AssortedBiscuits

Karma is supposed to be about ethical causality more than anything else. Per Wikipedia:

The theory of karma as causation holds that: (1) executed actions of an individual affects the individual and the life he or she lives, and (2) the intentions of an individual affects the individual and the life he or she lives. Disinterested actions, or unintentional actions do not have the same positive or negative karmic effect, as interested and intentional actions. In Buddhism, for example, actions that are performed, or arise, or originate without any bad intent, such as covetousness, are considered non-existent in karmic impact or neutral in influence to the individual.[24]

Another causality characteristic, shared by karmic theories, is that like deeds lead to like effects. Thus, good karma produces good effect on the actor, while bad karma produces bad effect. This effect may be material, moral, or emotional – that is, one's karma affects both one's happiness and unhappiness.[21] The effect of karma need not be immediate; the effect of karma can be later in one's current life, and in some schools it extends to future lives.[25]

The consequence or effects of one's karma can be described in two forms: phala and samskara. A phala (lit. 'fruit' or 'result') is the visible or invisible effect that is typically immediate or within the current life. In contrast, a samskara (Sanskrit: संस्कार) is an invisible effect, produced inside the actor because of the karma, transforming the agent and affecting their ability to be happy or unhappy in their current and future lives. The theory of karma is often presented in the context of samskaras.[21][26]

Karl Potter and Harold Coward suggest that karmic principle can also be understood as a principle of psychology and habit.[17][27][note 2] Karma seeds habits (vāsanā), and habits create the nature of man. Karma also seeds self perception, and perception influences how one experiences life-events. Both habits and self perception affect the course of one's life. Breaking bad habits is not easy: it requires conscious karmic effort.[17][29] Thus, psyche and habit, according to Potter and Coward, link karma to causality in ancient Indian literature.[17][27] The idea of karma may be compared to the notion of a person's 'character', as both are an assessment of the person and determined by that person's habitual thinking and acting.[10]

With this in mind, karma is actually fairly materialist if you ignore the parts about future lives. Intentionally doing good deeds which results in good deeds being materially actualized leads to positive change within the person which further incentivized that person to continue doing good deeds. Almost all virtue ethical systems like Confucianism would agree with this formulation. Doing good deeds (as defined by that particular virtue ethical system) leads to cultivation of virtues (as defined by that particular virtue ethical system), which leads to further good deeds, which leads to further cultivation and so on.

There's multiple dialectical relationships:

1. The dialectic between an individual's intention and an individual's good deed (good intentions vs good works)
2. The dialectic between the performance of the good deed and the good deed's actual impact on the material world
3. The dialectic between the good deed's impact on the material world and the individual being transformed by the good deed as well

Karma mischaracterized as some cosmic force that rewards good deeds and punishes bad deeds is just orientalizing Westerners shoehorning their familiar conception of God into something that has nothing to do with it at all.

I mean, in terms of social media, there's XHS like I said earlier. There's also Bilibili, which is Chinese Youtube. You could also find Chinese people posting videos on Youtube for that matter. Besides Chinese people just posting about their daily lives on social media like every other person who use social media, there's also domestic tourism. So you could find videos of someone who's from Wuhan visiting Guangzhou. Stats and charts are one thing, but as they say, seeing is believing.

Front page of Bilibili has this video: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1pevzBKEBx/ You don't have to understand Chinese to see that the person is filming at a small village and that it's a rural environment because she's seen feeding vegetables to calves on top of just seeing fields of crops in the video. In terms of infrastructure, it's obviously less developed than somewhere like Shanghai, but nothing's particularly rundown. Some of the buildings look like they've been recently painted. The road is old with some cracks, but it doesn't have any potholes, which is more than what I can say about the roads I have to drive through on my way to work. And those residential roads are through suburbs with nary a cow to be seen.

Here's another interesting video I found on the front page: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1tBvsBTEdc/ I have no fucking idea why Katy Perry is on Chinese social media, and she's apparently on Chinese social media enough that she has a Chinese nickname 水果姐, which literally means "Fruit Sister" and this nickname is apparently well known enough that there's even a Wiktionary entry of her nickname on Chinese social media: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B0%B4%E6%9E%9C%E5%A7%90

First and foremost, I think people should consume media that is not from the West. You really can't claim to be an internationalist if your media bubble (I'm including social media as well) is entirely situated within the West. To be an internationalist means recognizing that Western thought isn't the end all of human civilization. What constitutes the West is actually pretty small. It's only through imperialism that the West has a very oversized presence. But the West is only one of many viewpoints. At a bare minimum, you have to read what non-Westerners say.

