I mean, thats good, but unfortunately a huge (over-representative?) amount of online leftist discourse is so subsumed by extremely emotionally driven short sighted glomming onto bullying a particular person that they often say things that are basically obviously ludicrous if you either take a few deep breathes and think about what you’re saying, or if you’re not really involved in the often extremely petty nature of discourse around/perpetuated by many popular online leftists.

But hey, Not All Leftists, I guess?

Its frankly deeply embarrassing to accurately describe myself as a leftist and then have less politically engaged people often think I’m like one of these over the top internet personalities, and also infuriating when I describe myself as a leftist to other leftists online, who then usually woke scold and purity shame me for having non ludicrous positions.

Hell I’m still banned from like half the hexbear and lemmy.ml communities for pointing out that maybe Taiwan has expressed a desire for governmental sovereignty, you know kind of like Ukraine, even though its obviously not a perfect society, it doesnt deserve to be invaded or subverted by a neighboring state?

Nah. Verbotten opinions.

I think the latest hexbear community to ban me did so because I posted a response to an ‘enigmatic, therefore funny and awesome’ meme on weibo.

The meme, a kind of wojack meme, boils down to ‘Dengist reforms allowed western influence into China, which has resulted in nowadays Chinese incels pretend to be black men online to pick up chicks because many Chinese basically racistly view black men as all having giant cocks.’

But you can’t even hint that parts of Chinese society might be gasp racist, or even have segments that view women as only interested in big dicked men because this breaks the brains of many online Western leftists that Chinese society is not actually perfect.

Its even more baffling to me that many online Leftists barely ever mention, or tie themselves up in absurd logical/rhetorical pretzels about how just in general many East Asian societies and ethnicities have large chunks that are extremely racist towards other East Asian and other ethnicities, basically because a good number of East Asian societies are nominally communist or socialist, so that must mean they’ve solved racism.

When your highly nuanced and extremely educated political stance is obliterated by an extremely obvious fact that you forgot to consider because you got lost in the sauce of [current hot conversation topic] for [I’m a Leftist!™] identifying individuals.

Well uh when you have the US Navy under your command, and already in the area dealing with Houthis, you know, by shooting down their missiles and bombing them and such, you actually /can/ stop trains and tankers.

You could airlift aid! You could, hilariously, stop ships heading to Israel with a Naval Blockade!

Obviously that last one isnt going to happen, but theres a whole lot more than basically nothing that you could do.

For starters: Cut off a bunch of joint projects between US and Israeli firms, stop sending them large amounts of money for other things, stop fucking shit canning every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel, or maybe even use these aforementioned things as threats and leverage to force a fucking ceasefire.

And now because this is the internet: Am I saying that Trump is somehow not bad, not far, far, far fucking worse by pointing out the rest?

Nooooo!

No, fucking obviously Trump would be a thousand times worse!

But pretending that there’s nothing Biden could do is a joke.

He doesn’t because he is a long time Zionist, and the American public, and particularly political and media figures, have been bathed in Zionist propaganda for so long that it takes an overt genocide for us to figure out that maybe Israel actually isn’t a perfect unconditional ally.

Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.

This isn’t an insult, its a fact.

When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.

Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.

I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.

Why latch on to Trump in particular?

Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.

Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.

You know, standard fascist shit?

It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

Reddit where I can block people and without /as much/ absurd delusional nonsense.

I actually had a tankie tell me that Chinese is not actually a bunch of what us Americans would actually more properly call different languages altogether, when I told a story about a friend I knew from Hong Kong, speaking Cantonese and a little a English, had to actually go through me (Cantonese, English, capable of translating Cantonese to Vietnamese, but not Mandarin, because my phone waa bugging out), and a nearby Vietnamese shopkeep (Vietnamese, some Mandarin) to communicate to someone who only spoke Mandarin, and effectively nearly no English.

We did this comical routine of my friend typing Cantonese into my phone, translating it to Vietnamese, then to Mandarin via the shopkeep, then to the Mandarin speaking woman, then all the way back the other way, for about 20 minutes, to have a conversation that probably could otherwise have been had in 3 minutes.

There are in fact many regional /dialects/ of Chinese (beyond just Cantonese) that are actually so different that it is very common that one who can only speak one /dialect/ cannot actually communicate nearly at all with someone who knows only a different /dialect/.

