What pops into my head is a quote from the movie A Man for All Seasons (I’ve seen it numerous times cause of my Catholic family members and their like for it). There’s a quote from it that goes like:

Sir Thomas More: [to Will Roper] Now, listen, Will. Two years ago you were a passionate churchman. Now you’re a passionate Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning, your face is to the front again.

It feels like every other headline with her is “damn, she’s just a lib”, “no wait, she might be more than that”. Maybe she’s just ignorant and learning as she goes, maybe she is a form of controlled opposition. I dunno, but hopefully she gets more clear as time goes on. Given how these things tend to go though, if she does get clear-headed enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the moment when western imperialist media stops talking about her and we only ever hear from her anymore from other sources. Western imperialists love the “debate ideas in public” conception of things until those ideas involve coherent communism and anti-imperialism, and then they suddenly remember what deplatforming is and sweep those ideas under the rug as fast and brutally as they can.

“Chanting ‘don’t genocide’ at an event about genocide being bad is one of the most disgusting things you can do. Shame on you.”

That’s about how it reads to me. 🫠

Wouldn’t happen to have a source on it somewhere? I mean, with all the shit the west gets up to, I could def believe it. But also, I wouldn’t be too quick to be scared by such a thing. Just on a fundamental principle level of things, one thing to remember is that the best human generals can make tactical blunders and AI is nowhere near being on the level of human intelligence in the first place. I could see attempts to use it for statistical judgments, but such judgments are likely going to be locked into a specific scenario and it’ll be hard to generalize. At the end of the day, we’re still dealing with material conditions and AI is too.

And though it might not be exactly the same tech, based on what I’ve seen so far with generative AI, it’s a lot less effective at generalizing than people tend to think it is. One of the problems in generative AI, to put it in specifics, is that if the dataset has no experience with X subject, then it’s likely going to struggle to do anything in that subject, ex: if a text model was not trained on any data about Legos, it won’t somehow extrapolate that Legos exist in the world (which makes intuitive sense when you think about it for an example like that). Same thing with humans, but worse with AI. Even we can only generalize so much beyond what we know for sure and we overcome this by learning new things as we encounter them. But a lot of what’s getting called AI doesn’t learn a damn thing unless you make it do that, explicitly, and training gets expensive fast. And if you try to make it some kind of self-learning, it could easily run itself in a direction you don’t want, like the Microsoft Tay incident.

So I mean, they can try, but colonialism has gone on as long as it has without AI even in existence for the majority of that time. AI might impact how brutality is carried out, but the brutality has been going on for hundreds of years. And in spite of that, China is doing well, as are some other AES states. BRICS is making progress. The empire can be resisted and will be until its war criminals are brought to justice.

Edit: wording

I have not seen Andor, but sounds like a refreshing portrayal worth a watch some time.

Yeah, it’s a very weird moral argument. I want to say, one based around idealism, if I’m recalling my terms correctly (maybe some individualism in there too). The general argument of it being that evil acts come from inner evil, not from outer circumstances, so doing something that is under the umbrella of “bad stuff” has a “corrupting” influence and will “make you evil” like some sort of Evil Meter that fills up each time you do a “bad thing.” (As much as I like them as games, video games like KOTOR sort of do this literally.)

This position also seems to treat “bad stuff” as all corruptive and all on a sliding scale. So like, petty thievery would probably be on the lower end, but might “corrupt you” into “darker stuff” like physical violence.

I think the only truth in that conception of it is that if you become desensitized to certain acts, you might be more apt to do them again without the normal mechanisms of shame, guilt, traumatic reaction stopping you. But as we know from history and present, sometimes people go through with horrific acts in spite of there being collateral damage in the form of them having a traumatic reaction to doing it. Because the external processes and pressures supersede the internal “striving.” Which is a fancy of saying, “The world is not defined solely by personal willpower. Fuck you, rugged individualism.”

