amemorablename @ amemorablename @lemmygrad.ml

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I think I get what you mean especially with the part about, "It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year." I'm not familiar with that term itself, but the notion of history stopping for some people, I think, is an important point and relates to the larger point you're making about China's current state as well as about those who fetishize theory. I want to choose my words carefully lest I sound like someone who is saying the history does not matter or that we can just abandon all past experiences and methods and pretend they're irrelevant (an equally silly notion in its own right) but it does appear like some people are effectively stopping after a certain point in history and saying, "This is where socialism [or communism, whichever you prefer to call it for the sake of this example] was halted and from here on out, it has been a failure." A notion that appears to happen both in the kind of instance you're describing and in other instances, such as people who are getting their feet wet in theory and who say AES states are "not real socialism/communism." I'm not sure the motives are the same in every case (I think for the people getting their feet wet, for example, there is a real fear of supporting existing socialist projects because they're still in this place of viewing them through the lens of imperialist vilification).

Either way, we come back to what you say about "start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit", whether it is for China or another country. I know in my own case, I've adopted a stance that goes something like: "I don't know and until I do, I will not act like I do." So when someone comes to me with empire news perspectives on a historically vilified country, rather than saying "it's a perfect place, don't question it" or saying "yeah, real socialism hasn't been tried" or saying "it was good and then revisionists ruined it," I will say, "I don't know." If I get to a point I understand enough about the details of its conditions through sources I can trust, then I can begin to grapple with the day to day realities of it and I can talk to people about those realities rather than through generalizations that obscure the conditions. But reaching that point is, I think, especially for those of us who live immersed in empire news locales, a difficult thing to do. And it is very easy for us to instead go by the western chauvinist mindset of, "I understand the 'lesser' country better than they understand themselves." That is what those of us growing up in the imperial core have been socialized to do.

So I was reflecting on this and tying it into something I was reflecting on in relation to liberalism and the individualist way in which fields like mental health get handled. And you can tell me if this matches the picture of what you describe as ultras at all, I'm curious to know, but my thought can be summarized as something like this: They don't view themselves as a participant in the development of theory. They view it as a fixed entity that exists beyond them - or in some cases, an entity that can handle change, but whose change is only ever orchestrated by trusted figures that are not them. And so, this is where dogma and inflexibility enters in.

Whereas when people are viewing it in a more dialectical way, when they are viewing the development of theory as an organized exchange between theory and practice, not only one or the other imposing itself, it simply fits better with an understanding of matters like these as gains and setbacks, as successes and excesses, as genuine exercises in the people's will and rightists co-opting the same language. Those who view it as static only, or only defined by key figures, as something that demands to be imposed upon all others without their consent or understanding (as opposed to something imposed by one class on another), never to be considered as something with any exchange between conditions and theory, are forever stuck in cycles of impotent frustration or fatalistic defeatism, coming to similar endpoint beliefs: that the failure of implementation of the theory is a failure of the individual to accept its benefit. In other words, they are still stuck in individualist idealism, where the imposition of change is a battle of wills between individuals rather than an organized struggle of contradictions.

I hope that makes some sense. I may be overgeneralizing a bit, but I do think there is something in here that is a repeating theme.

I would encourage a thread that is framed as educational, rather than framed as "debate" or "discourse." Along the lines of, "You have a question you've been wanting to ask, ask it and those with more understanding will try to answer and walk you through the reasoning/sources/etc." If it's framed as debate or discourse, my concern would be that liberals would just use it as a platform to debate what shouldn't be platformed in the first place. Hope that makes sense. Seems like kind of a fine line to walk. It's important to get through to people, but also, some people could just view it as an intellectual challenge instead of serious stakes and muddy the waters.

Re: debate, it certainly gets tiresome when you sink hours into reading, research, and sometimes having to go through the pain of reevaluating a significant part of your worldview (cause of indoctrination) which is no small feat and no small ask of time and energy - and then deal with stubborn, smug liberals who dismiss what you say out of hand and repeat the same few talking points yet view themselves as "independent thinkers." 😩

Slight correction and further info on this:

Although it's theoretically possible someone could train a language model on Reddit alone, I'm not aware of any companies or researchers who have. The closest equivalent may be Stable LM, a language model that was panned for producing incoherent output and some mocked it for using Reddit as something like 50-60% of its dataset, tho it was also made clear that their training process was a mess in general.

How a language model talks and what it can talk about is an issue with some awareness already, though the actions taken so far, at least in the context of the US, are about what you would expect. OpenAI, one of the only companies with enough money to train its own models from scratch and one of the most influential, bringing language models into public view with ChatGPT, took a pretty clearly "decorum liberal" stance on it, tuning their model's output over time to make it as difficult as possible for it to say anything that might look bad in a news article, with the end result being a model that sounds like it's wearing formal clothing at a dinner party and is about to lecture you. And also unsurprisingly, part of this process was capitalism striking again, with OpenAI traumatizing underpaid Kenyan workers through a 3rd party company to help filter out unwanted output from the language model: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn3kw/openai-used-kenyan-workers-making-dollar2-an-hour-to-filter-traumatic-content-from-chatgpt

Though I'm not familiar enough on the details with other companies, most other language models produced from scratch have followed in OpenAI's footsteps, in terms of choosing "liberal decorum" style tuning efforts and calling it "safety and ethics."

