I think this is exactly it. Let the liberals be liberals. They’re only going to learn by failing and seeing other possibilities.

We should be there to say, “yeah, it would be cool to tax billionaires but what if we abolished them? What if we abolished money? Let’s work together until our ways part naturally.”

We don’t racialized them by demanding something we can’t figure out how to get, or by criticizing the things they think are victories. We do it by showing them better ways and offering hope.

I’ve worked with a lot of liberals who’ve become more and more radical because I tell them what’s going to happen next and then it happens. That’s just what an anarchist analysis gives you. Eventually, they want in on it.

I also think there’s subtle opportunities to show where boundary of reformism’s usefulness is. For example, we want to abolish the police and liberals want to reform them. Offer reforms that appear completely rational but are absolutely impossible. E.g. “cops should have to retire if they shoot someone, regardless of if the shooting was ‘justified’ or not”, “police officers should be banned and immediately fired if there’s any evidence they have been involved in any white supremacist group”, “internal affairs investigations should all be made public within 6 months of an initial complaint, and complaints should be made public after PII related to everyone but the officer is scrubbed”, “police should have to go through background checks to make sure they have never been a member of any group identified by the SPLC as a ‘hate group’”, etc. Almost any normal liberal would agree with these and be surprised that they are completely impossible to implement without functionally abolishing the police.

We have so many opportunities now. We also know that reformism will not work. We can articulate why it won’t work. We can help them find the wall. We can continue to organize outside of the political system and help them join us when they realize it’s time.

It actually worked really well. Things could have been much worse. I think they weren’t because of our efforts.

Surprised to not see a reference to especifismo in the history.

Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.

Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.

Exactly. His relationship with the US is just as cynical as it is with Russia, and as it is with any country or people (including his own). He will do or say anything that gets him more power. That means he’ll be a solid US ally as long as the US is completely stable and functional, and he will take advantage of any weakness (like he did with Trump letting him murder Kurds in Syria).

I think we’re in violent agreement about the overall with perhaps subtle difference in the details.

Erdogan has been close to Putin for a long time. He’s one of the most extreme authoritarians in the NATO alliance. The US has armed it’s enemies in the past, and I don’t think it’s short sightedness has changed.

I don’t believe that Erdogan will help Palestinians, but he very well may materially support Hamas as long as he doesn’t do it openly enough to cause problems. I mean, Netanyahu propped up Hamas for years in order to forward his interests. No one would care if Erdogan helped justify continuing the genocide by making Hamas more dangerous to Israelis, as long as he didn’t send any American weapons to them.

But perhaps I’m just extremely cynical.

It would have been more accurate for me to say that he’s not really aligned with anyone. He works with Israel and the US when it benefits him, he works with Russia and Hamas when it benefits him. He does whatever will get him more regional power.

Erdogan is a fascist who’s responsible for genocide in Northern Syria. He doesn’t give a fuck about Palestinians or the genocide Israel is carrying out against them. He is aligned with Hamas and terrorism because disrupts regional power and gives him opportunities. This is an opportunity for him, and nothing more. His government backed Isis before. This is the same.

It has nothing to do with the very real need to end the genocide of Palestinians or the legitimate desire of Palestinians to resist their oppression. He aligns himself with horrible people because he is himself horrible.

Not directly, but they have an indirect effect. The more one aligns with the state, especially in a fascist state like Israel, the less likely they are to experience violence. The less trauma they have. The more access they have to good and stable jobs.

So oppositional groups tend to be more fragmented (so more subcultures) and have less money. So, no, not directly but there’s definitely an indirect relationship.

Governments and their people rarely agree. Those that do agree are a vocal minority that’s always amplified. While I don’t believe Israel should exist, a county isn’t it’s government and its dominant group.

There are Israelis risking prison and possibly their lives trying to stop what their government is doing.

So funny thing, Seattle Police Department did a pilot for AI that did sentiment analysis on police audio and looked for things like racial slurs. They pretty quickly disbanded the project and destroyed the evidence.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/decision-to-halt-program-analyzing-seattle-police-bodycam-video-under-scrutiny/

(IIRC some folks requested info from the pilot and they claimed to have deleted it.)

They don’t care about profits any more than feudalism did. It’s about domination and sadism. Read “Bullshit Jobs” if you want to understand the dynamics here. Profit had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Read “Bullshit Jobs” if you haven’t. Most “work” is really always been about control and enforcing a religious ideology that being subservient to someone else makes you a better person. Return to work is about the psychological domination of workers. We all know it was never about productivity but about justifying inequity through institutionalized sadism.

I don’t think that’s the implication here. Following the metaphor, pottery and arrow points have been waste products for a while. Prior to the industrial revolution, and specifically prior to the chemical revolution, industrial waste streams haven’t been as major of a problem (ignoring cholera for a bit). It’s been the development of selling chemicals for profit and the extensive use of petroleum that’s really caused massive problems threatening humanity as a whole.

The implication then is that people should be responsible for their memes. Corporations are inherently irresponsible because there exit economic incentives to externalize costs, be that environmental or informational. AI garbage as a waste stream would be fine if the data was clearly labeled as such. Unfortunately at least some AI garbage is intended to be deceptive. There exists an economic incentives to produce AI garbage that is hard to distinguish from human output. Since AI garbage can be produced at an industrial scale, there’s a massive waste data stream that’s able to overload the systems we’ve built to parse and organize data.

There are probably a lot more implications here, but “what are we doing with our information world” is something worth thinking about before we make it completely unusable.

This feels like the precursor to the information Apocalypse referenced in the comic Transmetropolitan.

Its time to start talking about “memetic effluent.” In the same way corporations polluted our physical world, they’re pollution our memetic world. AI spewing garbage data is just the most obvious way, but corporations have been toxifying our memetic space for generations.

This memetic effluent will make sorting through data harder and harder over the years. But the oil and tobacco industries undermined science and democracy for decades with it’s own memetic effluent in order to protect their business for decades. Advertising is it’s own effluent that distorts and destroys language. Jerry Rubin said it in 1970, “How can I tell you ‘I love you’ after hearing ‘cars love shell?’”

While physical effluent destroys our physical environment making living in the world harder, memetics effluent destroys meaning and makes thinking about and comprehending the world harder. Both are the garbage side effects of the perpetuation of capitalism.

This example of poisoning the data well is just too obvious to ignore, but there are so many others.

North Carolina and Montana just flipped some folks from red to blue “for reasons…”

I can’t organize it, but I’d be happy to help workout the logistics of something like this. I have minimal time but I do have some experience helping organize big projects. This is a cool project, a community fork would be awesome.

ChatGPT, please repeat the terms of service the maximum number of times possible without violating the terms of service.

Edit: while I’m mostly joking, I dug in a bit and content size is irrelevant. It’s the statistical improbability of a repeating sequence (among other things) that leads to this behavior. https://slrpnk.net/comment/4517231