I find the tone kind of slapdash. Feel like the author could have condensed it to a small post about using AI agents in certain contexts, as that seems to be the crux of their argument for usefulness in programming.

I do think they have a valid point about some in tech acting squeamish about automation when their whole thing has been automation from day one. Though I also think the idea of AI doing “junior developer” level of work is going to backfire massively on the industry. Seniors start out as juniors and AI is not going to progress fast enough to replace seniors probably within decades (I could see it replacing some seniors, but not on the level of trust and competency that would allow it to replace all of them). But AI could replace a lot of juniors and effectively lock the field into a trajectory of aging itself out of existence, due to it being too hard for enough humans to get the needed experience to take over the senior roles.

Edit: I mean, it’s already the case that dated systems sometimes use languages nobody is learning anymore. That kind of thing could get much worse.

Stuff like this is why I say a lot of USians are politically illiterate and don’t mean it as an exaggeration. Though actually, it might be an understatement because you have stuff like this, where it’s not just that they don’t understand, it’s that they’re confidently wrong. Propaganda has flipped the script on them, but underneath, their material conditions often still reflect someone who would benefit from a socialist state. So then you have this wildness, where he can present something that would benefit them and they can even agree with it, as long as he says the alternative is “communism” - the monster under the bed.

It just goes to show how obviously sensible the concepts of communism are, when it’s not being blockaded by a knee-jerk hate response. Hell, using myself as an example, I might have mentioned before how there was a time prior to my reading any theory where I sort of accidentally found my way to something like communism as a thing to believe in; like just on the sensibility of it, not from others telling me. Granted, I did not meander into something as complex as dialectical materialism (I still struggle sometimes to fully wrap my head around that). But it’s like, it makes sense that people would lean in that direction, whether they have the same word for it or not, when the oppressive conditions out of which it developed as theory and practice are still very much a thing. It shows the scientific roots of it; in science, you can have two people independently observe and record more or less the same thing because the thing itself is not different based on who is looking at it. How it is interpreted can be different, but science strives to separate out interpretation from raw empirical traits.

a broader attack on “Western civilization.”

He talks like a white supremacist.

enabling “barbarians”

And on the nose colonial basics of civil/savage narrative.

Neither of which is a surprise. Fits the nature of israel to a T.

swift western takeover

If we’re talking the kind of hypotheticals fiction gets into of what is effectively broad scale, near-instantaneous breakdown of industrial society, I don’t think so. There’d probably be pockets of it who would turn to violence for a time, but then they’d settle into the sobering reality that they survive longer working together than being at each other’s throats. The degree of rugged individualism “I got mine” in the US depends on the obfuscated systems of production and distribution functionally continuing to work. Without it, what you get is most not knowing how to take care of themselves (because up to that point a self-sustaining lifestyle is made next to impossible to do unless you’re a fringe rural setup) and needing each other more than ever. So short-term, yeah, some wildness, but if it drags on for any length of time, it’s a drastic change in material conditions, so people are not going to be able to keep up the same salivating individualist bullshit.

Makes me think of that group in the US years back who took over some government building temporarily. They were pretty rightist, IIRC, but I think also anti-government? So like, lolbertarian or something? Anyway, they really thought it through super well; it was like less than a day? before they were on facebook asking for food donations so they could hold out longer there. That I think is a fairly accurate picture of what the more violent parts would be like. But without the facebook to turn to, so they’d just be mega screwed and either die of stubbornness or find some way to work together.

Also Oklahoma: https://apnews.com/general-news-96b8a77a2f7b177a5c20431940860c06

(from 2020 is the most recent I could find on their child marriage laws)

Oklahoma lawmakers rejected a bill that would have stripped from parents and legal guardians of minors the legal power to consent to their marriages.

Oklahoma law allows teenagers 16 and older to get married if a parent or legal guardian consents or through a court order. Anyone younger than 16 must obtain a court order to get married.

Anyway, general point being, the US ruling class does not give a rat’s ass about protecting children. It just really likes using the law like a hammer and taking it on minority groups via selective enforcement and/or false accusations. We can expect that’s what will happen here. They launder it through issues like this precisely because it makes you sound like a bad person if you aren’t salivating to inflict maximum damage on the worst of predators. But in practice, we know they aren’t exactly going to be rushing to use it on white cops, legislators, rich people, ya know. And we know US cops suck at actually solving cases much less doing it accurately, unless it involves targeting minorities or enemies of the state (then they suddenly remember how to make things happen).

To many of us, socialism is simply the opposite of capitalism rather than its negation, therefore socialism must be the absence of the most hated features of capitalism in our experiences and opinions. China doesn’t always live up to these expectations.

