans eating human meat (and likewise, cows eating cow-meat, pigs eating pig-
meat) can cause some very very weird and very serious and very rare illnesses.
(social?) Animals have not evolved to eat their kind, or perhaps put
differently; animals have evolved _not_ to eat their kind.

~~~
BadassFractal
Sure. But let's say it's fully sterilized and fully cooked so you have 100%
guarantee of not getting sick from it. Is it still wrong?

It's similar to the objection you hear about incest: "Yeah but what if the
woman gets pregnant", thus you set the conditions that there is 100% no chance
of conception.

And actually, our closest relatives, the chimps, have evolved wonderfully to
eat their own kind. In fact they find each other delicious during constant
raids on the enemy's territory.

~~~
lucideer
> _let 's say it's fully sterilized and fully cooked so you have 100%
> guarantee of not getting sick from it._

I'm being a pedant here, and this isn't really relevant to the previous
commenters point, but worth noting that one of the known dangers of
cannibalism (CJD) is less related to typical sterilisation and not quite as
well understood in general, so 100% guarantees are hard to come by.

~~~
BadassFractal
Yep. It's more of a philosophical experiment than something that is backed by
perfect hard science. The point remains that most people (at least outside of
the tribes that practice it) would find it completely wrong even when given
hypothetical perfect guarantees.

~~~
amval
I get that it was not your point, but the problem with cannibalism is the
transmission of prion proteins. Not really an infectious disease per se. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_\(disease\))

------
kevingadd
This is an interesting saga I didn't hear anything about when it was
happening. I recall seeing that Pixiv had launched an instance, but I'm
honestly shocked that it took off like it did. It makes sense that it was
appealing to artists in part due to a more lax policy regarding sensitive
images.

The author would've done themselves a significant favor by not wasting a bunch
of space on an attempt to neutrally and imprecisely classify 'red' and 'blue'
groups before dispensing with the neutrality halfway through. The neutrality
wasn't especially helpful in the first place, but his "free speech" and "safe
speech" labels later on are (from my interpretation of everything he describes
in the series of events) both clearer and more neutral than any attempt to
group sides together as 'SJWs' or 'aGG' or 'MRAs' or whatever because it
describes the general point of view underlying their behavior. It may not
describe those groups _as entire individuals_ but it seems to accurately
classify most of the split here - people seeking mastodon instances that are a
Safe Environment (hence the incredible threat posed by federated instances not
honoring privacy settings) vs people seeking mastodon instances that are
moderation-light and rules-light where they can do whatever they like. The
legal threat posed to server operators by caching is an interesting side angle
that puts the operators in a nasty spot.

It sucks that issues with fair treatment of French and Japanese speakers on
Mastodon have to get sidelined by getting pulled into right-vs-left US culture
wars - what Japanese artists choose to post on social media really shouldn't
have anything to do with how Americans feel about concentration camps or no-
platforming. In a sense, even this attempt to depict the way Japanese users
were impacted by this whole saga falls flat because it centers the western
parties ('red' and 'blue') in the story despite the fact that the Japanese
users featured in it outnumber them.

On a final note, it's interesting to see Twitter described as Blue here, as at
the present time Twitter's company leadership is actively and openly courting
the right wing in business meetings and online discussions (including "alt-
right" leaders), presumably for business reasons but perhaps for others. I
guess the political winds shift quickly.

~~~
makomk
I don't think they can really avoid touching on this, because a lot of this
really is more about those tribes than about any particular underlying
principle. For instance, a while back there was a controversy over a US
Nintendo employee who worked with kids calling for it to be legal to own
photos and videos of actual kids being raped. She was blue tribe and the
people who discovered this red tribe, so the entire blue tribe insisted that
anyone who was with them must side with her. There was even this narrative
that she wasn't really calling for this, just defending Japanese culture, and
anyone who claimed otherwise was lying. (Which didn't hold up - she'd used
this as one flimsy justification as to why this should be legal, but hadn't
even backed this with any evidence that any Japanese people supported this,
and she was calling for it to be legal in the US and everywhere else too.) The
idea that Japanese works shouldn't be policed by Western cultural standards
is, in general, very strongly rejected by blue tribe folks, but that changed
the moment an American of the right tribe needed defending.

