Would you prefer the term malignant psychopath? Or sociopath? Same general outcome in meaning, just more clinical. The way it comes across to me in a context like this, is it’s trying to convey how shockingly deceptive and anti-social a person is. It would be a different kind of thing to say “people with white hair are demons” or something. Bill Clinton can choose not to say victim-blaming things, but he can’t choose what his natural hair color is.

Does this sound lib to you?

Trump has vowed to carry out a massive police state crackdown on immigrants, pledging to round up millions of undocumented people in militarized raids that would take place in every part of the country. He has whipped up support for this mass deportation campaign using the most vile, racist rhetoric that slanders immigrants as violent criminals.

The Democratic Party has reacted to this by essentially adopting Trump’s anti-immigrant program, but without his demonizing language. Harris touted her plan to vastly expand Border Patrol, and emphasized the support of the Border Patrol officers’ association for her policy. She presented herself as a “tough on crime” prosecutor ready to take on “the border”.

I know it’s a bit 2020 hindsight* thing to be saying it after the fact, but it’s still wild to me they picked Kamala at all, considering how close she is tied to the unpopular Biden admin, on top of her never having been a popular presidential candidate in the first place.

*Realized after writing it that it’s 20/20 hindsight, but 2020 hindsight sounds funnier because it sounds like it’s referencing things we’ve already seen from past elections.

I may have underestimated how shitty it is on this. Did some playing around and it got all high and mighty about me describing Israel as doing a genocide, saying there isn’t evidence for one and blah blah blah. Mind you, LLMs can get up to all kinds of bullshit (what some term “hallucination”) and take one position one time and another at another time. It’s not as though this means it is deterministically tuned to take the stance it did. It also said something to me about China’s position earlier in the test convo, which seemed to more or less match what I’ve heard about China’s stance on Palestine. But it really wasn’t happy with throwing around the word genocide. Anyway, I still stand by the general point of these corps tuning models to try to act neutral, so as not to be controversial. Even though they definitely aren’t because everything has bias. I could really get into a rant about how unethical it is to present a model as striving to be neutral when it obviously can never be.

Probably tuned on a lot of the same kind of slop that models like ChatGPT get tuned on. They (meaning companies, generally, I don’t know specifically what tencent says about it) make it out like it’s about “safety and ethics,” but in practice, it amounts to corporate sanitizing to reduce as much as possible the chances of a model saying something that could reflect badly on the company who made it. It may not even be that there is any tuning specific to Palestine, other than “this is a nuanced and complicated issue” generic slop that covers politics more generally.

That’d be wild. Would not be surprised if Russia fear-mongering goes into overdrive.

You know, I was trying to figure out how I feel about the results because like, I knew no matter which it would be, it wasn’t going to be a big difference to me (both genocidal imperialists, ya know). But like, I think what I figured out is I have some secondhand anxiety about it? Like I have some anxiety about how other people are going to react to it, because people have been hyped up to such a degree to believe it’s a world-ending scenario.

Good thing I didn’t bet on it then.

I think there’s a number of reasons, but a couple contributing are probably:

1. They’re actually a lot closer in views to republicans than they are those who are even a little “left” and whether they tend to be all that conscious of it or not, it can be a system shock when they hear where people are drawing a line. I mean, I saw someone online in one place I go, who said words to the effect of they love the democratic party, but they need to do better. I could not even begin to imagine using the word “love” anywhere near the democratic party myself, unless it was like “love the thought of them not being a party anymore.”

2. They get told in the media to blame “the left” and “3rd party voters” for election losses rather than being told to take responsibility for failing to court those voters.

What pops into my head is a quote from the movie A Man for All Seasons (I’ve seen it numerous times cause of my Catholic family members and their like for it). There’s a quote from it that goes like:

Sir Thomas More: [to Will Roper] Now, listen, Will. Two years ago you were a passionate churchman. Now you’re a passionate Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning, your face is to the front again.

It feels like every other headline with her is “damn, she’s just a lib”, “no wait, she might be more than that”. Maybe she’s just ignorant and learning as she goes, maybe she is a form of controlled opposition. I dunno, but hopefully she gets more clear as time goes on. Given how these things tend to go though, if she does get clear-headed enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the moment when western imperialist media stops talking about her and we only ever hear from her anymore from other sources. Western imperialists love the “debate ideas in public” conception of things until those ideas involve coherent communism and anti-imperialism, and then they suddenly remember what deplatforming is and sweep those ideas under the rug as fast and brutally as they can.