I am putting /'s around dialect because actually a growing number of translators who know one or many of these /dialects/, as well as English, think it is more accurate to describe them as being different languages to those who speak English.

Anyway, yeah, had a tankie chew me out for pointing this out and call me a ‘gusano’, which is incredible because this is an insult popularized by Castro against counter revolutionaries.

I am an anarchist, and gusano is Spanish for maggot or worm.

It was truly a ludicrous exchange.

And at this point I am sure that when you say that you mean the status quo of Taiwan has always been a part of China.

You are wrong, but keep pushing that narrative!

You’re right, its a plurality. I misspoke.

Still doesn’t change any of the rest of what I said.

Hey at least I can admit and own up to a mistake!

Also worth noting, the TPP candidate, incumbent and now former President Ken Wen-je, is in favor of the status quo with China, in terms of their governmental influence/dominion, meaning continued independent governance when it comes to sovereignty, though this does mean significant economic partnership, in uh, economic terms.

So that’s actually roughly 65% of Taiwanese voting for a President that seem to not want Taiwan to become a part of China.

Which would be… a majority.

Damn near a super majority, as us filthy consumeristic and vapid Americans might say.

To actually attempt to venture into the Narrative Construction Zone, one might say that despite one major party in Taiwan with close positions and ties to the Chines Government itself, the momentum seems to be in favor of moving toward /less/ interference from/subservience to/ integration with China, especially where matters of sovereignty are concerned.

Cool, uh, anyway, in Taiwan the President is directly elected by popular vote.

So the majority of Taiwanese voted for a President who opposes greater integration/interference/subservience to, whatever you wanna say, with or to China.

In fact this would seemingly necessarily mean that the only way this could happen along with the DPP not also winning a majority in Parliament is that a good chunk of Taiwanese support the KMT and TPP for domestic affairs, but prefer a president, who has more power and relevance specifically to foreign affairs, that opposes integration/interference/subservience with/from/to China.

But please do go on about my narrative while you are either knowingly or unknowingly misrepresenting the most fundamental basics of the situation.

Funny, I just had a whole bunch of hexbear and ml lemmy tankies dogpile on me for, not even suggesting necessarily that Taiwan seems to desire that it be independent from China, but that if they did voice that opinion democratically, that such a thing should be respected, even if they are a flawed and imperfect capitalist society.

They all seemed to be very certain the Taiwanese people desire a kind of integration into China that would essentially make them either a puppet state or perhaps nominally democratic province.

I would just like to point out that being terminally online has almost nothing at all to do with being technically savvy.

Huge numbers of people who are terminally online are really only adept at using tech at a surface level, and often confuse this /skill/ for things like knowing how back end programming works, understanding what software development entails, etc.

Actually technically competent people go to great, astounding lengths to make decent software very easy to use for the average person. UI/UX, front end devs, back end devs, database management, and I would say testing paradigms for possible bugs, but the industry seems to have largely abandoned giving a shit about that.

Even here on lemmy I often find myself in discussions which turn into arguments which turn into me finally realizing that the person I am talking to has absolutely ludicrous ideas about tech, the tech industry or a specific software.

Such people say and truly believe in obviously nonsensical things, or approach topics from a standpoint that makes it obvious they are really just power users of a particular kind of software, and have developed into basically superficially convincing fanboys or fangirls for it.

They reveal that they only have knowledge from a bit of experimentation and mostly just following a whole bunch of uninformed discussion about some new tech buzz word, and lack understanding of the important basic concepts, or actually relevant dynamics at play, which they likely would /not/ believe if they had ever actually worked in the tech industry, or developed their own software, or contributed usefully to some open source project.

A whole key thing about the tech industry is that it is dominated by reverence for impressive sounding tech buzzwords that promise some new and revolutionary feature, when in reality such things are nearly always minor, iterative improvements on something that came before.

A high number of people are easily bamboozled by such things.

Basically… you are not immune to propaganda?

Then tech world has: You are not immune to marketing.

A great example is the current craze over ‘AI’ generated content.

OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, these kinds of things?

None of them are capable of the vast majority of the kinds of processes that describe intelligence, but people will argue vehemently that they do, because they are not tech savvy, do not know anything about how the underlying tech actually works or what its capable of, or even what the word intelligence means.

It can do cool and neat things, and its branded or marketed as AI, so it is!

But, its not.

