Russia is not imperialist: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_"imperialism"

Having some global influence and a capitalist model does not automatically mean you fit the definition of imperialism. You could try to argue current Russia might have the potential to become imperialist given the right circumstances, but short of them losing their sovereignty to the western empire and becoming a puppet state (and therefore only imperialist in the sense that they are part of the west’s empire), that seems like a snowball’s chance in hell. Russia is currently an important actor in a newly forming multipolar world, which is in direct contradiction to having monopolistic capitalist power. And it is “socialism with Chinese characteristics” China, with its fast-moving advances, increasing mutually-beneficial ties with other countries, and powerful forces of production and supply chains that is the dominant force in that multipolar push for sovereignty and self-determination, not Russia. So even if Russia were trying to do some kind of 5d chess maneuver to become a global imperialist power, they would have to go through China to do it, which is where some of their most significant support comes from.

There just simply aren’t the conditions there, as far as I can tell, for Russia to independently develop into the kind of domineering power that the west has had, part of which was built on the tendrils of colonialism created over hundreds of years and then further developed on the advantageous technological and productive position that the US was in, in post WWII; and those US conditions were owed in part to it suffering so little damage to its own country while other places, like the USSR, suffered incredible losses. Russia is again suffering losses for fighting against the puppet/proxy state Ukraine and its neo-nazi and NATO-backed fascist elements, so that they don’t get NATO knocking at their door, coming for them next. This is not some easy war that simply wins them territory and resources, and loses them little. You don’t have to like Russia’s leadership at all to recognize that this is a part of the ongoing existential fight for sovereignty against a brutally expansionist western empire. It was the west that invaded the USSR in its beginnings, it was the west that sought to destroy the USSR and successfully did so. It was the west that couped Ukraine. It was the west that sabotaged peace deals between Ukraine and Russia. The same west that has been doing constant wars, coups, economic sanctions, and other forms of waging war against the entire world for decades, killing millions, just in post-WWII. Not even counting the damage done via colonialism if you go back further. Any attempt to make equivalent Russia and the western empire is nothing short of the most high grade, top of the line BS, and most likely comes from western imperial sources who are trying to flip the script.

Critical support means what it sounds like. It means you support but with caveats, not that you give unthinking support. It means you recognize that the world is not a Marvel movie, but instead has complex contradictions and factional crossovers. That it is not made up of perfect victims and cartoon villains, but of varied peoples and cultures who don’t all have the same interests, and you have to engage with and navigate that in order to develop toward global communism and a world free of imperialism. You can despise it all you want, but you still have to engage with the realities of it in all its messiness.

This still doesn’t explain what “the backward group” has to do with generative AI, which didn’t even exist in Mao’s time. Hell, he says in the passage you linked:

The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.

(bold emphasis mine)

So he was specifically in favor of winning over the “backward elements”, which contradicts with your implication that AI as agitprop is “unwanted by people” and somehow bad as propaganda because it would only “be effective agitprop [for] the backward group.”

And…people don’t want it. The only people for whom it would be effective agitprop are the backward group.

I don’t have much time right now, but I know there have been previous threads on this with good answers. Here is some context on Ukraine and the nature of its administration:

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7112898

https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2022/10/24/ukrainian-army-war-crimes-include-shelling-of-ambulences-firetrucks-and-rescue-workers-in-the-donbass-republics-similar-to-israelis-and-u-s-backed-terrorists-in-syria/

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8044328

And a thing on debunking the idea of Russian “imperialism”:

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_"imperialism"

This isn’t Church, we aren’t here to worship specific political figures of the past. You need to explain what your thoughts mean and in the current, modern context that we’re in. You don’t get to excuse yourself from accountability by vaguely pointing at a famous communist who has written tons of things.

The fact that it took me some time to realize this is a historical thing and not something happening just recently. I guess the US hasn’t changed much.

And…people don’t want it. The only people for whom it would be effective agitprop are the backward group.

What exactly are you trying to say here? That if someone likes anything an AI generated, they are automatically part of a backwards ideology?

People like this are adult children who never learned how to regulate their emotions, but did learn how to excessively rationalize every emotion they have and in this person’s case, went and made a whole goddamn career of it. So basically, their worst takes tend to amount to tantrums disguised as flimsy rationalizing.

This is the important part:

Trump is also, incidentally, a menace to me and basically everyone I care about. A perfectly enlightened being would feel no bitterness about this, but I do.

