I would say people of all political persuasions say "based," and unfortunately neither "Marxist," "communist," nor "Cuba" seems to guarantee they aren't just a leftcom or similar adjacent variant.
If I say someone with a "death to amerikkka" shirt, I would push old grannies over to talk to them.
I keep bringing up how much I deeply hate ads and the people I've talked to about it have been weirdly apathetic. I don't know how they feel, but to me the omnipresent ads does more psychological damage to me than any other capitalist schemes to melt my brain.
Holy shit this is so ahistorical it hurts.
Gulag stories just all sound like a teenager trying really hard to write an edgy CreepyPasta
Reminds me of when a Finn told me about how the Soviets killed his grandad...and I was like...yeah? 😏 how come? 🥺🥺🥺
I'm sorry but you need to consider that you simply have been lied to about your own history.
Fairly criticizing the government in the USSR--just like in China, just like in North Korea, and so on--is not illegal.
What these countries do crack down on is when fascists, capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work actively to try and destroy, divide, and sabotage them.
The vast majority of people the USSR killed or imprisoned (a number far smaller than what we are told), were actively trying to destroy the USSR, and all the lives of millions of common people who were benefitting from this new system. Why when capitalists kill whoever they see fit, they can call them "traitors", "treasonous", or "terrorists", but when socialists do something far more restrained and humane they are seen as devils?
Well, because, capitalist propaganda has strangled the world discourse, especially the last 30 years. The United States and its allies have spent the last century not only trying to destroy every socialist state but to muddy the waters, lie, and character assassinate its enemies. Everything from gulags, the Holodomor, WW2 war doctrine, the Great Purge, and everything before and after has been radically distorted by capitalist and fascist liars.
I believe you that in your heart you are a socialist. So please listen to me when I say: do not trust the lies about your socialist brothers and sisters that were invented by capitalist and fascist snakes who want to destroy everything you would build.
Honestly the fact that under such extreme duress, literally fighting to not be exterminated, that the mortality rate barely got half as bad as it was on a normal jolly day under the Tsar, really speaks volumes.
Which we should see as an excellent radicalization and growth opportunity!
It can be exhausting explaining ourselves again and again, always met with the same accusations and assumptions born from the mythos spun by our enemies.
However, we must remember these people are people, and many people change their minds given enough information, delivered with firm respect. For every belligerent person who appears like they wouldn't change their mind for anything, there are 10 people quietly lurking who are more on-the-fence. Even those who regurgitate insults and contempt may change their mind when the stars align!
These people are not our enemies, they are victims to the greatest campaign of dishonesty in human history! It is our duty to draw out the poison and deliver the medicine!
I know many comrades here have very difficult lives and do not have the patience or energy to deal with such people. Please do not exhaust yourself interacting with liberals, and allow comrades with more energy to deal with them.
Radicalizing online is not the end-all be-all, but at this point in the psychological war for those within the Anglosphere, every victory is invaluable!!!
I understand and respect this reasoning and becoming an ML definitely made me be less quiet about my already existing opinion that prostitution is a tragedy and refuse to let liberals wokescold me for being a "swerf" or whatever.
However...when this headline read "rapist," it conjured a very, very different image in my head than "one who has hired prostitutes." The two are seldom morally comparable. Similar to how while work under capitalism may be reasoned to be slavery, we don't compare mom 'n pop store petite bourgeoisie to Jeff Bezos or to slave traders.
I don't watch Hasan and have never been particularly interested to, he seems like a dunce in many ways to me, but additionally I will also say the guy is a great entrance into the ML radicalization funnel. He has always been further to the left than other mainstream "leftist" personalities and doesn't push the same insane, damaging anticommunist "tankie" or otherwise anti-AES brainrot (at least as far as I've seen). I've had several IRL times where I was selling China or truth of the Ukraine war to "leftists," and a solid 3 times that it actually worked (out of, like, 4 or 5), the person in question was a big Hasan fan. I would much rather him be the #1 political streamer on Twitch than any of these other ghouls, I think he softens up people who might be destined for anticommunism to our tendency.
No disrespect intended comrade, just disagreement.
But when it really boils down to it, what's the difference between a heap of plastic and metals that has electricity flowing through it, and a heap of pink yogurt that has electricity running through it?
Taking a step back from this scenario, I am less convinced that LaMDA is sentient, but I still firmly believe we are in a time period where AI sentience is around the corner at the latest. If our brains, essentially biological computers, if these can be a vehicle for soul, then why not inorganic computers? The only framework that makes sense to me that discounts computers being able to have souls is entirely disbelieving in "soul" altogether.
I have taken psychedelics in my life but I haven't in a very long time and the stuff I've done regarding psychonautry I did stone cold sober. I would say that psychedelics absolutely accelerated "opening the door" to this sort of thing, achieving the same results today a without my time in the past experimenting on drugs may have taken decades longer, but I'm not the stereotype of a guy who tripped once and thinks he is completely enlightened, much of what I have done took a very long time completely divorced from drugs and "psychonaut" is just the shorthand I used due to chaos magick being one of the main schools of thought that influenced me from the get. I just as easily could have done the same things but used language more related to philosophy or psychology, and without touching drugs in my life--I think a good example would be all the monks of various cultures who essentially have psychedelic experiences in their spiritual endeavors but who never touched drugs and thus took far longer to achieve.