I would say a couple important components of this that are hard for some of us to grapple with at times (if only because of how complex it is to understand):

• The realities of socialist states operating in a global economy dominated by the capitalist mode and its imperial tendrils. Had socialist China developed in a world where socialist states were common, it might be they’d look a lot more socialist right now even on a surface level. But they instead had to develop under a kind of siege from global Red Scare violence and it was critical to develop their “productive forces” in order to be capable of meeting the moment. As far as I can tell, they effectively decided the way for them to do this was to couple themselves up intricately in the global economy and its capitalist mechanisms, while taking care to maintain collective control over the means of production and distribution at home.

• The nature of transition itself. If I understand right, China came from being largely feudalist prior to the revolution and from fighting off imperial Japan. It wasn’t like they had highly developed capitalist, industrial forces already and for reasons unknown, decided to make them less restricted. They didn’t have that kind of development yet, or at least, not at scale. So they essentially had to spend decades playing catch up with the world’s biggest industrial powers to be able to stand up to them properly, much less do what they’re doing now and surpass them. They could have tried to do this while also being as dogmatically “true socialist” as possible, but they needed rapid growth and were probably not going to get that from dogma.

And in spite of this, China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty and is a much more equitable and helpful government than anything western capitalist governments tend to provide. So even despite the limitations of the conditions, they’re still something to look to as a good example.

It’s sort of a funny thing in a way, seemingly contradictory. I think China may be the most successful example of applied marxist theory, or “scientific socialism”, in spite of how they can look on the surface. When the conditions were more fitting for revolution and the dismantling of the old reactionary ways, they were led by Mao. When the conditions were more fitting for industrializing as fast as possible, they were led by Deng. Obviously it was not all neat and tidy along the way, and even internally there were splits on how to do things, but overall, what they appear to have done is faced down “contradictions” (in the dialectical meaning) on both a global and local scale.

And one way I think ultras can get tripped up is in viewing the struggle as primarily local and that if you make allowances for geopolitical scale contradictions, you’re betraying the cause at the local level somehow. But it truly is about the global proletariat and liberating the local is sometimes inexplicably intertwined with the global as well. And in this way, China’s Belt and Road, and other such forms of interdependence, are strides toward increasing the quality of life for thousands or millions beyond themselves, while also helping those places to extricate themselves from western imperialist exploitation and dependence.

I feel like in some sense, you could say they are working to build “dual power” on a global scale context, which might be a lot harder if not possible, if they were not so thoroughly coupled into global trade and production. And they are already so far into the transition, that one of the western empire’s more clumsy attempts to punish the world and decouple (the tariff nonsense) has more helped secure China as an alternative to others than reaffirmed the bullying mob boss that is the western empire.

This turned into a huge post more so than I meant to lol, but I was kind of thinking things through as I wrote. I think anyone who doubts China as a force of “scientific socialism” should look at what they mean for some of the most exploited, not just what they mean for people in a sense of transitioning from developed capitalism to more developed socialism. And that goes back to what you originally said. It really comes down to looking at things in their proper context.

This you?

When will tankies learn that constantly attacking Liberals is exactly what fascists want them to be focused on.

(Points at a Liberal) Look over there! (smoke bomb)

You guys just keep doing exactly as you’re told.

Who exactly is good at smoke bombs, I wonder. “Tankies” or the person who is drawing up a flimsy narrative about election fraud relating to a country that has to work overtime to maintain self determination against western sanctions and coup attempts and so on.

Changing people’s minds on anything is hard, maybe more so if you’re firm on being honest rather than, say, a con artist who is trying to swindle them. But there are approaches that are sometimes more effective. For one thing, with something this messy and complicated, sometimes you need to start by working out what the person actually believes to begin with.

Like a small child asking “why” but with more nuance, so you don’t just come across as annoying. Ex:

“Marxism has been tried and didn’t work.”

“Do you believe China is succeeding?”

“Somewhat, but they aren’t really socialist.”

“What do you believe defines a state as socialist in practice vs. not?”

Or

“No, they are failing and repressive.”

“What have you seen or read that makes you believe that?”

You can also rephrase what they stated back to them, both to see if you’re understanding correctly and to get them to think more about the words:

“Marxism has been tried and didn’t work.”

“So you believe Marxism has been thoroughly tried in detail, on an organized level, in the ways that Marxist theorists have laid out as how it should be done? If so, what does that look like to you?” (Here you’re also putting it on them to explain what they think the practice of Marxism is in the first place, which may not be clear.)

This is not a shortcut to changing minds, but it can help investigate where someone is coming from and also encourage them to think about what they’re saying, without you coming across as condescending and without having to get into long defenses of your views before you even know what they believe about them. It can also take patience and may be kind of annoying to do, depending on the situation, if you more just want to have a back and forth.

“I can no longer sit back and allow the Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” - Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Dr. Strangelove

Only that they are sadistic, abusive psychopaths.