Specifically for antiwork:

Because they are either generally not very well informed or politically well versed and just know that work sucks,

Or they do not have very much free time to follow meta news about reddit and are unaware of what is going on,

Or they just have not heard of lemmy yet,

Or they have had some kind of technical trouble trying to sign up for or use lemmy in the way they would want to,

Or they are not very not very tech savvy and do not understand the FOSS benefits to a discussion board or why or how thats relevant to capitalism,

Or they are basically hypocrites who prefer an echo chamber that is comfortable to a somewhat less echo chambery option and are really just into the whole scene superficially and do not really actually care for having non contradictory and inconsistent views + personal actions/behaviors.

Lots of them probably fall into different categories and many probably fall into more than one.

See, unlike the communist tankies who would at this moment chant ‘one of us, one of us’…

I will encourage you to aim to to good in an imperfect world where circumstances are often either morally gray, or involve complex factors that are non obvious, but very relevant and important, to learn moral and ethical theories and challenge yourself to actually answer ‘What is good?’.

I will encourage you to /never/ believe you have all the answers to everything, that there is always more than can be learned, and that there are very rarely one size fits all answers to unique and specific situations, and to know that admitting a mistake or error, and reflecting on why or how you came to be in error, is not the sign of a fool, but is the sign of a genuine person striving to be consistent froma starting point of incomplete knowledge and experience.

I will encourage you to challenge your own assumptions, but to be confident when confronted with rhetoric and theories that you yourself can prove are misleading, logically invalid, or outright justify atrocities.

As can probably be reasonably expected, there is an extremely wide range of Anarchist stances on basically the minutia of theory, as well as on what are and are not defensible or moral stances on specific current events or situations, and there are many Anarchist theoreticians who come from many different cultures and backgrounds, and many who focus much more on how Anarchist theory can or should apply to more specific features of our largely capitalist world.

I have tried here to outline the most broadly agreed upon ideas that… well again probably only really Communist Tankies would find fault with, they kind of have a whole history of incorporating anarchists into initial Social Revolutions, and then murdering them all after they have control of their newly acquired state.

They really do not like that Anarchists existed and still exist, they are very convinced, ironically, that they own the ideology that evolved out of Marx, when in truth prominent Anarchists such as Kropotkin and others actually both agreed and disagreed with each other on various issues, and helped form some of both of their views both by antagonism and agreement.

Anyway, entirely unironically:

Live Long and Prosper, and, the Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few.

Thanks for the compliment! =)

No problem.

Because no one knows anything whatsoever about actual anarchist political theory.

Largely due to it being heavily suppressed and propagandized against by States, capitalist or ‘Communist’, and their adherents.

Anarchy as thought of by the wide and vast majority of people is simply a state of chaos and violence with no clear rulers.

What Anarchy actually is is fairly simple.

Root words derive from Greek.

An- Prefix: Without

Archon: Tyrant/Cruel and Ruthless Ruler/Undefiable Authority

Non insane Anarchists are always critics of the state, corporate structures of organizing the work place, most forms of organized religion, oppressive social norms and anything that creates and maintains any kind of hierarchy in society that results in oppression, impoverishment or cruelty to any particular group of people for illegitimate reasons.

Anarchy is essentially very similar in many ways to communism as Marx envisioned it, in that it is an idealized, as yet not perfectly defined goal of a just, egalitarian and democratic society that heavily emphasizes people being adequately represented economically in their daily lives as workers, as opposed to the standard liberal capitalist model where your boss essentially has authoritarian power over you in the workplace.

Both Marxism and Anarchism are highly critical of the profit motive and the ability of a very small number of people to own all or much of the capital (means of production such as factories) of a society, for very lengthy and detailed reasons.

A very common misunderstanding is what is truly meant by ‘private property’: most people unfamiliar with Marxism or Anarchism believe that Marxists and Anarchists believe that no one should be allowed to singly, individually own /anything/.

This is false. While many different adherents have different precise definitions, generally speaking private possessions are just fine until they get to the point of owning something directly and singly that has a massive impact on the lives of others should you choose to unilateraly use your ‘property rights’ in a way that is beneficial to you personally, but harmful to a large number of other people.

Further, Marxists and Anarchists both generally agree that ‘property rights’ as we currently conceive of them really only functionally exist for the rich and powerful, and are enforced via the power of the state.

