Westerners have a view of China that is 10-20 years in the past, or more. They thought only the US would be able to innovate in AI/neural networks with Europe contributing maybe 1% of it, as has been usual in the past. Then China comes along and not only do they provide similar state-of-the-art performances and innovations, they 2. provide more research (look at all the AI related papers being published on arxiv, >50% of them are Chinese) and 3. choose to work open-source/open-weight instead of proprietary.

Now overvalued companies like OpenAI can’t compete, so their second best shot is “but do you really want China to control AI? We should control AI, like we’ve controlled the world’s supply of new things for the past 100 years. Now give me 500 billion $$$”

AI is like the steam machine was in its time. The benefits of steam were not readily apparent, they needed the machines to be designed first to use steam, and the infrastructure to make use of that steam. But once they did, everything accelerated quickly. We are in the first 4 years of AI still, it hasn’t even been half a decade yet. At this stage, at the state-level, AI is considered almost existential. A country that had the steam machine simply outpaced anyone else in production, allowing imperialism at scale. You could out-produce commodities, out-outfit your army, out-manufacture weapons with the steam machine.

AI has that potential, whether it will reach it is another question but at this time it’s not a question of “I don’t like how it looks” or “it’s not really art” anymore. The US government is not interested in AI because it does slightly better customer support, it wants it for war and imperialism. Like focusing on the surface-level arguments of AI is just a distraction, there’s so much more at stake here than our social media experience. Any attempt to “fight back” against it will just put it in the hands of the state and remove it from our hands. Refusal to use it or learn how to use it is self-defeating, as it once again only puts it in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the reactionaries. Do we want to win or do we just want to have good optics? And while we congratulate ourselves on having chased “AI slop” out of whatever big conglomerate social media platform, Raytheon will happily make AI enhanced missiles, unbothered.

Meanwhile China is using AI in education, agriculture, infrastructure and healthcare - which is not a coincidence at all, food especially, considering their history of famine in the country. Other Global South countries are following and developing AI too, though they are doing so slowly, and could benefit from Chinese models (and BRI infrastructure such as the chips required to run and train these models).

They’re scared. China has ~half an energy grid’s worth of reserve electricity produced at all times while we here don’t even know what solar panels are. A lot of people in Europe still have never seen a solar panel in their life, because we tariffed Chinese solar panels to ludicrous 300-1000% amounts so that people will be forced to buy overpriced shitty EU-made panels. And then they don’t buy these panels because they’re too expensive.

I suspect as China’s development with AI progresses we will see more of these arguments about somehow fighting against Chinese AI (as if that was somehow possible) while trying to leave US companies alone. All this talk they’re doing in the comments about China while not mentioned OpenAI or Anthropic is an example. And yes, it’s weird that there’s suddenly anti-China top-level comments out of nowhere, but there’s also a lot of communists that I’ve found on this cluster of subreddits.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI

probably bringing back workhouses. I don’t have the list of stuff gates has been involved in rn but he has very eugenics-adjacent views, except his are more socially palatable. He’s huge into charter schools, wants to rethink the entire world system in his image, all the stuff he gets up to in africa, etc. and he’s in the epstein files asking epstein for antibiotics to slip his wife so she wouldn’t know he caught an STD from someone epstein provided him.

Expectation: “The chickens have come home to roost. I repeat, the chickens have come home to roost.” “Confirmed. The pizza is in the oven. Proceed.”

Reality: “man don’t you just love being a pedopihle? i love beign a pedophile so much, my dear frind jeffrey epstein who lives at 123 Main Road, New York City and can be called at 555-000-12-12. sent from my blackberry.”

This is how these people mock at the whole world. Opsec is not a luxury, it’s the tool of the masses.