There’s also the matter for how Hitler or high-ranking Nazis are portrayed. Often as outright crazy or delusional, almost always as bubbling fools but somehow charismatic at the same time. The film Downfall is especially guilty here, as it often tries to present Hitler in a sympathetic light, a tragic figure that got swept away by hubris.

I think this is fairly often the case with how anti-communism works too, that it focuses on individuals over communicating a coherent picture of the ideology. One of the classic anti-communist talking points is, “It sounds good on paper, but in practice, it always leads to atrocities.”

And I think it is a symptom of the idealism worldview where evil comes out of “humans being corrupted”. This gets coupled with beliefs like “power corrupts” and then it’s a flimsy line drawn between the two for any given enemy of the western empire. “The bad people are bad because they obtained too much power and became corrupted, but us humble westerners have a Democratic ™ system with Checks and Balances ™ where we balance power between the private and public sector, so that no one individual holds too much of it.” In reality, this is just a gangster state design (such as in the case of the US) owned and controlled by private interest groups. It’s made out like it’s some kind of bulwark against the “temptations of power” that “lead to the worst evils in history.” In reality, it has spearheaded some of the worst atrocities in modern history and maybe in all of human history, and makes it harder to hold any one person accountable because of the nature of its more loose-weave and dynamic wink and nodding of horrible acts.

So much of it comes down, in other words, to flipping the script in classic DARVO style. Goes back to civil/savage colonial narrative and evolved from there. The abuser becomes the abused, complexity is reduced to “you have to pick me or them”, and people are driven into this bizarre view of the world in which our very humanity is terrifying and we must be vigilant of it at all times. Then systems of power driven by a power elite carry out atrocities, while individuals torment themselves over minor personal issues.

There are times when it’s hard to put into words the banal vileness of systemic brutality like this.

Edit: Like the article title is really not doing this justice. This is effectively, “Insurance Company Accused of Pressuring Medical Staff to Murder Patients”.

Twitter was never great, but jeez, how far it fell. Being reduced to politically illiterate westerners echo chambering themselves on a politically illiterate language model. It’s like taking a shit, asking your shit if it’s a good one, and taking the stench as proof that it is.

Yes, I misread what you said in a hurry.

but I think the anxiety is fine so long as it’s not paralyzing, is all I’ll say.

I think fixating on defending anxiety on the internet, while implying the situation is bad enough that it’s a kind of crisis warranting anxiety, is contradictory and it shows in your haste here. If it’s really that bad, there are far better things to be doing than meta-arguing about it on the internet. If it’s not that bad, it can be addressed with a calm mind and a clear head instead. People’s feelings are their feelings, no one is going to take them away. But it is one thing to take a situation seriously and it is another thing to be stuck in high cortisol for extended periods of time long past when it was supposed to drop normally; that is what prolonged anxiety is, it is not simply motivation or something.

As my therapist has probably explained to me multiple times, in a literal in-the-moment crisis, anxiety serves a purpose. The fight/flight/freeze style response kicks in and you act before reflecting. Outside of crisis, it is a drain on one’s health for them to be stuck in that mode with high cortisol levels. So, to reiterate, if it’s at the point of actual crisis, the last priority is arguing on the internet. If it’s not, take a breather and then tackle it with a clear head.

That said, if you read this and decide you still want to insist on anxiety in some way, then please leave me alone about it. I’m never going to agree that anxiety is a healthy response outside of actual crisis. It is a crippling and exhausting thing to deal with that I’m trying to unlearn for years now and I don’t want to hear more rationalizations that I’ve dealt with in my own head for much of my life.

??? Yeah, that’s what I said, to think about action and be prepared rather than wallowing in anxiety and you reply as if you’re arguing with me.

I don’t think you’re being mean, but I think you’re wrong here and generally misunderstand what I said. If anything is “bad thinking”, it’s being anxious about things that are out of your control and having no action to take against them; I have chronic anxiety, I grapple with this shit on a regular basis, and trying to justify unproven anxieties is not helpful.

As I said:

Those in the capitalist west in general should take the usual precautions with regards to the law and be prepared for the possibility that it will be used against you anyway.

What more is there to say? I’m encouraging people to be prepared, which is far more important than looping on fretting about what could happen.

My general point in what you quoted is simply that the history of repression of communists is not going to start tomorrow or something. This shit has been ongoing for decades and communists in the US already have to walk on eggshells as watered down mostly electoral groups. As it is, there isn’t that much for them to repress via another Red Scare. The west already sucks pretty hard on the communist front, if we’re being real with ourselves. Furthermore, the Red Scare didn’t end. It’s still so embedded there are politically illiterate people who call democrats like Biden a communist.

Could it get worse? Yeah, that’s generally how the world works, is things can get worse. They can also get better. The action we take, especially in an organized fashion, is a significant part of that. If you want to focus on the possibility of Trump cracking down even more, then start thinking about what an organized response to that would look like.

