lib1 [comrade/them]

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2020

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  • Fair enough! For me I think it came down to a perspective shift on the design of liberal democracies. I would love it if the owning class was forward-thinking enough to allow social democracies to function well longitudinally. It seems that the dynamic is that workers fight for protections and social safety nets and then owners slowly gut those programs and push austerity. On a long enough time scale, social democracy decays.

    I used to think we could essentially protest and activism our way out of this because I viewed liberal democracy as something which was fundamentally designed to serve the people and was corrupted to serve the owning class. Now I view liberal democracies as something which was designed to serve the owning class from the start. There was a big reason land ownership was originally required to vote in the United States. Lenin says in State and Revolution:

    A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell … it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.

    I think this naturally leads to questions about how to deal with the entrenchment of capitalists at a fundamental level and the answers lie in historical examples of societies which were able to do so. And all of this is made significantly more urgent by climate change.









  • I can’t speak for everyone, only for myself. My opposition to AI isn’t an opposition to the disembodied, out-of-context concept of AI. It’s an opposition to the context in which AI exists and of which it’s emblematic. The form that LLMs take in our society exists because of a prioritization of profit and ownership over workers. I can go more in depth about the specifics of that that if you’d like.

    We can have a discussion about the efficacy of luddites and their strategies in working class liberation. I don’t disagree that they achieved little. I just don’t think that their methods failing means we should dismiss the anger they felt or similarly the anger people feel about AI. That’s the truly analogous part. When I rail against AI on Lemmy, I’m not advocating for individuals to start breaking into a smashing up data centers. That would be just as ineffective. But that expression of anger is still valid.






  • I just looked it up. There were 2 horses who played Artax so they could film continuously while not working the horses continuously. They trained the horses for 7 weeks to be comfortable submerging themselves up to the neck in mud. Still a wild thing to do to a horse but neither of them died