~~~
kevingadd
I was around during the controversy you refer to, and it was largely
manufactured. You're generally right about the issues in question but it's a
classic case of someone being accused of being a pedophile (regardless of
their position on the political spectrum - this is done frequently to right
wingers and left wingers as a smear tactic) and then repeated for years
without verification.

------
scarejunba
Okay, I think I get it.

ロリコン - artificial images representing children or child like people in a
sexual context, either drawn or rendered with software

児童ポルノ - photos of actual kids in sexual contexts

These online storms in teacups are rarely worth it, but this one is actually
quite interesting.

~~~
jbob2000
The author is being disingenuous by saying that these are different. The form
of the “art” is different, but the motivations behind it are the same; lust
for youth. It’s the motivations that people have problems with, not the form
that the art takes!

~~~
The_Amp_Walrus
> It’s the motivations that people have problems with

I don't agree with you there and I don't think the author is being insincere.
The problem with child pornography is the harm, or potential for harm, of
children. Why would you care about a person's motivations as a root issue?

~~~
jbob2000
It's not just the harm to children that people have problems with, it's the
power difference between an adult and a child. Adults have power over
children, they place their trust in us. We are supposed to use our power over
children to make them better people, to make their generation better than the
previous. Society (perhaps only Western society it seems) does not like
relationships where one person uses their power over someone else to the
betterment of themselves (Harvey Weinstein and the rest of the #metoo movement
comes to mind).

So I think that's the root cause of the "disgust" for this type of art and the
motivations behind it; it facilities dishonest use of power.

~~~
Vinnl
But when you only look at drawings, no one is using their power over someone
else. Photographs, however, do require someone to have used their power over
someone else, namely the photographer. Which is why I would consider looking
at (and hence stimulating the production of) the latter immoral, and less so
the former.

~~~
jbob2000
The desire is the same, whether it’s animated or not. That’s the issue - you
still desire sexual power imbalances. It’s not about using the power, it’s
about the desire.

Anyways, these are just my musings on the matter. I am not an expert or
familiar with the subject at all. I just was curious as to why society still
is disgusted by child porn even when the harm is removed

~~~
Vinnl
So that's what OP disagreed with. Some people might care about intention, but
when you said

> It's not just the harm to children that people have problems with,

then "people" sounds like "most people". Now I don't know what most people
feel like, but at least for me and OP, harm to children __is __what we have
problems with. Desire for power, not so much.

(Obviously, just musings from my side as well. Disgust for child porn when
harm is removed happens to be one of my pet peeves - I believe that it is
easier for people not to act on their desires if they are able to discuss them
with others without being rejected by society.)

------
aquova
I found this article to be interesting, but framed in a very strange way. The
author continuously promotes that there is a left-right "war", and while
several of their examples seems to definitely imply a political spectrum split
like that, most of the issues they're recounting come from a cultural divide.
This basically boils down to English/Western vs Japanese/Eastern cultural
differences, but with political opinions pulled into the mix. Their choice to
not even define the two types of content is telling as well: by simply
defining it, they know the Western audience of their article won't want
anything to do with it.

It's an interesting story, but framed in a strange way with key details left
out to fit the red-blue narrative, in my opinion. Some, I would assume more
Eastern-oriented users, would argue that they are being censored for content
that is perfectly acceptable in their culture. Others, primarily Western
audiences, would argue that it isn't culturally acceptable here, and that this
is what Mastodon was designed for, to choose who you wish to include in your
Federation. I don't really know which side I agree with personally, both seem
to have their merits, but it's an interesting situation, one of several I've
heard whispers of from Mastodon.

~~~
icebraining
I'm an outsider to the whole story, but I read the article as detailing two
different clashes, the blue/red and the English/Japanese, though partly
intertwined.

------
AJRF
Labelling the sides as Red versus Blue is convenient (as in; people know what
you mean) but boy is it damaging to simplify like this. It's not the authors
fault at all, he's simply using the nomenclature of the time, but it makes me
sad to see how polarized we've all become.

Ultimately I think the labels act as a screen that people use to bucket people
in, and if you ain't in my bucket, I ain't going to listen. Which just
perpetuates the polarization.

