Idk if this distinction works for anyone else, but in my mind places like Reddit or Lemmy aren’t the same thing as “social media” because they maintained the anonymous forum structure. The activity on the site isn’t centered around people and personalities, it’s the content being discussed.
I’m sure he would have appreciated some AC though.
I’d fund some dream MMO. Those things are bottomless money pits.
Even if this worked, this seems like over-engineering at it’s finest. “Lets create a machine that takes power, maintenance, and proprietary catridges to replace a cheap rubber object people can use with their hands easily.” Kind of reminds me of that “smart” juicer.
That’s super dumb. Also, I thought there weren’t 3rd party Reddit apps anymore? Do you not still have to pay for the API?
It’s like everyone forgot about the Patriot Act and NSA stuff. This shit has been going on through at least 4 different presidents. And that’s just the modern surveillance state.
Interestingly, the place I heard it was in a completely different context, different meaning, but same derogatory connotation. In DoTA 2 esports, the Chinese pro teams were known for spending a lot of time “farming,” (acquiring resources in a mostly passive way that can be a little boring to watch) so some people started calling that “ricing.” “Farming”, but Chinese, so “ricing.”
Continue writing “2024” for the date for at least a week or so.
It probably depends on the accent, but we say “Double U”.
External hostility often pushed socialist regimes toward authoritarian measures. For example, the USSR faced significant opposition from capitalist countries, which influenced its militarization and political centralization. This external pressure created a siege mentality that undermined the potential for democratic governance.
This is something that I wish more people who talked about this would acknowledge and engage with. I get it, authoritarianism isn’t good. It’s not like we want that. It’s not the goal. But it’s really easy to sit on the sidelines from a relatively cushy life in the imperial core and judge all the people out there who are dealing with the historical reality of colonialism and feudalism and the current reality of imperialism. They are actively engaged in the practical task of liberating themselves from forces, both external and internal (old power structures/privileges) that seek to violently return them to a condition of servitude. The decisions they made have to be viewed through the lens of that context.
That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss and criticize them, but it’s worth engaging in the nuance of the history rather than out of hand dismissing their attempts as inherently illegitimate, evil, and/or misguided. What were the conditions they were operating under? What dangers did they face? Were their actions the best strategy for achieving the future they wanted? Was what they gave up too great? Did they have the capability to take a more open path? Have/had their decisions irreparably led them astray or were/are they still on the path to that eventual communist society on some time scale?
If you think they’re wrong for what they did, you still have to be able to answer the question of how you protect your revolution from forces that will spy on you, sabotage your industry, fund right wing militias to terrorize people, sanction and blockade you, or even invade you? Or if you think the path wasn’t even violent revolution in the first place, what is your answer to how you get to where you want to be when the power structure that would need to allow this is also invested in not allowing this? It’s a bit harder to see how this is made difficult or even impossible in liberal “democracies,” but it should be uncontroversial to acknowledge that some kind of force was necessary to escape from illiberal systems like Feudalism in Russia/China or from colonial regimes like in Vietnam.
The one thing I’d push back on from your comment is about the welfare states of Europe. That’s not really what socialism is about. They’ve made life better for people in their own country, yes, but it’s on the backs of those exploited in the third world. That’s why communism is inherently internationalist. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” You need to be able to build a movement that can work to lift everyone up with you, or at least not drag them down for your own benefit. I’d be interested to have more of a discussion on this, but that’s the standpoint I’d start from.
This isn’t a shower thought. It’s a bath thought.
Yeah. To me the misinformation conversation just sounds like”why are the poors talking to each other instead of listening to US?”
If we had a misinformation law in 2001, would it have applied to the news outlets or gov officials who were lying about the Iraq war?
There is A real problem in how we sort out second hand evidence, it’s just that this problem didn’t magically start when social media became a thing and it won’t be fixed by returning authority to those same old institutions who were lying to us in the past.
I think there’s something to be said for the fact that the country has always had these tendencies. It’s a country founded on conquest and genocide and we just kept the wars rolling ever since. People are just numb to cruelty because it’s so “normal” living in an imperialist country. To complete the Nazi comparison, Germany, like most of the European states, was a decaying colonial empire. You spend centuries dehumanizing people around the world to justify colonizing them and it becomes pretty easy to turn that dehumanizing apparatus inward. The minds of the people are already set up to view some people as being lesser to justify oppressing them.
I think what you and others are experiencing isn’t a significant change as much as it’s becoming conscious of the violence that’s always been there. That’s good. People need to take that step to be able to do something. That said, there’s not NOTHING new about the various developments in the world. Technology always empowers those who already have the power to wield is to do things that they might have only dreamed of before. The industrial scale genocide of the holocaust wouldn’t have been possible without modern technology. Today, surveillance, data science, and automation allows the powerful to optimize their control over an increasing number of people with fewer and fewer people necessary to do it for them. What might once have taken a whole army of spies and police/soldiers can now be done by some computers and a guy controlling a drone.
But people don’t have the framework for recognizing these as the problems they are because they start from the assumption that the US is good and therefore the various violent things it does must be for good reasons. You can try to point out all evidence to the contrary, but the assumption that the “other” is the enemy is so strong that they can justify almost any action against others as being better than the alternative. And some people will try to resist, get others to see what they see, and then get called a hippy, conspiracy theorist, and/or a foreign agent.
Mine is that in Star Trek, at least all the computers advanced enough to be used on a starship are actually sentient. At some point you have enough self aware hologram programs and rogue AIs that you should start to wonder if they’re actually anomalous.
My adblocking doesn’t work on twitch anymore, so I stopped using it for everything but one streamer I’m subbed to.
And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,
I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.
As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.
The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.
Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.
People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.
People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)
There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
Oh. Yeah. Maybe he just meant “last” as in the one prior and not last as in final? Idk.