The rationalizing isn’t really about Palestinians lives or what is tactically more effective, it’s that the person doing this self-centered tantrum is upset and probably scared, and so they’re going to take it out on a whole scapegoated entity “the online left.” It’s the same kind of empty, childish finger pointing that you see in a video game after the group has just failed a challenge; someone is mad that things went wrong, so rather than sitting down and trying to work with others to get a better outcome going forward, they start finding someone to scapegoat. Incidentally, this sort of treatment of others syncs up well with how fast liberals can go to fascist thinking. They are more interested in othering than accurately investigating and dealing with real problems or threats.

The line about “A perfectly enlightened being would feel no bitterness about this” is part of what makes it clear to me how tantrum-like it is. It suggests that the emotion is somehow out of the person’s hands, like they have to be perfect not to feel this way. But it’s beside the point of maturely dealing with emotions. There’s nothing wrong with feeling bitter about something, it just is, emotions just kinda happen sometimes. The important part is what you do with the emotion; how you process it and in what way you act on it, if you do act on it at all. And people like this try to make their emotions other people’s problems and put it on them as responsible (“it’s the online left”) and they try to avoid any sense of agency in being a feeling being (“a perfectly enlightened being would do better but I am not…”).

In short, this kind of person wants to escape responsibility for feeling because they don’t know how to regulate feeling. They probably notice on some level that the way they dysregulate looks immature, so instead of maturing, they find a way to excuse it or reframe it as something else.

At some point, Youtube changed to where it was more beneficial to do videos that are 10+ minutes, I think cause of number of ad rolls or something. It’s been a while since I heard it talked about, but I remember some creators bringing it up. Naturally, this is going to contribute to stuff where people pad out video length just to have more ads, but it doesn’t actually have more substance to it than it would if it was shorter. That is probably some of what you’re noticing. There’s also the fact that youtube’s ads are not the most reliable way of income, so some people do sponsorships within a video or have a product to sell. It’s a very capitalist problem I suppose, but whatever the cause, I don’t think you’re imagining it if you find a lot of videos to be rather shallow trails toward ads and products.

In particular, those infotainment style videos with cutesy animations, reek of content mill to me. I’m sure there is some genuinely informative stuff, but it may not be as easy to find sometimes, as the flashy millions of views most popular videos.

One thing that I do with ASMR videos is I’ll search for some kind of ASMR and I’ll change the date range, so it’s searching for like, video that came out within a month. Not quite the same kind of video as education, but the general idea here, is it allows me to find stuff the algorithm may not prioritize as popular but that is still enjoyable to watch.

“Environments which may induce seizures [based on vibes from watching a 10 second clip on the internet] now seem [based on hatred of China that has been drummed into me for years] to be the goal. The logical endpoint of a world where Bigger Louder Faster Stronger [foreigners doing better than my country] replaced the Good, the True, the Beautiful [being a tourist survivalist for a few days, hiking or camping in land that was stolen from indigenous people through genocide].”

Colonial scumbags try to paint themselves as the victim as usual. “How dare they use violence to oppose us. We’re only trying to use violence to mass murder millions.”

I don’t think “vibin’ through the day” is inherently unhealthy, but capitalism can certainly make it feel unhealthy or be more unhealthy than it is, since it probably means you don’t have much money and so your options are pretty limited for what you can do with your time. And on top of that, you will have a harder time relating to the majority (who are working heavily) and can’t spend much of that time socializing with other people if they’re busy working. There’s also self-esteem to consider and because capitalism has this culture of “you’re valuable for how hard you work,” you could feel worse as a person simply for not being someone who is busting your ass.

Like if you go back to some people in previous societies in history, many of them were probably working far less hours, just due to the logistics of things. Now I’m not saying that necessarily means their lives were easier, but I doubt they were sitting around in their downtime going, “I just wish I had more structured busywork to do.”

Thanks!

In practice, IME, a confused term generally put forward by people who for some reason don’t want to call AES states socialist projects (possibly in part because of how vilified the words socialism and communism are in the west). The most important question is, who / what interest group is in power. In China, the working class is in power through the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the US, the capitalist class is in power through a dictatorship of capital. Beyond this, it can get nuanced on what the conditions are of a given state and how they go about designing and carrying out policies and so on.

But it’s more literally accurate to say the US is “state capitalism”, though in this regard it’s kind of redundant; the state ensures that capitalism is the only mode that can be in power. Corporate lobbyists and representatives are a revolving door. In other words, in the US, the operations of capital and the operations of the state often work hand in hand; they just do it more indirectly than you’d see in something centrally planned. If the capitalists were to abolish the state (such as in the anarcho-capitalist fantasy), they would also abolish a vital mechanism through which they enforce the capitalist reality and so they would lose/dilute much of their power in the process. This is important because some people get confused and think of socialism as “state doing stuff” and capitalism as “private enterprise doing stuff”, but it’s not that simple. Capitalism is a specific mode of private enterprise having supreme power through its ownership of the means of production and distribution; land, factories, etc. China is not capitalist because the capitalists are not in charge. Capitalists are subservient to the state rather than using the state to define and enforce their power.