Anarchism significantly differs from many later Marxist derived theories such as Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism that generally emphasize that in order to actually achieve an ideal, non capitalist society, one must create a massive state structure (or subvert an existing one) and place all power to reorganize a capitalist economy into a class of totalitarian economic organizers and planners, and that during this process the state is entirely justified in basically any means of crushing dissent it deems necessary.

This is of course heinous to Anarchists, who view a totalitarian state as essentially criminal.

What modern Anarchists, who are, again, not insane, usually support are working both within and outside of existing norms and government structures to meaningfully improve peoples lives amd expand their rights:

Mutual Aid: Direct Involvement in you local community to feed the hungry, house the unhoused, provide aid to the sick and displaced.

Advocacy: Doing what you can to promote ideas and views that will be beneficial to the masses, or to protect at risk minorities, both within existing formal societal structures like governments and businesses, and also within society generally.

Many modern Anarchists are also very concerned about the power if states and corporations to abuse the environment and curtail freedom of expression.

Anarchy also has another useful definition in the context of a world of nation-states:

Anarchy is that same common understanding of a world without rules and chaos, but the realization that this simply describes our current world given the history of actions of and between nation states, who often engage in many harmful acts against other nation-states and their populations, and rarely actually follow any rules or norms which are supposed, but i actuality rarely do, govern affairs between states. States will often do whatever they believe they can get away with that will benefit themselves, even if it means massively harming another state or group of people.

Finally, if you want to also be a modern technologically savvy anarchist, aka a cyberpunk, you can realize that the advent of computer and digital technology means there no longer exist any actually valid reasons, in very many cases, to actually pay for software, and that you should be an advocate of open source software.

So, in summary, Anarchy is not a state of chaos, without rules.

It is a very complex and nuanced political theory of advocacy for a more equitable and more just society.

No serious Anarchist believes that the world would be better if everyone was free to rum around and do literally whatever they want on an individual scale.

What exact kind of society do they propose?

Well unfortunately that differs wildly from Anarchist to Anarchist, but again, as with how Marxist socialism is but a /process/ of transforming from a capitalist society into an as of yet not perfectly defined communism, Anarchism is a /process/ and /method of analysis/ of how to transform into a better society for everyone.

No, I am not welcoming an artist apocalypse, that would obviously be bad.

I am noting that I find it amusing to me on a level I already acknowledged was petty and personal that many, many mediocre artists who are absolutely awful to other people socially would have their little cults of fandom dampened by the fact that a machine can more or less to what they do, and their cult leader status is utterly unwarranted.

I do not have a nice and neat solution to the problem you bring up.

I do believe you are being somewhat hyperbolic, but, so was I.

Yep, being an artist in a capitalist hellscape world with modern AI algorithms is not a very reliable way to earn a good living and you are not likely to be have such a society produce many artists who do not have either a lot of free time or money, or you get really lucky.

At this point we are talking about completely reorganizing society in fairly large and comprehensive ways to achieve significant change on this front.

Also this problem applies to far, far more people than just artists. One friend of mine wanted her dream job as running a little bakery! Had to set her prices too high, couldn’t afford a good location, supply chain problems, taxes, didn’t work out.

Maybe someone’s passion is teaching! Welp, that situation is all fucked too.

My point here is: Ok, does anyone have an actual plan that can actually transform the world into somewhere that allow the average person to be far more likely to be able to live the life they want?

Would that plan have more to do with the minutiae of regulating a specific kind of ever advancing and ever changing technology in some kind of way that will be irrelevant when the next disruptive tech proliferates in a few years, or maybe more like an actual total overhaul of our entire society from the ground up?

Well, off the top of my head:

Whole Brain Emulation, attempting to model a human brain as physically accurately as possible inside a computer.

Genetic Iteration (not the correct term for it but it escapes me at the moment), where you set up a simulated environment for digital actors, then simulate quasi-neurons, quasi-body parts dictated by quasi-dna, in a way that mimics actual biological natural selection and evolution, and then you run the simulation millions of times until your digital creature develops a stable survival strategy.

Similar approaches to this have been used to do things like teach an AI humanoid how to develop its own winning martial arts style via many many iterations, starting from not even being able to stand up, much less do anything to an opponent.

Both of these approaches obviously have drawbacks and strengths, and could possibly be successful at far more than what they have achieved to date, or maybe not, due to known or existing problems, but neither of them rely on a training set of essentially the entirety of all content on the internet.