Yes. It feels similar to what I’ve been learning about with the history of occupied Korea in that way. US props up government run by Syngman Rhee that is rabidly suppressive and violent. [Skipping ahead some] DPRK forces almost take over occupied Korea, with Syngman Rhee fleeing, but US along with UN forces (which are at this point in time basically beholden to the US from what I can gather about how Blowback was presenting it) intervenes, led by the rabidly violent MacArthur, without which Korea would prob just be Korea today and run by DPRK.

Of course, difference with Korea is Korea as a whole is a legitimately named region and israel is a made up colonizer state, but if we think of it as what gets called “South Korea” being like israel, both are basically states / territorial divisions made up by colonizer/occupier forces and are historically dependent on those forces because they are lone outposts of terror in a region that wants peace and self-determination.

It makes sense, in other words, that these sort of ghoulish outposts would be so dependent on support from imperialists/colonizers in other regions. They are an invader in the region they occupy and they terrorize, if not genocide, the locals. Which is going to make them violently unpopular to said locals and, thankfully in the case of israel, is at least starting to make them viscerally unpopular to the rest of the world too. Though it’s little consolation with all the mass murdering they’re getting away with so far.

Similar train of thought, the other day I was posing a question to someone who can be pretty lib, like, if the republicans are such a terrible fascist threat, why aren’t the powers in charge doing more to suppress them? Instead of just letting them do what they want electorally and being like “we’ll vote them out.” I think I actually got through to them a bit on that specific point. Like existential threat to “democracy”, supposedly, but we’re gonna let em do a popularity contest and get power that “takes away democracy”, what sense does that make.

My prediction is:

• If it’s close at all, both sides (of the same ideology) will be rabid

• If it’s a clear win for Kamala, Trump and co will crow about how it was stolen and use stochastic terrorism and/or try to get the supreme court to give him the election anyway

• If it’s a clear win for Trump, Kamala and the democratic party will be like, “Welp, shucks, that’s how democracy goes, sometimes you hand over the reigns peacefully to fascism! Guess we have to fight against them in 2022, plz send another $10.” Meanwhile, liberal voters will be like, “Whiplash, wth democratic party, you can’t give in that easy!” And then some people to the left of them will be like, “We told you it would be like this” and they’ll be like, “Oh hey, yeah, you exist. It was your fault that we lost, ‘the left’. How dare you two remaining voters of a left-leaning persuasion in a country ravaged by red scare paranoia vote in fascism!”

Edit: Meant to say 2026 in reference to midterms lol, but the slip there just shows how similar my brain is processing this to being like past elections.

Hello and welcome!

“Chanting ‘don’t genocide’ at an event about genocide being bad is one of the most disgusting things you can do. Shame on you.”

That’s about how it reads to me. 🫠

Wouldn’t happen to have a source on it somewhere? I mean, with all the shit the west gets up to, I could def believe it. But also, I wouldn’t be too quick to be scared by such a thing. Just on a fundamental principle level of things, one thing to remember is that the best human generals can make tactical blunders and AI is nowhere near being on the level of human intelligence in the first place. I could see attempts to use it for statistical judgments, but such judgments are likely going to be locked into a specific scenario and it’ll be hard to generalize. At the end of the day, we’re still dealing with material conditions and AI is too.

And though it might not be exactly the same tech, based on what I’ve seen so far with generative AI, it’s a lot less effective at generalizing than people tend to think it is. One of the problems in generative AI, to put it in specifics, is that if the dataset has no experience with X subject, then it’s likely going to struggle to do anything in that subject, ex: if a text model was not trained on any data about Legos, it won’t somehow extrapolate that Legos exist in the world (which makes intuitive sense when you think about it for an example like that). Same thing with humans, but worse with AI. Even we can only generalize so much beyond what we know for sure and we overcome this by learning new things as we encounter them. But a lot of what’s getting called AI doesn’t learn a damn thing unless you make it do that, explicitly, and training gets expensive fast. And if you try to make it some kind of self-learning, it could easily run itself in a direction you don’t want, like the Microsoft Tay incident.