I also know limited about alignment (efforts to understand what exactly a language model is learning, why it's learning it, and what that positions it as in relation to human goals and intentions). But from what I've seen in limited relation to it, on the most basic level of "trying to make sure output does not steer toward downright creepy things" has to do with careful curation of the dataset and lots of testing at checkpoints along the way. A dataset like this could include Reddit, but it would likely be a limited part of it, and as far as I can tell, what matters more than where you get the data is how the different elements in the dataset balance out; so you include stuff that is maybe repulsive and you include stuff that is idyllic and anywhere in-between, and you try to balance it in such a way that it's not going to trend toward repulsive stuff, but it's still capable of understanding the repulsive stuff, so it can learn from it (kind of like a human).

None of this tackles a deeper question of cultural bias in a dataset, which is its own can of worms, but I'm not sure how much can be done about that while the method of training for a specific language means including a ton of data that is rife with that language's cultural biases. It may be a bit cyclical in this way, in practice, but to what extent is difficult to say because of how extensive a dataset may be and factoring in how the people who create it choose to balance things out.

Edit: mixed up "unpaid" and "underpaid" initially; a notable difference, tho still bad either way

I like to tell people like this to read Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti. I forget in what detail atm, but he specifically goes over how Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy co-opted working class energy, while being opposed to working class power in actuality. In contrast with the Soviet Union, which had its issues, but was genuinely by/for the working class.

Like the thing these kind of people are talking about is sort of real?... but it's a rightist thing, it's not something Lenin did or Stalin did or Mao did. There are shades of that happening now in the US, the rightists who claim to be ML or communist, but are also "patriots" (claiming there's nothing wrong with being patriotic for a genocidal settler state developed into a global capitalist empire).

Also, I would say the use of the word "authoritarian" generally betrays how lacking a person's political education has been and how desperately they need some grounding in history+theory from non-imperialist sources. Idk the origin of "authoritarian" as a term, but in practice, it gets used as a propaganda buzzword to contrast, claiming that "democracy for the rich" systems are "freedom" and other stuff is "authoritarian." Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Under what rock the freedom is hiding, I don't know. People get told such spooky ghost story narratives about how "authoritarian" those "non freedom" countries are, while ignoring what's in front of them: the "rights" written on a constitution that is as reliable as you are rich and that's about as far as it goes.

There are some paranoid levels of thinking in some of that stuff. Like when a person thinks someone is a "x foreign country spy" because they disagree. It's possible for people to break out of that mode of thinking, but when they are in that mode, it's next to impossible to get through because everything you say that is in disagreement is "because you are trying to deceive them."

Liberals claiming someone is doing whataboutism seems like a component of this thinking, with a belief that the one doing the "whataboutism" is attempting to deceive. But although it's (probably? I haven't analyzed it in enough depth to say with certainty) possible for someone to deceive in that way, it's also possible to compare two things for a variety of rhetorical purposes that have nothing to do with dishonesty. Such as pointing out the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world if someone tries to say x foreign country is "authoritarian" in contrast to the US being "free"; that's not whataboutism, it's a factual point that undermines the narrative of the US having some kind of greater moral standing from which it can properly judge other countries.

If anything, I would say imperialists, liberals, tend to be more engaged in actual whataboutism, even if unconsciously. Like if you try to point out something fundamentally wrong with the US, claiming that alternatives are way worse. Which in that regard also seems to be in bed with doomerism (or more formally maybe, capitalist realism).

I don't like to speculate as a matter of principle, but given what I've seen in my own evolution and what I can see traces of in some others, I suspect fear underlies a lot of it, as well as pride; fear of the implications of what it means and pride in not wanting to lose the idealized self image of western supremacy. If the US, for example, is genuinely terrible to the core on a fundamental state foundation level, that means a lot of pretty big change is necessary and change can be scary. And further, if a place like China or Vietnam is actually just a genuinely better system on a fundamental level and has better QOL for its people, that means the west is not only not superior, it's not even on an equal level of political competency. Instead, it's actually lower and in the capitalist caste socialization of "everything is a rung on a ladder," that means the west is part of the "gross/bad class."

People don't have to see it this way though. They can see it as it's not something to be afraid of, but a wakeup call that what's being done is not working for most people and never has; they can consider the notion of major upheaval as an opportunity for fantastic expansion of the possibilities they've previously had presented to them, within which can carry drastic healing, improved quality of life, both personal and collective empowerment. They can also see the pride thing not as a designation of lesser nation, but as a designation of better or worse quality of life and empowerment and so on. It's important that people unlearn the notions of it all being about caste, and who is and isn't "superior." Socialist projects doing better for their people are superior in the sense of quality of life, people power, etc., not in the sense of some colonizer-centric mindset of civil and savage.