You can lead the horse to water but you can’t make him drink. You can only plant the seeds that will later grow. If they didn’t link to LLM output they would link to any other western newspaper that disproves it. They’d link to wikipedia. If they don’t want to see it, they don’t. Remember that their privilege depends on them profiting from this system, and if they admit it’s all true they’d have to admit and examine several things:

• they’ve been lied to their entire life, at the societal level
• they’re actually on the team of the bad guys
• the world is much bleaker than they thought, instead of getting better
• they can’t trust anything they read in the media anymore
• they profit from this system and its continuation

This sounds like the start to a creepypasta lol. But what probably happened is when you ban someone you get the choice (on lemmy) to also delete their content, and depending on the version of lemmy you are on this deletes the communities they created or are head mod in as well. Not sure I like how wide of a net the delete content button does but that’s how it is (it’s useful against spammers and trolls that you know can be safely purged)

the person in the commune who likes to build high-speed rail will do it in exchange for produce from the person who likes gardening. I’m not joking.

The 70s were wild. They seem so distant (half a century wtf) but the more they surge back, the more I see similarities to today’s climate. The first airplane hijackings, a burgeoning indie scene in the arts, a very “i don’t even care about this shit anymore” attitude, the black panthers, invention of Gonzo journalism, the legacy of the many liberation movements and struggles of the 1960s, the oil crisis, and now even the kitsch is coming back in style!

Is Salo as shocking as people say or is it one of those things where its reputation makes it look bigger than it is? You got me intrigued when you said it was written by MLs lol.

At this level they are not competitors anymore, they are good friends with each other - including in politics. It’s how capitalism progresses as it asserts itself as the hegemonic mode of production. All the talks of “if this law gets passed it’ll be bad for business and I might just move my company” is exactly just talk; by the time the law is even publicized to the public these guys have already been told all about it and ran the numbers and simulations and know exactly how they’re coming out of it. Shadowy elites, though, that depends. I mean, they’re pretty blatant about it. We know who they are – Bill Gates Elon Musk etc. The shadowy part might be that they keep up the appearances in front of the cameras (so to speak) but behind it they all know each other intimately.

There’s an old joke that after convicting the accused, the judge, the prosecutor and the attorney all go grab drinks together.

I’m reposting most of what I find on twitter with the prolewiki account but if you don’t have an account you can’t read twitter anymore unfortunately

some people put up jmail.world website which looks like gmail but you’re logged in as epstein as a way to browse the email correspondence more easily. I think there’s a few other archives, MeidasTouch I think is one? Note I know nothing about these websites, I can’t personally endorse them.

some of the files were deleted shortly after being published by DOJ, but were archived.

I can post some of the stuff that was found, but I’ll do it in spoilers. Warning - not for everyone to read. I don’t even know what content warnings to use but if this is a difficult topic for you please just don’t open the spoiler, if anything ask me if you have a question and I can try to answer you differently if you really want to know.

Halfway through I decided to delete the list because I couldn’t continue but I think it’s important to type this all out and conserve it. I think more stuff will come out of this latest round, but this is what I’ve seen mentioned so far.

I think you’re talking to OP comrade 😳

I have a hard time taking trots seriously, never did tbh lol, so I’m not really up to the meta on SIOC and permanent revolution. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, permanent revolution was where trotsky agreed with the mensheviks that the peasantry could not be trusted and would turn counter-revolutionary, and therefore there needed to be a solely workers government that oppressed the peasantry, whereas the bolsheviks instituted a joint dictatorship of the workers and peasants.

This would create resistance from the peasantry but incite workers in industrialized countries (namely europe at the time), along with material help from the workers government in russia ig, to wage revolution of their own and then come to help trotsky’s workers government suppress the rest of the peasantry.

I don’t know like I said I can’t for the life of me find anything related to trotsky interesting in the slightest, so I have a hard time wrapping my head around this but… I can see several issues from the get-go lol.

Maybe minimanual of the urban guerilla has some information (on prolewiki). It’ll be more tangential but the tactics are similar - operate underground in a way that if you are arrested and searched, they can not find anything on you. Total Resistance comes to mind too, unfortunately the only english PDF was scanned weird and some of the smaller text in the graphics doesn’t display. https://mega.nz/file/HrA1gYQT#fkwvQxea0jg5yAWM-pzgSGotAG0Syw8oZ_K1wdpLr3I

Safe houses that you know you can go to, hidden spaces in your home, decentralized infrastructure and cell-system on the structure - each cell is linked to a cell leader and they operate mostly independently, so that if one cell gets taken down the other cells can still operate. In the age of the cell phone and internet this means no online presence and digital for you.

