redtea @ redtea @lemmygrad.ml

Posts

7

Comments

816

Joined

3 yr. ago

Oh, I see. Yes, that's closer to what I thought it meant but then I've started to see it be used around here or maybe on hexbear. Thanks for the example.

What is a 'skill issue'? And where does the phrase come from? I think I get the gist but I'm uncertain.

Me too. It comes on fast once it starts.

You're not becoming one of those who enjoys huge walls of text, are you?

Lenin walks around the world.
Mathematicians cannot bar him.
Neither above one nor below zero.
Nor does multiplication scar him.

Lenin walks around the world.
An asymptote becomes him.
Marching forever towards zero.
Divide Marx by he till we reach infinity.

Twittiance (n) the strange feeling of seeing your own shitpost tweet reappearing on your timeline six hours later but as a headline in a tweet from a newspaper.

Wait no more!

Fill in this form and I'll add you to my list, right away: link.

$60 million a year to train an AI on our data.

In a different world, I'd suggest it's the political line. I.e. that a dedicated ML space is in some ways a greater threat than a left-unity space. But there are three problems with that idea.

One, hexbear seems to be fairly consistently on the same page as lemmygrad e.g. LGBTQ+ rights, Ukraine, Palestine, and the need to abolish capitalism.

Two, the authors of the paper in question haven't displayed any indication that they understand or could understand the difference.

Three, it's a link aggregator. We've had some successful hauntings but otherwise we aren't much of a threat at all. As said in another comment, we don't even like to discuss 'local' issues to avoid doxing, nevermind organising on here. It shows the liberal mentality, to see the mere existence of contrary views as such a threat. Our simple presence, here, stating that Nazis, genocide, and transphobia are bad is considered to be as extreme as the far right organising in plain sight to run over protesters protesting the things we agreed are bad.

Rent free lol

It depends what you mean by align.

The far right is sometimes correct for the wrong reasons. Lacking in dialectics and materialist analysis, the far right often identifies valid social ills yet has zero comprehension of where the problems come from, leading its followers to flail at the wrong targets.

For example, wages are suppressed and stagnated. The far right blame immigrants. The evidence is right, there: all that surplus value is stolen by the bourgeoisie. The far right complain about taxes because they're 'used' to pay for the 'lazy' via welfare. As a general statement, it's correct but only because the biggest recipients of state financing are the haute bourgeoisie. The amount spent on ordinary people struggling to pay bills is miniscule. (Also, that's not quite how taxes work, and without state expenditure money doesn't exist at all, but they're more complicated issue.) Etc, etc.

Bear in mind, too, that we consider 'liberals' and conservatives to be in the same camp. They're all liberals because they support capitalism. Liberalism being the ideology of capitalism. The difference between the far right and the 'centre left' is negligible. As the saying goes, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Meaning that fascism is liberalism's self-defence against inevitable progress towards socialism / communism.

So when you ask if our views align with the far right's, the question is slightly misframed for implying that (a) there's any significant difference between the right and the left within bourgeois politics (bourgeois being related to commodity production i.e. capitalism, i.e. liberalism) and (b) we wouldn't be equally disgusted to find that our views align with 'progressive' liberals.

It's a distinction without a difference. For example, the 'progressive' might agree that gender inequality is bad and propose more women promotions, etc. That's not a bad start but the next question is what happens to the other billions of women who continue to be disproportionally oppressed? Having a woman CEO call the shots or put in the order for another military contract isn't much consolation.

The liberal doesn't see anything fundamentally wrong with capitalism, only the need for minor fixes towards an idealist 'perfect' capitalism. Applying dialectical materialism, two things are clear. One, capitalism is irredeemable and irredeemably the cause of 99% of current social problems. Two, anyone who supports capitalism is just as bad as anyone else who supports capitalism, notwithstanding their surface level decoration.

Worse, all those liberals with the decorative decorum drop the facade as soon as any oppressed person or group decides that they're unwilling to wait for multiple more generations for the end of their oppression. In sum, any alignment between our views and the far right's (a view sometimes called 'horseshoe theory') is merely incidental, and as incidental as any alignment between our views and those of more progressive liberals. ((Non-)alignment with ultras, leftcoms, Trotskyists, anarchists, etc, is a story for another day.)

If you're left of liberal, please stick around. Having sampled what's on offer, I can tell you that Marxism-Leninism has the answers you're looking for. It's the only successful revolutionary theory. It stopped the Nazis, lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and helped liberate millions more from colonialism. We have reading lists and resources, if you're interested.

That makes sense. This is why it's important to trace the meaning of words through history. I'm curious now as to how entitled, rich and out of touch the post-war generation actually was – and whether the current 'boomers' have given the actual boomers a bad name.

Is it time we stopped talking about boomers as if they're a generation? It seems to me there are some great people from that generation and plenty of younger people who have the traits of the boomer meme. I'm starting to think 'boomer' should apply to anyone who got wealthy in a bubble of a boom and didn't lose the wealth afterwards. It just happens that they're were lots of those people post-war. But the same distortion of reality has infected many others since then, too.

That's called a hole in gone.

Sending a hologram AI of Steve Jobs around the world to do the marketing.

Damn, is it time to read Warren Buffett's book?

It’s so candid it’s refreshing

That's a good way of putting it. I think with the Greeks, it's not just the fascists, either. There's a view even among more level-headed (albeit mistaken) libs who look to the Greeks as virtuous fathers of democracy. You can find some of that. But you have to read it through a rose tinted welding helmet or, as you say, fascist eyes, to ignore the bit about limiting democracy to certain citizens or to treat that bit as a good thing and, likewise, to ignore the bits where they rejected markets.

I quite like Hayek. Not because I like what he says. But because he articulates some modern right wing views so well. And he's unashamed.

Many reactionaries today will try to sugar coat their politics. But if you explain what they're really saying by paraphrasing Hayek? It's like holding up a perfect mirror, yet the reactionary thinks it's one of those fairground, distorting mirrors. He's good for highlighting the problems of capitalist governance to onlookers. He puts the grotesqueness on display.

She could start by selling a Prada 'emperor's outfit' to the bourgeoisie for a mint, then use the proceeds to fund a revolution while we laugh at the emperors who paid a fortune to be naked while we overturn their world order.

Grim. But with the potential for a prime time audience. And it'll give something for trump to do if he loses the election.