~~~
gdulli
The author is hilariously non-self-aware about their own bubble-inhabitance.
It starts out with a tone of ostensible I'm-above-this-so-I-can-analyze-it-
objectively but doesn't take long to devolve into:

> Some of this alliance was expressed overtly, for instance by creating an
> "advisory board" to guide Twitter culture and staffing it with some of the
> most hateful of Blue leaders

> "shadowbanning" persons identified as Red by AI systems

> But there were also many on the Blue side angry that the Red side still had
> not been completely annihilated

~~~
throwaway37585
Are those statements wrong?

------
evernon
This does explain why platforms like Facebook and Google have arrived at the
sad inevitability of filter bubbling.

------
iaml
Author could have sidestepped the whole political mess (considering it's
tangential to the whole post) by calling sides "tumblr" and "4chan".

~~~
ohtwenty
Which is just a proxy for left/blue vs right/red, and since their post is on
twitter --> mastodon that would be a really weird way to talk about it?

~~~
iaml
Blue/red thing is mostly american politics, while I'd argue that tumblr vs
4chan is mostly abstracted from politics and more about world views and has
lesser of a chance of hurting ego, which I believe would lead to more
productive discussion. I know it's just semantics, but a lot of people are
very emotionally invested in those colored labels.

------
rrobukef
But what is the actual difference between the two? Is the second more extreme?
Is one drawn and the other real? Or is the second drawn but based on real
models ( like the fine)? Is it the difference between nude and naked?

Pixiv is generally drawn but there are no examples of the other. The book
Lolita is ok in europe, a bit weird but not banned. There is even nude art of
children - though it is controverial.

~~~
claudiawerner
To be specific, "Lolicon" is a Japanese word that's partly a loanword from
"Lolita" in English; in the way the author is using it, it means "drawn or
simulated representations of fictional children engaged in sexual activity",
though in common Japanese parlence the word literally means "pedophile". The
author has decided to say that _lolicon_ is "child pornography" and this
itself is a matter of debate; some authors (such as Young, in "Resolving the
Gamer's Dilemma") consider child pornography to be _synonymous_ with abuse,
and hence "virtual pedophila" (as he calls it) does not fall under it.

The "other thing" is literally just child pornography through and through,
photographs or videos of real children engaged in sexual activity.

The fact that the author has neglected to specifically state the difference is
strange, and I honestly can't think of a good reason for doing this, or why it
was left in Japanese script.

Furthermore, there's something else here; a while ago I read an article which
claimed that 81% of the Japanese public based on an extrapolated study would
be fine with _lolicon_ being made illegal. So how does the author say that
_lolicon_ being acceptable is a mainstream view? The author writes too,

>The idea that ロリコン is bad in the same way 児童ポルノ is bad, or even that there
could be a meaningful category including both ロリコン and 児童ポルノ as if they were
somehow comparable, is incomprehensible from the mainstream Japanese point of
view.

Does this make me an honorary holder of the Japanese point of view? I honestly
can't see a way in which drawings and real life photos in this case are
comparable at all, it's incomprehensible to me how one could lump them
together other than by the subject matter they represent, which is _extremely_
broad and ignores the whole point of the classification - that is, one
necessitates child abuse to be created, and the other doesn't. I very much
align with the Japanese point of view here.

On the other things the author mentioned, I agree with another commenter in
saying that it's not at at all useful to frame this as "red" and "blue"; I
consider myself rather "blue" on some issues (being a socialist) but the
liberal idea of free speech is one I hold very dear to myself, and I am
vehemently opposed to laws that target any kind of expression, even if that
does entail "lolicon"; I believe the harm principle can stand here on its own,
though I'm not sure if I'd bend even if it was proven conclusively (how?) that
lolicon "causes" people to molest real children.

~~~
rrobukef
Oh, so ロリコン is lolicon? Thank you. I can't read japanese. Even a direct
translation would be useful, because even google translate doesn't translate
both as child pornography. The assertion in the text that both are translated
as such is needlessly confusing.

~~~
claudiawerner
Yes, I apologise for not actually clarifying the words in the script, it
seemed obvious to me for some strange reason :)

------
thepumpkin1979
(2017)

------
konart
>Twitter that would be free of "harassment," which is a Blue code word for the
mere existence of the Red side

Sums up greatly.

------
dielan
This is actually a really interesting perspective on Japanese fediverse.

The article lacks nuance when talking about the "red" and "blue" sides. Seems
like false dichotomy to me.