The reality of global capitalism being such a pervasive part of the world economy no doubt gives China some capitalist characteristics in spite of its best efforts if for no other reason than because in order to not be isolated, it has to trade and deal with the capitalist global economy. But the nature of its society as a whole is still going to be significantly different than the US, for example, because of where power derives from and whose interests it is for.

I wouldn’t be so quick to judge. The youth may be organizing in other ways, or simply not being shown in the pictures as much. It’s also possible that farmers as a group specifically tend to be older.

Pokemon bootlickers will tell genuine fans of the series they’re just nostalgia brained for saying that newer games on the series are undercooked, unfinished, and filled with anti-player features/trends (DLCs, un toggleable QoL, no difficulty setting).

Bootlickers in defense of [insert any criticism of a game’s product fitness ever] are some of the most annoyingly smug people on the internet I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with on an ongoing basis.

To be clear, there are game enjoyers who sometimes defend something who are just having a conversation and disagreeing, and that’s perfectly fine with me, you don’t have to agree with a criticism someone levies at a game.

But then there are those people who use every talking point pushed by corporations like it’s their religion and talk down to anyone who makes any criticism, even if that person is otherwise a big fan, like they’re telling off a child for demanding a candy bar at the store. Those types give off the same vibes as the sort of lowlife scum who would tell people they are entitled for wanting universal healthcare. The bootstraps ministers who preach being happy with whatever you get, as if corporations and capital were gods who are being magnanimous when they provide anything at all.

I see, I didn’t realize there was controversy about it before it was even out.

I don’t know, admittedly I was not on online forums witnessing hatred of Wind Waker back then so maybe the hate was like you say, but I personally was not a big fan of Wind Waker and it had nothing to do with what you stated. For me, it was largely the art style and the ship gameplay that put me off. I’ve long preferred more realistic-ish art styles in games (not necessarily hyperrealistic, just not like super flat I guess) and have yet to meet a game where I enjoy navigating sea.

Ocarina of Time is one of, if not, my favorite game of all time because it had great puzzles, music, environments, story, and was all-around charming, and is no doubt ensconced in a lot of nostalgia for me, of playing it with siblings. Tits and gore would destroy the charm of it and be more like GTA, not Legend of Zelda. In fact, I would say one of the charming things about Legend of Zelda is the distinct lack of “adult” themes. It feels more like a kid’s adventure born out of their daydreams than a gritty hyperrealistic thing.

Games as art largely got killed by capitalism. There’s some of it in indie, as with other industries, but they turned into a largely casino-adjacent medium overall. As for game enjoyers, yeah there are a lot of people who get defensive over criticism levied at the game(s) they like. In general, any online “community” centered around a product seems to trend toward being cult-like (or cult-lite, perhaps), maybe because in the capitalist west (particularly the US section of things) the customer has virtually no power or influence short of kicking up a prolonged media shitstorm for a given company and just kinda has to deal with what is meted out or leave, so it’s maybe similar to the makeup of a cult in that way; supreme leader (corporation) and followers (customers who stick around). And also the disconnect, that with online, we aren’t generally talking about a business made up of people you know in your community, but instead a largely faceless entity who hardly knows your in-person region exists, much less cares.

The USian compulsion to externalize every problem it has as analogous to a foreigner (sometimes even a caricature of a foreigner made up by the US) is really something that should be studied. It’s like this knee-jerk inability to take on any responsibility for the US fundamentally being shit. Possibly in part due to the religious-like treatment of the constitution. And the endless vilifying of leaders and/or peoples of other countries over decades, which has made it basically a constant thing to have one foreign specter or another in the public view.

I’m not saying it is wrong all the time but it’s outright dangerous to abandon critical thinking as a whole and accept ChatGPT as some sort of deity.

Tbh, it’s best practice to assume an LLM is wrong all of the time. Always verify what it says with other sources. It can technically say things that are factual, but because there is no way of directly checking via the model itself and because it can easily bullshit you with 100% unwavering confidence, you should never trust what it says on the face of it. I mean, it can have high confidence (meaning, high baseline probability strength) in the correct answer and then, depending on sampling of tokens and the context of things, get a bad percent on one token and go down a path with a borked answer. Sorta like if humans could only speak in the rules of improv’s “yes, and…” where you can’t edit, reconsider, or self-correct, you have to just go with what’s already there, no matter how silly it gets.