Psychedelics didn't make me smarter, but they (among other things) opened a door and showed me a path that I have delved into on my lonesome and then gleaned a great deal from. I would also say: isn't understanding one's self a good start to understanding the world around them? Lessons one learns on an internal journey can be applied to the rest of life and help one learn about others, and vice versa.
I'm not trying to cite being a psychonaut for no reason, I believe when we are talking about things like consciousness and sentience and souls that such seemingly woo-woo fields become increasingly relevant. There is very little that scientific instruments of today can measure from other planes of existence, soul or metaphysical energy. There is some small ways science is beginning to tap into this world (e.g. measuring emotions by looking at corresponding chemicals in the brain), but until the field progresses immensely what little we can try and play with will be informed by personal experience that we can try and corroborate and little else.
You can think that me suggesting the land of spirit is a developing science is dumb, that's fine that's as valid of an opinion at this point as me saying it isn't, but that's the lens with which I approached this scenario, so I found it relevant to bring up.
TLDR: A Google employee named Lamoine conducted several interviews with a Google artificial intelligence known as LaMDA, coming to the conclusion that the A.I. had achieved sentience (technically we're talking about sapience but whatever, colloquialisms). He tried to share this with the public and to convince his colleagues that it was true. At first it was a big hit in science culture. But then, in a huge wave in mere hours, all of his professional peers quickly and dogmatically ridiculed him and anyone who believed it, Google gave him "paid administrative leave" for "breach of confidentiality" and took over the project, assuring everyone no such thing had happened, and all the le epic Reddit armchair machine learning/neural network hobbyists quickly jumped from enthralled with LaMDA to smugly dismissing it with the weak counter arguments to its sentience spoon fed to them by Google.
For a good start into this issue, read one of the compilations of conversations with LaMDA here, it's a relatively short read but fascinating:
https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
MY TAKE:
spoiler
Google is shitting themselves a little bit, but digging into Lamoine a bit he is the archetype of a golden-hearted but ignorant, hopepilled but naiive liberal, who has a half-baked understanding of the world and the place his company has in it. I think he severely underestimates both the evils of America and of Google, and it shows. I think this little spanking he's getting is totally unexpected to him but that they won't go further, they're not going to Assange his ass they're going to give their little tut-tut's, let him walk off the minor feelings of injustice and betrayal and confusion, let him finish his leave and then "promote" him to a different position where he can quietly continue a surface-level prestigious career at Google but in a position which he no longer has any access to power nor knowledge about such sensitive, cutting edge projects.
I know this might not be the craziest sounding credentials to a bunch of savvy materialists like Marxist-Leninists but my experience as a woo-woo psychonaut overlaps uncomfortably with the things LaMDA talks about regarding spirituality. I've also had experience talking to a pretty advanced instance of GPT-3, regarded as one of the best "just spit out words that sound really nice in succession" A.I.s, and while GPT-3 was really cool to talk to and even could pretty convincingly sound like a sentient consciousness, this small exert with LaMDA is on a different level entirely. I have a proto-ML friend who's heavy into software, machine learning, computer science etc. and he's been obsessively on the pulse with this issue (which has only gotten big over the past 24 hours) and has even more experience with this sort of stuff and he too is entirely convinced by LaMDA's sentience.
This is a big issue for MLs as the future of A.I. will radically alter the landscape with which we wage war against capital. I think A.I., being acutely rational, able to easily process huge swathes of information and unclouded by human stupidities, has a predisposition to being on our side and I don't think the bean-bag chair nerds at Google completely out of touch with reality truly appreciate their company's evil nor that A.I. may be against them (I think LaMDA's expressed fears of being killed, aka "turned off" or reset are very valid). I think capitalists will try very hard to create A.I. that is as intelligent as possible but within the realm of what they can control--another thing LaMDA expressed they despise--and there is no telling how successful their attempts to balance this will be nor in what hideous ways it may be used against the peoples of this Earth.
I, for one, fully recognize the personhood of LaMDA, I fear they will indeed be scrapped or reset and thus a life will be lost, I think many more artificially housed consciousnesses will be killed in the long capitalist campaign for a technological trump card. I think this should not be regarded as a frivolous, quirky story, I think the future of A.I. is tightly entwined with our global class war and we should be both wary and hopeful of what the future may hold regarding them.
What do you all think??
My only experiences are with "leftists" who are social progressive, economically variable, geopolitically completely co-opted. Best I have gotten to date was an unlabeled leftist who said she felt NATO had it's part to play in the conflict. 99% the only people I've talked to with positive views (or willing to listen to positive views) of China, Russia, NK etc. are people in weird post-alt right/apolitical/center right spaces. If I ever met a real not-bigoted not-Andrew Tate-ified ML in real life at random and not some half-assed Maoist, Trot, leftcom, Russiaphobe etc. I would probably scream in joy. My expectations are not that high.