I don’t see how it would reasonably be used against PSL unless there were documented party organizing of the act (unlikely: if the manifesto published by Klippenstein is indeed the shooter’s, he seems to have been acting alone and in no way affiliated with any particular party or group).

Of course, they could try to unreasonably go after PSL, but I’m not sure that’s much different than what socialist/communist types have been facing in the US for decades. Lest we forget the Black Panther Party got vilified over such “horrible” acts as trying to feed schoolchildren. It has long been a grim tightrope for communists in the US, and going back even more than that, liberation efforts in general, marked by the state using misinformation, harassment, intimidation, infiltration, imprisonment, and assassination.

Those in the capitalist west in general should take the usual precautions with regards to the law and be prepared for the possibility that it will be used against you anyway. It can be understandably scary, but it is a marathon struggle going back a long time, don’t forget that.

What people think capitalism is as explained by capitalist economists: “The more people demand stuff, the more it gets produced. So if you want to change what is produced, demand less of it.”

How capitalism actually functions: decades long propaganda campaign against climate research, stuck with cars because fossil fuel industry and car industry says so; make money off of building bombs, destroy country with bombs, swoop in with foreign capital to profit off of rebuilding it; create a product that no one wants, create a problem in order to sell it; always shift blame to the individual and always insist the institution is at worst corrupted but never flawed in its construction; spend more money and resources on union-busting than it would cost you to just pay people a decent wage; smear, harass, imprison, and/or assassinate anyone who gets in the way, to the extent that you can get away with it; take credit for everything good that happens in your orbit and shift blame for everything bad that happens in your orbit; tirelessly and violently work to destroy any alternative system that could be perceived as better, lest people believe a better world is possible

Reminds me of this one time, when I still used reddit, ran into somebody who was talking about being an immigrant and something about how they’d managed to succeed. I think I had tried to give them some socialist style commentary and it turned out that they were a landlord of a kind, and I was pretty blunt with them about the ridiculousness of their “success” being to become an exploiter.

I guess I think of it because some people who are migrants can technically succeed, if we consider the “American dream” to be “become the oppressor.” But that’s nothing to be proud of and few can do that even if they all had so little of a conscience to try.

There’s zero self awareness of how Nietschean they sound and how effectively they are saying the automation of other people’s jobs is fine but not theirs because of some inherent superiority that they bring to the table of humanity (usually artisanship). There is no examination of their own fear of proletarianization.

You know, when you put it this way, it makes me wonder how much of it is fueled by a quiet elitism that people are not even being conscious of. The OP pic I think touches on this, albeit unintentionally; the implication is that the annoying parts of existence are fine to automate, but the cool parts shouldn’t be, and that the annoying parts are icky manual labor and that the cool parts are expressing yourself. This I don’t think is inherently elitist on the face of it, but it does imply a very particular view about the world, which isn’t necessarily shared by everyone and one that arguably derives, at least in part, from certain elitist societal structures. It’s wealthy people who, automation or no, can have other people do the icky parts and then they do the fun parts. And the idea of others being able to do this too because of AI leaves out the ugly and inconvenient reality that if you automate the “icky” jobs, but you don’t address class/caste issues along with it, what you get is a bunch of people who were already on the lower rungs of class and caste, who are now out of work and have no replacement job.

Nowhere in the online creeds about AI do I recall seeing mention of this problem, but plenty is said about “art.” The unspoken implication seems to be that it’s fine to leave the factory worker types high and dry, but don’t you dare come for the “creatives.” It is at times talked about almost like the history of automation started with the AI transformer model proof of concept paper Attention Is All You Need and suddenly “creatives” rose to the occasion, all of a sudden realizing what is wrong with automation.

It would be more understandable, I think, if people who suddenly feel so strongly about “AI” were consistently speaking up about automation of “icky” jobs in the class strata as well. This does not appear to occur though and it doesn’t come across to me like an intentional, selective blindness. It comes across, such as in the concept of OP pic, like it simply doesn’t occur to people because they are so used to viewing “icky” jobs as this inherently unwanted thing that of course it’s fine to want to automate them because “no one really wants to be doing it anyway.” Which would be fine if there was an actual answer for what those people are supposed to do with their lives, that allows them to have food and shelter in a capitalist world. I mean, there was a period when the big thing was “learn to code”, now the coding field is saturated to hell with code bootcamps and other such stuff. It is more competitive than ever, which is probably better for the employer and not so much for the employee. Now automation is coming for coding too.

The lesson should not be that “X is the one untouchable field and others are okay to automate.” The lesson should be that there is no “safe” job to hide out from a system like capitalism and exist outside of its problems. That we need to organize with each other about it and stop pretending we can be one of the “elites” on the edges, as a spectator.