FunkyStuff [he/him]

What’s your preferred term for “not trans”?

It’s weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with “that’s not true socialism.” Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn’t would say that, but anyone who’s reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.

Which brings me to my next point: Socialism’s biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It’s the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants’ daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.

protest for the sake of conducting the genocide more effectively is definitely enough reason to cut settlers some slack!

At least in Star Wars they explain the context with the scroll at the start of the movie, libs think that Ukraine literally popped into existence in 2022.

If you’re looking for some in depth discussion BreakThrough News just did a video on the subject.

“Not humanly possible” is a quote from an American swimmer commenting on the Chinese athlete’s performance.

If China tested fewer athletes than the US, you’d call them lax. But they test more than anywhere else and that’s sketchy because it makes this particular metric look better.

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Do you think the exodus has happened as a result of Maduro’s policies, or the American imposed sanctions? On what basis do you believe that Maduro is not favored by the public, yet the far right opposition is, the polls with very small sample sizes that showed results similar to what Gonzalez is claiming?

The truth is that Maduro has popular support from every part of Venezuelan society save for the reactionaries who wish for private oil companies to run the country again. I don’t know if you speak Spanish or are from LatAm, but the difference in ideology between wealthier, English speaking Venezuelans and the less fortunate who only speak Spanish is enormous. The numbers that the right is claiming are only feasible if you’ve only ever talked with the upper crust of Venezuela, who see Maduro and Chavez as cruel despots who took away their rightful position in a stratified society. Same as the latifundio owners in Cuba, or the mob, the casino owners, etc. If that is the class of people you interact with, you might come away thinking all Venezuelans hate Socialism. If you talk with the workers you’ll get the opposite impression, and one group obviously outnumbers the other and is being suppressed by this attempted coup.

No one is telling you you need to do violence, though. No one in Lemmygrad or Hexbear believes that the time to take to the street and start shooting is right now, obviously it wouldn’t achieve anything and would just be a waste of life, that’s why fascists are the ones committing mass shootings. What we believe is that when the contradictions mount to the point that the ruling class clashes down on its opposition with violent force, we need to be organized and ready to carry out the revolution come hell or high water, like every single socialist revolution in the past. Whether or not you personally want to participate is irrelevant because the historical process in which capital undermines its own existence is inevitable, some amount of time from now the crisis of capitalism necessarily must reach a point where its contradictions can’t be reconciled anymore and either the ruling classes succeed at preserving the system, or the workers succeed in transforming it into something new. Furthermore, regardless of your own participation in the violence necessary to maintain capitalism right now, that violence is happening anyway, and it’s orders of magnitude larger than the violence that the left is capable of, even if we were the bloodthirsty maniacs some liberals claim us to be. The black book of communism claims that communism’s death toll nears 100 million, but every 10 years far more than 100 million people die because of preventable illnesses, hunger, and conflict, which are all direct effects of the decaying economic system. If you reject to resist that system, then you’re complicit too, even when so little is asked of you.

Although I’m sure if they had anything they had to actually run (like a country) they’d be an absolute horror show of fighting, arguing, and bloodbathing each other until they got to the point where the strongest survived and could impose their vision of utopia on the masses.

China is currently installing the equivalent of 5 nuclear power stations’ worth of solar and wind power every week.

Meanwhile in the west AOC and Bernie groveled at the feet of the democratic party by endorsing Biden’s genocidal regime and all they got in return was Biden announcing a plan to cap rent increases at 5%, which can only go through if they win the next election… against a fascist candidate who is far ahead of Biden in almost every swing state.

See why we want revolution?

What? What other groups make up the left then? Do they wield political power? Have they ever gotten to wield political power? Because the only left that has ever gotten to wield political power and use it to liberate the working people from capitalist oppression are the ones who were willing to pick up a gun and fight.

If all those people disagree with you, what kinds of people do you imagine would say yes? Nancy Pelosi? Chelsea Clinton?

Yeah lol just validate my clearly very questionable view, you’re only allowed in this thread if you agree with me!

The nature of the dialectic is for it to continually and fluidly evolve, every now and then contradictions mount to a point of qualitative change and give rise to a new system that resolves the contradictions of the last, but gains new ones. It never ends. Marx only said, capitalism will bring about socialism, which will in turn bring about communism. Everything after that is too far away to really make any concrete statement that isn’t grossly biased by the conditions of our time.

The current situation over in China still allows internet users to easily access services like Facebook or YouTube through VPNs, it was more of a measure of digital protectionism to allow local development of IT companies, online business, etc. If China wants to do similar censorship in response to these measure, they very well could still crack down on VPNs.

Justifying their attacks with claims of superiority, defending the obvious contradictions with equivalence. Classic motte and bailley.

The state is part of the superstructure that is shaped by the economic base, which is in turned maintained by said superstructure. However, changes in the superstructure are never transformative unless they also come with radical change to the mode of production. Billionaires, and the capitalist class as a whole, completely block the path for the workers to seize the means and reshape society towards progress. It doesn’t matter what faffing idiot you put in power in the state, when the economic base keeps operating with the same logic of capitalist extraction.

Yeah, real resistance fighters should take advantage of all the empty space there is in the world’s densest city, so they can fight in a way that’s acceptable to white westerners! If only they were really trying to liberate themselves instead of pursuing their evil terroristic agendas, their movement would be morally unimpeachable and the whole world would recognize their plight. Alas, Israel killed a bunch of kids, which is Hamas’ fault actually, so we have no choice but to glass them. maybe later kiddos!

communism made lemmy so where does that leave us

You have a pretty interesting idea that I hadn’t heard elsewhere. Do you know if there’s been any research to make an AI model learn that way?

In my own time while I’ve messed around with some ML stuff, I’ve heard of approaches where you try to get the model to accomplish progressively more complex tasks but in the same domain. For example, if you wanted to train a model to control an agent in a physics simulation to walk like a humanoid you’d have it learn to crawl first, like a real human. I guess for an AGI it makes sense that you would have it try to learn a model of the world across different domains like vision, or sound. Heck, since you can plug any kind of input to it you could have it process radio, infrared, whatever else. That way it could have a very complete model of the world.