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by randomdata 799 days ago
Is this instance liberal (accepting of change) or conservative (hesitant of change)?

On one hand it seems liberal, wanting to see a change that gives individuals who might be subject of deepfakes more autonomy.

On the other hand, AI is changing the world and it seems like an effort to try and hold the things around AI in place as to not seem them change.

It could go either way. So could the state of the economy right now, for that matter.
1 comments
kergonath 799 days ago
> Is this instance liberal (accepting of change) or conservative (hesitant of change)?

I don’t think this framing is very useful. Modern conservatives don’t have problems with change, they just want that change to go their way. They are perfectly able to innovate and push new doctrines or legal theories when it suits them. And on the other hand they do not care about preserving anything besides an idealised vision of “traditional values”, which are not as old as they seem.

Looking at the actual policies and arguments, the spectrum is between oligarchy (or dictatorship for the most extremes) and democracy. It makes much more sense that way.

> On one hand it seems liberal, wanting to see a change that gives individuals who might be subject of deepfakes more autonomy.

It’s also a significant limitation of personal freedom in the case of a victimless crime, which is anything but liberal.

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randomdata 799 days ago
Who you have described are reactionaries, not conservatives.

In fairness, some political parties who subscribe to reactionaryism operate under a capital C Conservative banner to try and muddy the waters, but to consider them conservative because of that is like considering the Democratic People's Republic of Korea democratic.

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kergonath 799 days ago
> Who you have described are reactionaries, not conservatives.

Indeed, that’s exactly what they are. But they prefer calling themselves conservatives. It’s better from a marketing perspective.

To be fair, there are not many politicians that could be called old-fashioned conservatives in the US. Most of them are a subset of the republican establishment and they were mostly wiped out in the last couple of years.

> to consider them conservative because of that is like considering the Democratic People's Republic of Korea democratic.

Definitely! Unfortunately, that’s how the semantics went, though. In the same way as what most people call “liberals” now are very different from who liberals used to be (they used to be all about capitalism and free enterprise, for example).

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