I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse, but I don’t think the kind of mindset you’re talking about in this thread is a thing specific to places that have been couped. For the US for example, I’m not sure if I’ve seen it on lemmygrad directly that I can recall, but I know on Twitter I’ve seen stuff along the lines of like “why is the left so useless” and it’s like, um, well its revolutionaries keep getting imprisoned or murdered by the state, then the messages of those revolutionaries (if they are allowed to be seen in popular media at all) get watered down into liberalism after their death, and aesthetic takes the place of substance in support of the status quo and methods of resistance like the feckless “resistance liberal” who “posts really hard and angrily about voting for a candidate who is carrying out genocide so the other genocide candidate won’t get in” are all that is allowed to be spoken about as a valid tactic in the media with the most reach.

People get frustrated and I think one way to approach it is to treat it less like a dismissal of an entire people and more like a strategy question. Underneath the dismissal is someone who probably wants a better world, but doesn’t understand why it isn’t happening or how to bring it about, from where they’re standing.

Sad to see. Must be hard for those who have been following Linux, or even contributing, for a long time, seeing it devolve into such pathetic falling in lockstep with the most demeaning lines of the day about countries the US deems “bad”.

By all rights I should be an insufferable turbolib.

Well I’m very glad that you’re not. :D

Programmers, the senior ones who can court good money with relative ease at least, are gonna tend to be pretty well off, which I’m sure is part of it. For them, the concept of “skills gud, pay gud too, something something meritocracy vibes” pretty much applies (even if the reasons it works for them are probably not what they think) and afaik they don’t even have to fight for it with unions much of the time because the demand is high enough and the number of people at their skill level low enough. Entry level seems to be a much different story, having become saturated with all the bootcamp code stuff and “learn to code” rhetoric and such. But like, there’s stuff where it runs on some old programming language that virtually nobody learns or actively uses anymore, so knowing it could give you a lot of leverage.

The moment these types of people were faced with hardship in employment and wages, I’m confident many of them would start questioning a lot of things they never thought much about before. But as long as they are a relatively comfy class in high demand, much of the class struggle can fly under the radar for them and through that, much of the rhetoric that might persuade them to think about imperialism as well.

I’m just spitballing here, but I wonder if some of it is logistics illiteracy, which also plays into keeping people living in the imperial core infantilized in capability to change anything. Cause like, in all the narratives about this country is dictator, that country is dictator, you know what I never hear? How exactly they do it. What the logistics are supposed to be of carrying out these dictatorships and how exactly they function and manage to stay functioning over time, being simultaneously so in control and so terrible to their people. I’m not saying terrible governance isn’t possible (hell, I live in the US…), but I never see these people delving into those things with X country that the empire vilifies. Probably because if they did, they’d find out the process is not at all what they thought. I remember when I first learned some things about the voting process of Cuba; was one of the first times I was ever exposed to actual logistical info on the processes they do and it wasn’t even in that much depth, but was still way more than I’d ever been exposed to with Cuba before.

The zionist regime has been murdering very, very, very effectively the leadership of Hamas plus Hezbollah for a few months now so it’s not one of those things likely to be a lie.

Effectively seems like overstating it a lot. They’ve been genociding an entire people and bombing an entire infrastructure to go with it, including hospitals, schools, etc. What they are “effective” at is using blank check firepower and funding from the US empire to bomb and torment and murder indiscriminately. If they were “very effective” at targeting leadership, they would have done this long ago.

None of this is to disagree on the point about whether it’s true, especially since it has been confirmed as true prior to my writing this comment that he has been martyred. Rather, I disagree on this exaggerative language that poses the zionists as somehow more clever than they are. If you want to say they are very very very genocidal, yes. Effective at targeting leadership specifically? I don’t see how, at all. I’m not sure that’s even their goal in the first place, much of the time. They love to claim secret military targets when they target civilians over and over, and naturally, in broken clock fashion, doing this often and thoroughly enough is going to hit military some of the time too because military can’t operate in total isolation from everyone else and every other part of infrastructure.

Beijing is conducting espionage activities on what Western governments say is an unprecedented scale, mobilizing security agencies, private companies and Chinese civilians in its quest to undermine rival states and bolster the country’s economy.

Reads like pure projection. Like if you change the wording to:

Washington is conducting espionage activities on what anti-imperialist governments say is an unprecedented scale, mobilizing security agencies, private companies and American civilians in its quest to undermine rival states and bolster the country’s economy.