But it's not just a case of picking any random non-Western country since many of their news media has been captured by the West through NGOs. Personally, I find news from Anglophone non-Western countries (India, Nigeria, and so on) to be bad overall as far as echoing what has already been said on Reuters and the BBC. The easiest way is to get out of the bubble is to pick news media from countries that are hostile to the West. That's one of the reasons why you see Russian/Chinese/Iranian/Venezuelan news media cited in ML circles. It's an easy way to pierce through the Western bubble even if you must be cognizant of the geopolitics at play. It's not the only way by any means. In many ways, social media by non-Westerners can be superior even when accounting for botting and censorship. There's a reason why the US wanted to get rid of Tiktok and I strongly suspect they will move to do the same with XHS, which actually has authentic Chinese people (of a certain demographic) on social media.

When you step outside the Western bubble, it's very obvious that the vast majority of criticism of China comes from a broader Cold War 2.0 strategy by the US to attack China. Whatever is not wholly made up is put an exorbitant emphasis on. There are numerous problems with Chinese society, of course. Many of them are actually pretty apparent if you consume Chinese social media made by Chinese people in China. However, you're not going to find this in any article by the BBC unless it's to push some ridiculous narrative about how Taiwan is going to be invaded or Tokyo is going to be nuked by China. You have to step outside the Western bubble.

So you support neither the Allies nor the Axis during WWII because both sides comprise of state actors? Non-state actors didn't exist in any meaningful capacity during WWII. Even partisans and underground resistance groups were affiliated with the Allies.

You say this, but I bet you and almost everyone here support the Allies during WWII even though most of the Allies had colonial empires and had already committed multiple genocides to build those empires. I do not think people here would seriously think that the principled socialist position is to hold "neither Berlin nor Moscow nor London" signs while the Blitz was happening or to hide in a cave while the Nazis were exterminating people in death camps because the British were also starving Bengalis to death.

They deserve credit for this, but they also deserve blame for their earlier cooperation with fascist Germany

The Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with fascist Germany because it was already at war with fascist Japan. It then had a non-aggression pact with fascist Japan while it was at war with fascist Germany. The entire pact was just the Soviet Union not wanting to fight in two different fronts against fascists.

The Soviet Union was already waging war against fascists in 1935. Can't say the same for the rest of the Allies outside of the Republic of China.

Late reply to the post.

My question is - and this is an open-ended question - would this be art? Is this artistry? Has deepseek become an artist? Why so? Why not?

I would say no because Deepseek cannot perform labor. No tool can perform labor. That's the whole point of the dialectic between labor and capital. Without labor, capital is just dead stuff. Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor after all. Value can only intrinsically be found within nature and can only be further cultivated through labor. The labor is ultimately performed by the prompter and human technical staff maintaining the data centers and other network infrastructure, not the LLM.

I don't think LLMs or any algorithms in general can perform labor. At best, an android with AGI can perform labor, but that's different from saying the AGI itself performs labor. The human equivalent would be like saying the consciousness of the human worker performs labor when it's the entire body of the human, from their eyes to their muscles to their heart to their lungs to their skeleton and so, that performs labor.

"It's only going to get worse." - Me when Windows 8 didn't come with the start menu

how white liberals think fascism works

Chad voting in a UN resolution condemning Israel's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza

you're finished

Official portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu

no, pls

Okay analysis. Awful solutions. All that just to say what someone far smarter than him had already said: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Fascists seize state power once they believe they have enough political power (ie the means of dispensing organized violence through a military or paramilitary formation). They are only stopped at the local level by antifascists willing to get their hands dirty, on the national level by the state military that refuses to go along, and on the global level by state actors.

Art has never once been a real threat to the status quo in the way the comic is saying. At best, you have art produced by the subaltern like Palestinian art which destabilizes the colonial order. And Palestinians do use AI art which is as destabilizing to the Zionist colonial order as any other type of art. There is not a single antifa formation more worthy of being antifascist than Al-Qassam Brigade for the sheer number of fascists they have liquidated, and even Al-Qassam Brigade has used AI art for their propaganda. They have more important things to do like blowing up tanks and sniping IOF goons, so they offload less important things to technological tools.

Communal society: Electoralism is cringe.

Slave society: Electoralism is cringe.

Feudal society: Electoralism is cringe.

Liberal society: noooooo, electoral democracy portents the end of history elections are based nooooo

Socialist society: Electoralism is cringe.

Communist society: Electoralism is cringe.