I do wonder if the democratic party could produce much of anything viable at this point even with a concerted effort to do so. Biden seems to have largely gotten in on “he’s not Trump”. Bernie might have been a real shot at a milquetoast reformist, but even without the capitalists doing everything they could to stop him, the anti-anything-remotely-socialist-sounding rhetoric in the US is strong. And if we look at how pathetic Bernie’s takes on the genocide against Palestine have been, who’s to say he wouldn’t have been funding it just like Biden is, but with slightly different rhetoric and so receiving much the same criticism Biden is.

Trump on the other hand, is willing to say he wants to do something drastically different. In practice, I’m not sure even he has any real intention of consolidating a new christo-fascist order, but he is at least willing to play the part of wanting to and that prolongs the belief for a little longer that the shambling burger empire can be changed significantly through voting.

I could see it being plausible that the capitalists would throw their support behind a Trump kind of figure getting rid of the facade of democracy because of not having much else of direction to go with it. How many times can they do the same Charlie Brown / Lucy Football maneuver while conditions continue to deteriorate for most USians before a critical mass of people go, “Yeah, this stuff is a bunch of BS and we’re not going to feed into the facade anymore.” The anything-but-Trump panic pushed by liberals seems to center on this idea that there is in fact a functional “democracy” and that Trump is going to destroy it, but nowhere in this panic do liberals explain why their candidates are so incredibly bad that a guy like Trump is viable in the first place.

It’s bizarre watching them effectively tell people “we are one of the worst things there is in your universe, but vote for us anyway.” And I’m not sure it’s tactical ineptitude or neglect, so much as it is having reached the limits of pretending to care without meaningfully doing anything for regular people while in office. Obama did nothing to shake up anything while putting on a show like he was the kind of person who would. Biden has done nothing to shake up anything while the media acts like he’s FDR. Liberals can pull out a list of minor stuff they’ve done, but none of it addresses the fundamentals and it’s the fundamentals that leaves people open to a guy like Trump to come in and say, “I’m not going to legitimize how ridiculous and humiliating this system is.” Of course, he’s perfectly capable of legitimizing it anyway, while pretending not to, and I think that’s much of what he did when he was in office before. But then there is the following he has who doesn’t see it that way and they may push him to challenge the fundamentals more than he actually wants to himself. Shaking things up wouldn’t exactly be a cozy thing to attempt. He’d be taking a lot of risk that the existing fascist forces of neoliberalism rally against him and make the remains of his life more painful, and I don’t think his heart is really in it on the beliefs.

As far as I can tell, base skepticism doesn’t accomplish much, if not grounded in a conscious understanding and embracing of one’s biases (such as a bias for the working class), as well as translating that to an understanding of the biases implicit in sources (not just whether they are “factual” or not). For example, an article could say, “A man at the supermarket today was wearing a pink shirt.” Okay, on its own, this may be factual, but why are they focusing on the color of one man’s shirt and specifically the color pink? Sometimes answering that is way more important than whether it’s strictly true or not that there was a man at the supermarket wearing a pink shirt.

But if people don’t even get to that stage because they’re too exhausted with the exercise of verifying whether what they’re being told is even true on a basic factual level, I’m concerned they’re just going to tap out in general. Do you see what I mean?

nefarious synthetic content risks increasing people’s scepticism towards digital information altogether

This is honestly my biggest concern with AI gen and information. I’m not so much concerned about “fake news” as I am about people who are already jaded becoming more cynical about information as a whole and effectively saying, “Let me just enjoy my Cheetos and iPhone 53 in my domicile and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist.”

I just read through the thread and tried to mentally filter for people saying it’s a common thing. Didn’t find anything particularly overt in that way. Don’t think anyone was making claims as to how common it is either way, but I guess I could have missed it.

I think that makes sense yeah. Thanks.

It’s telling to me how fragile the gender binary is when people feel the need to police attraction lines based on such arbitrary physical characteristics as how much someone does bodybuilding or fitness.

What is this from? I’m trying to figure out who is the Pacheco he is talking about. Most likely seems to be Rodrigo Pacheco, who as far as I can tell, is associated with the Social Democratic Party. I don’t know how reliable wikipedia is on this, but it describes the Social Democratic Party as a force of centrism in Brazil.

So I’m a bit confused as to why Lula would be saying that to Pacheco in a way that sounds like some kind of counter argument, if it’s the same Pacheco.

The most perturbing question for the liberal is the question of violence. The liberal’s initial reaction to violence is to try to convince the oppressed that violence is an incorrect tactic, that violence will not work, that violence never accomplishes anything. The Europeans took America through violence and through violence they established the most powerful country in the world. Through violence they maintain the most powerful country in the world. It is absolutely absurd for one to say that violence never accomplishes anything.