It’s basically just what the US has been doing for decades.

I’m sure China is doing some covert offensive things. It’d be a bit odd if they weren’t considering they can’t have any lasting peace while the western empire is still going. In that sense, it’s more like defensive offense, most likely, in the same general meaning as Palestine trying to survive a genocide when they take out an occupier tank. Some of it’s probably real, some probably fabricated to manufacture consent for cold war, but either way, the characterization of it reads like very clear projection.

Hopefully someone with a better understanding will chime in if I’m at all off here, but from the standpoint of entities who are working on a larger scale, I believe the argument goes something like that a two state solution is incompatible with israel’s settler extermination goals, while also benefiting Palestine and Palestinian people vs. their current situation, and so sometimes it makes more sense as the position to take, even if it seems weaker on the surface than it is; because it is simultaneously the more diplomatic and peaceful position, while also being one that materially runs counter to what israel is about. For israel to truly embrace peace and accept the sovereignty and self determination of those they have dehumanized and targeted for extermination for decades implies losing the point of being out there in the first place, it implies having to give up on their ingrained culture of superiority and entitlement, it implies facing accountability on a large scale system level for what they have done in order to make the peace stick.

It’s an interesting thought. But going for “simplest explanation” reasoning, I would say based on the fact alone that israel is known to aggressively, constantly lie, that would suggest they’re more likely to be doing any lying/misleading statements here. If we consider israel as being something like Narcissistic Personality Disorder in state colony form, that kind of person never wants to admit weakness or fault, no matter what; a narcissist’s actions differ from a more plainly cunning malignant psychopath in that protecting their image can be deemed more important than protecting themself materially. (Mind you, I’m not saying this situation is reducible to psychological archetypes - just drawing the comparison to try to help explain how pathological lying to the point of damaging their own goals could make a kind of sense to them as behavior, even if it seems irrational and reckless to us.)

I don’t love my own analogy here (anything too “individual psychology” focused is a bit iffy to me), but trying to get at the mindset of superiority that seems to be a significant part of what israel is and how it acts.

Tbh, while I think this is a funny meme that uses a good format, I’m not a fan of the generational rhetoric in either direction. I will focus on the US because that seems to be where a lot of the generational rhetoric is centered on: From what I can find on dates, Fred Hampton would be considered boomer age range, if he was still alive today. Assata Shakur, still living, is another. I’m sure one can find many more who fought for better and got imprisoned or murdered by the state, or are still actively free and fighting even if they don’t have a lot of visibility.

The best way to counter generational rhetoric, in my view, is not to flip it back on the ones who say millennials/z/alpha/etc. are bad, but to counter the whole premise of saying that one generation is causing problems and another isn’t. We know that’s not true. It’s a minority of people orchestrating most of the damage, across generations. That’s not to say there isn’t any damage being done by people beyond that range, but, for example, it’s not some protesters showing up for Palestine or some dentist who barely reads the news who is bombing kids in Palestine, it’s the US federal government and military apparatus in partnership with israel. Some people are more complicit than they should be, but the ones actually organizing the terror and pulling the trigger are not the majority.

People tried to, to an extent, in 2020. Against police brutality. And they were brutalized for it and cop cities started getting built. Called rioters when most of them were nothing more than civil disobedience and police were the ones primarily rioting, being violent against them for daring to express any opposition to the state’s wanton violence.

Mind you, I don’t say this to be reductionist or dismissive with the “why” which is an important question to contend with. But the point is, it’s not as though everyone is sitting around doing nothing. And revolutions, as we know from history, do not happen (or maybe, more precisely, do not succeed) from spontaneous anger alone, but from organized, disciplined force and intention. Stuff like cointelpro and the vilification and violence against the Black Panther Party, or going further back than that, the imprisonment of Eugene Debs or the Battle of Blair Mountain, shows that there are elements of the US who do fight back and face state violence every time. Or a more recent example, the student protests against genocide; maybe that doesn’t qualify as “revolting” to you, but it is a kind of resistance against imperialism and carries with it risk of violence from the state as a consequence.