So I mean, they can try, but colonialism has gone on as long as it has without AI even in existence for the majority of that time. AI might impact how brutality is carried out, but the brutality has been going on for hundreds of years. And in spite of that, China is doing well, as are some other AES states. BRICS is making progress. The empire can be resisted and will be until its war criminals are brought to justice.

Edit: wording

I have not seen Andor, but sounds like a refreshing portrayal worth a watch some time.

Yeah, it’s a very weird moral argument. I want to say, one based around idealism, if I’m recalling my terms correctly (maybe some individualism in there too). The general argument of it being that evil acts come from inner evil, not from outer circumstances, so doing something that is under the umbrella of “bad stuff” has a “corrupting” influence and will “make you evil” like some sort of Evil Meter that fills up each time you do a “bad thing.” (As much as I like them as games, video games like KOTOR sort of do this literally.)

This position also seems to treat “bad stuff” as all corruptive and all on a sliding scale. So like, petty thievery would probably be on the lower end, but might “corrupt you” into “darker stuff” like physical violence.

I think the only truth in that conception of it is that if you become desensitized to certain acts, you might be more apt to do them again without the normal mechanisms of shame, guilt, traumatic reaction stopping you. But as we know from history and present, sometimes people go through with horrific acts in spite of there being collateral damage in the form of them having a traumatic reaction to doing it. Because the external processes and pressures supersede the internal “striving.” Which is a fancy of saying, “The world is not defined solely by personal willpower. Fuck you, rugged individualism.”

It’s a thought provoking article, but on reflection, I do find myself disagreeing on a key framing:

that we are powerless. Or, more specifically, that we have been made powerless. That our power has been taken from us, and given to people who should not have power.

I don’t think we have been made powerless. What I think we have been made is to believe in the supremacy of the individual; that the self-actualization of the individual is in an inherent good above other things, even if it comes at the cost of millions we don’t know being gunned down; that the realization of an individual’s personal dreams takes priority over collective good and humanitarian cause.

And through this, we are faced with a deep sense of constructed existential dread. If we risk sacrifice for humanity, we are faced with the prospect of the loss of those individualist dreams, of never being self-actualized, of being forgotten and treated like a fool or as mentally ill.

I don’t condone adventurism, but there is another side to that coin, which is maybe what I’d called passionism (I have not thought the term through, I’m open to a better word); this is where you treat a crisis to humanity as a sort of side hobby while you try to do your individualist dreams anyway; you rationalize helplessness in this context, but it is not a totality of helplessness, rather it is a need to give up on some things you thought were essential to a meaningful life in order to fight for what is right. Some people struggle even to do this on a basic level of inconvenience via boycotting. The takeaway here isn’t to scold those people or imply they are of bad moral character. The point is more that what is deemed possible and impossible sometimes has to do with what you are willing to give up and what you are willing to risk. And I’d argue some of that seeming prison of powerlessness, particularly in the US, is an existential one brought on by individualism.

You don’t have to be reckless to sacrifice, but you may have to sacrifice some things you thought were essential. If not, with inaction, material conditions are going to catch up and force you to give up some things anyway. So it’s more a question of whether you do it on your own terms or not, than whether it will happen at all.

I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse, but I don’t think the kind of mindset you’re talking about in this thread is a thing specific to places that have been couped. For the US for example, I’m not sure if I’ve seen it on lemmygrad directly that I can recall, but I know on Twitter I’ve seen stuff along the lines of like “why is the left so useless” and it’s like, um, well its revolutionaries keep getting imprisoned or murdered by the state, then the messages of those revolutionaries (if they are allowed to be seen in popular media at all) get watered down into liberalism after their death, and aesthetic takes the place of substance in support of the status quo and methods of resistance like the feckless “resistance liberal” who “posts really hard and angrily about voting for a candidate who is carrying out genocide so the other genocide candidate won’t get in” are all that is allowed to be spoken about as a valid tactic in the media with the most reach.

People get frustrated and I think one way to approach it is to treat it less like a dismissal of an entire people and more like a strategy question. Underneath the dismissal is someone who probably wants a better world, but doesn’t understand why it isn’t happening or how to bring it about, from where they’re standing.