Most societies in the West are not opposed to violence. The oppressor is only opposed to violence when the oppressed talks about using violence against the oppressor. Then the question of violence is raised as the incorrect means to attain one’s ends.

https://redsails.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism/

These sort of people act like the organized violence inflicted by the oppressor was just siblings having a shouting match and having to learn to share space. No sense of the gravity of what they’re talking about.

It’s part of the cycle of blame. Liberals can’t take responsibility for failing cause that’d mean they have to actually do something more than whine about what the rightists are doing; they would have to both obtain power and leverage the organized violence of that power in order to suppress any and all rightist influence. But they don’t and in practice, often ally with and enable them instead. That leaves them blaming the nebulous, shifting, ill-defined entity “the left”. An entity which is portrayed as both weak and strong; on the one hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as an inconsequential sample of the population and thus something that should be ignored when it comes time to legislate or court votes. On the other hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as a serious threat that undermines their ability to win elections by refusing to support them and carrying water for what they label rightist talking points, such as (at this point, with the vote blue no matter who nonsense) criticizing anything a liberal in charge is doing.

If they took responsibility, they would have to admit that the liberal order they idealize is impossible to manage or sustain or implement meaningfully much at all without the contradictions building over time rather than lessening. They would have to admit that where they stand isn’t in any kind of middle, but is in direct opposition to the marginalized, the colonized, the working class. And the best they can ever do as liberals is the political worldview equivalent of Scrooge voluntarily becoming a good guy in A Christmas Carol. They can’t take it further than charity unless they take power seriously and for them to take power seriously, they either end up aligning with the rightists or they figure out they’ve got to reject liberalism and embrace a dialectical liberation as laid out by communists.

I don’t know. I can tell you, seeing what the game industry did to video games certainly helped me adopt an anti-capitalist lens. It was influences significantly beyond that though, that got me all the way to communism.

I mean, the game industry killed most of my passion for video games in a death by a thousand cuts. But that didn’t on its own get me in front of people who were talking anti-imperialism, talking Lenin, George Jackson, Michael Parenti.

racism, against black people

Recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nxeiFpSJfc

It’s a bit anecdotal as evidence goes, to be fair, and I recommend watching it, not taking my summary of it at face value, but the general idea IIRC is: black people are more treated as a curiosity. Like being curious about someone of an ethnicity you have never seen before, who looks so different. But since China doesn’t have the racialized cultural context that the white supremacist west has, it’s not an aggressive or hateful curiosity.

There’s this mythos in western thinking that goes something like, “Racism is cause people are tribal and mistrusting of strangers.” But it’s missing how systemically racism gets developed over time in history and for what purpose(s). And China, as far as I can tell, has no reason for such a development of power in relation to black people, so they simply don’t have the racism that the west has.

As tempting as it is sometimes, doomerism is counter revolutionary. Not to be confused with being down sometimes or contending with depression. Taking a stance, even if meant in jest (and doomerism does go for dark humor sometimes) that suggests there is no hope is a problem. That’s not even getting into the problems with feeding narratives about exaggerated differences between generations, which is a divide and conquer thing, and doesn’t help us build solidarity with anyone.

There are observable differences between generations in culture and conditions they face, to a certain extent, but exaggerated statements about them that suggest helplessness or a fixed, doomed state of being is not a good idea. And the liberation cause is one where people have more in common, usually, than they have differences.

Pretty sure twitter got worse with stuff like this since Musk took over. Anecdotal, but even with all the wild BS twitter had, I could swear it used to have more of a veneer of decency on the surface at least. Now it seems like every other post that has a mildly “human decency” perspective has got accounts flooding it with stuff that reads like astroturfing for the capitalist, imperialist order.

And I know the porn bots got worse on there (that’s easy to see and I’ve not been the only one to mention it) so if those bots are getting through, it would stand to reason other bots may be getting through more as well. Not to say there aren’t real people who push this stuff, but the sheer amount of it is hard to believe as authentic “deep in propaganda” posting. And with LLMs being how they are now, it’s feasible to produce bots who can write more coherent and human-sounding BS.

Good god. That is… a lot to deal with.

Great point and healthy reminder that the practice part in theory and practice is critical to get anywhere.

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.

I would say it’s closer to “the US taking the mask off on being fascist” vs. “finding ways to keep the mask on for longer”

It’s also not just about privacy. It’s also about safety (historically, ads can be a vector for viruses). And it’s about having garbage shoveled in front of you that makes the internet borderline unusable. Which comes back to capitalism and the nature of every space becoming an ad-infested hell because consume product is the god.

So, thanks for the back and forth on this. I ended up updating and it seems to be working again now. Since you figure it’s not using new functionality, my best guess is something old got deprecated in a way that my version was depending on in some part of the process.

Either way, working now, so yay.