Why it’s not more than that, is maybe a more important question to ask. And some of the answer to that, I think is found in the systematized racial hierarchy. To a racist enough person, the systemic violence against black people, for example, is virtually invisible to them as an issue, if they would even deem it as one in the first place. Then there are those liberals who view themselves as anti-racist, but obviously aren’t in substantive action, and that’s a whole can of worms in itself.

Part of the gut punch of this is the grassroots efforts to stop it that were basically ignored. Don’t let anyone tell you the US is anything remotely resembling a system “by/for the people.” One of the fakest slogans in modern history. The US is “by/for white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism,” and they have clung to that general makeup through the will of a violent and organized power elite—along with the weaponization of a racist class of “white people” under that—throughout the entire country’s history. On paper, being post woman’s suffrage movement, post civil rights movement, it is perhaps as democratic a system as it has ever been in the country’s history, which in practice is saying… almost nothing, considering outcomes like this. The US seems clearly to be a country that runs on the aesthetics of democracy over any actual democratic process. I find it’s the same way liberals tend to think about fascism in the US, as some kind of aesthetic that you will “know when you see it.” But the substance of fascism is already there (IIRC, George Jackson talks about this in Blood in My Eye, though I don’t remember the specifics atm).

What is a vote worth if it ignores the will of the people? This is the reality liberal “democracy” shows over and over (another notable example recently, what happened with the French “elections”). “What can we do to give the illusion of choice without actual people power that could challenge the hegemonic goal of imperial expansion, and global domination and humiliation of entire peoples?” The answers to that question brought into being by the organized colonizers is what we’re dealing with in places like the US. Honestly, even using words like “domination” doesn’t feel strong enough. The degree of systematic violence that colonialism does is obsessed with torture, maiming, and inflicting terror, not just in control alone. It is not enough for them to kill a person; they want the victim and anyone who supports them to feel helpless and dispirited too. To be broken by it, until you are numb.

Under any other circumstance, I might say I’m being dramatic, but this is a graphically violent system of power we’re talking about, colonialism, with a hundreds of years legacy to it. It can shock the system to internalize how grotesque and systematized it is, in its violence.

I like the idea of a bot for it, for certain domains maybe? That seems feasible, at least for some of it. For youtube links, it might get hairy, since they don’t necessarily have channel information in the name (unless there’s a way a bot can extract some kind of metadata from where the link leads?). Don’t know if the admins would go for it or not though, either way, or who to ask about that kind of thing. But I like the idea.

To be honest, I don’t understand how some people are arriving at the conclusions they are in this thread. I’d think a warning is a very low bar to ask for w/ regards to the way you’re presenting it. Like, “Hey, this is from a source that I find trustworthy on X narrow subject, but on Y, I do not advise listening to them.” Then there is at least a baseline established on the why. Because: 1) It is foolish to not guide people at all on what is and isn’t trustworthy and 2) It becomes hard to distinguish who is and isn’t laundering anti-communist politics if they can post just anything as long as it’s agreeable to communism and anti-imperialism some of the time.

In particular, w/ regards to this part:

Cutting off an information stream due to ideology harms, rather than benefits, the ability of Marxist’s to analyze what’s going on in the world.

I can guess what the intent is here, but it can’t be approached blindly as an individualist problem of discernment. For this to work, it requires an organized and disciplined approach to information. You wouldn’t tell a communist to listen to Fox News for 4 hours each day because they might “miss out on information streams” if they don’t. Cutting off information or not requires processing it with care. China didn’t cut themselves off from information about the world as a whole, but they did develop their own social media and messaging platforms, making it much harder for the west to come in and astroturf on them and their people.

It’s not liberalism to recognize that managing information and how people engage with it is a critical part of developing towards socialism and communism and their goals. We are supposed to approach it from the standpoint of actual truth, not manipulation for selfish gain, but that doesn’t mean you let just anything in because it contains a nugget of truth in it. You must have some boundaries, it’s just a question of what and when.

My thoughts are so

free.

Where do they come

from?

Do they come from

me?

I cannot understand where their origins

be.

So I wrote a poem about how they make me

feel.

Their originality makes me feel

unique.

I never check the comments because

I

Might find one of the other fifty million

people,

Who have writ the

same.