It starts off as a book club, either overt or underground depending on what is allowed or not (iirc Capital was initially allowed in Russia because they felt it wouldn’t be a threat). Underground means underground - you have to be patient, cautious and not let complacence take in. People get vetted into the book club piecemeal. Out of those you recruit promising members and hold even more secret book clubs and agitation work with them. This is where safe houses come in; you have to store material and produce it somewhere, and it can’t be at your house. Don’t use your home printer, the origin is easily traceable. They used to get their own printing presses (there were presses of all sizes) and print in safe houses. Also one thing people used to do, and this is in Total Resistance (which is funny because it’s allegedly not a communist book at all but so much of it fits with revolutionary activity that I have to wonder what the author truly believed), was type out their agitprop on typewriters and add instructions at the end to type out your own copies and pass them on. You never keep anything too long; burn instructions when you receive them and stir the ashes.

Complacence is how Ho Chi Minh slipped out of France and back to Vietnam. For months he had the exact same daily routine, to the point the police (he was being followed all the time by 2 officers) eventually started getting complacent. One day after work instead of going to the library as usual, he quickly hopped on a different bus and went to the train station where someone was waiting for him with tickets out of the country.

+ 40 years of cold war propaganda + times of heightened contradictions + living in the heart of the empire itself.

The CW propaganda was wild, someone once told me people in the USSR were “miming” working at the factory line (like the line was empty and they just mimed work) because there was nothing to produce. Like what? How does that even make sense lol. They were older, probably heard this as a kid in school. It was a real generational shock for me hearing this.

My POV is that yugo has a big audience and should be mindful of what he says, especially since he knows his audience is mostly baby leftists. And secondly Johnstone has herself gone on unhinged rants before:

She herself is a weird hodgepodge of liberalism and mildly progressive views. She’s said several times she’s not a communist and actively refuses to become one.

And when they’re called out for it they double down trying to “explain” how they were right and then never change. They have 0 material analysis, they’re just doing vibes-based politics. Is this how yugo wants to conduct politics with the masses? Would he publish this rant under a party name? If not, then why publish it on twitter under his own name? This is the kind of stuff you say with friends, and they gently steer you in the right direction.

Why are our idols now streamers and youtubers? Why do we care what these petty bourgeois enthusiasts who try to make a living taking money from baby comrades think about how struggle is conducted? Of course they’ll defend their petty-bourgeois views when it comes down to it. That’s what makes them money. Viki herself took a long break because she made, you guessed it, deeply ignorant remarks.

Yet they call for left-unity and expect us to side with their shit views and opinions, sweep them under the rug, while they continue on thinking and spouting whatever words they want. But it’s us, the marxist-leninists, that have to be on our best behavior around them.

Like I don’t know, I don’t always have the right takes and I’ve made comments to people on the internet that I regret. I apologize to them and talk to friends to understand the problem and synthesize my own conclusion from it. I don’t tell more principled people that they’re the ones who need to change and not me, cause that’s what they’re doing here. Coming from caitlin and vicki, it’s deeply selfish and self-centered to say this. They think because they’re big names with an audience that automatically makes them right and everyone else wrong.

When Lenin said “Among the Jews there are workers, toilers, they are in the majority. They are our brothers, comrades in the struggle for Socialism, because they are oppressed by capitalism. Among the Jews there are Kulaks, exploiters, capitalists, just like amongst us all,” he preceded it with:

Only entirely uneducated and completely oppressed people can believe the lies and slanders which are being spread about the Jews. These are survivals from the times of serfdom, when the priests burnt heretics at the stake, when peasants were trampled upon and were blind. But these dark survivals of serfdom are disappearing, the people are beginning to see.

Notice Lenin didn’t say “you must have faulty genes if you believe otherwise you disabled r-word”.

Criticism and self-criticism is a core component of marxism to progress forward. Normally it implies we find issues to remedy and then remedy them, so we all progress together. In this case, I’m not really sure where to even begin. I think it speaks for itself (esp. the “now I’m not calling them the r-word, just the diminutive that’s acceptable in your circles :)”)

But people don’t deserve to have their shit takes swept under the rug just because they’re nominally on “our side”. He chose to publish this on Twitter and leave it up, what are we supposed to do? Smile while he continues saying whatever unhinged shit crosses his mind that day under the shower, never getting challenged for it? What example does this set for the new leftists that watch him, who start to think communism is just about appearing edgy and being counter-culture?

I want to leave one last thought; you suggest to debate rightists, but why not rightist views and right deviationist views? Not everyone who calls themselves a communist is immediately our comrade, people don’t suddenly develop all the correct theory and ideas as soon as they proclaim themselves to be a marxist.

exactly, the contradictions are internal - or in other words, they’re coming from inside the house!

It’s the second time I’ve seen him tweet shit like this. I can probably dig up the previous time if I go looking in my discords.

I can understand being exasperated esp when you’re an somewhat known figure you probably get a lot of trolls and content of this sort sent your way, and sometimes you just quip something back at them. but to take the time to type out all of this and then decide “yes, I shall now send this. It’s a good idea” is something else.

Believe people when they show you who they are. Anyone can appear however they want when they control the camera, but posts like this are off-the-cuff moments where they feel like they’re talking to their friends around the campfire.

Here was the last time actually (archive):

his defense was the person in the video is a millionaire nepo baby so that makes it okay. Like again there’s a difference between saying “eat the rich” and making an entire eugenics screed over a video.

That’s the problem, I’m not sure I could do it justice. But Parenti did make claims in the book such as:

What is still not widely understood in the West is that most of the ethnic cleansing throughout the former Yugoslavia was perpetrated not by the Serbs but against them.

Which understandably is not well-received by the other nationalities/ethnicities involved in the war. I don’t think even the claim of most holds up.

These types of claim repeat all over in the book, basically presenting a very one-sided view that is pro-Serbia/pro-Bosnian Serbs and the book seems to talk about little else. It’s not necessarily bad in a vacuum (provided the info is accurate which was not among the issues brought up to me about the book), but many people use this book as a basis for understanding the Yugoslav/Bosnian wars and on that it can’t be a good source due to only talking about Bosnian Serbs and how it presents them in relation to the conflict.

Is it true that:

“the much heavier and “nearly incessant bombardment of Mostar” by Croatian forces, causing “far greater human and physical damage than Sarajevo,” according to Susan Woodward, received almost no world attention, and demonstrated how thoroughly the media could be managed”?

And that:

“Bosnian Muslim forces at Sarajevo, UN observers noted, were often the first to begin the daily artillery barrages, firing on Serb targets and Serb neighborhoods in order to provoke a response and trigger Western military intervention”?

Yes, probably. Yet what Parenti has to say about the siege is:

Bosnian Serb forces had offered safe passage to all civilians. With noncombatants out of the way, especially women and children, the Serbs would be able to treat Sarajevo as a purely military target.

And recently we found out about how the Bosnian Serb army organized “human safaris” for foreigners during the siege of Sarajevo. Purely military target indeed.

He probably couldn’t have known about that crime back when he wrote the book as the allegations only recently came to light, but you can see how it skews the picture, basically taking the Bosnian Serb claims at face value and not offering the same treatment to the other participants. It’s very one-sided and for that reason can’t be a history lesson, it should be read very critically, more as an analysis of media manipulation.

what is an “anti-imperialist book”?

He didn’t always have the right takes, but he was a great orator. Brought up a whole generation of communists.

And most of all, he showed us if there can be one Parenti, there can be many more. Our only limit is the one we put on ourselves.

be wary it’s a very pro-serbia book, as many non-serb yugoslavs have let me know.