It’s like asking if tanks can be proletarian. Or if comically large spoons can be proletarian. Yes: in the right hands, yes they can.

Xiaomi MiMo is by far my favourite. I think it’s severly underrated. https://mimo.xiaomi.com/

And GLM-5 for agentic coding and anything that needs a bigger context window https://chat.z.ai/

I’d vote to keep it.

But I probably wouldn’t have a vote, because I’m not a USian and wouldn’t be a voting member of the hypothetical people’s republic, and it’s unlikely that I’d be invited onto a consultative committee to deliberate on what to do with it.

In such a hypothetical setting, though, that statue would be a reminder of the lies USians were told. People could see it as aspirational, a benchmark of progress in their new republic if it finally earned the reputation that that torchbearer claimed.

But any decision to keep it would have to be subject to the approval/veto of minority groups who saw it as a symbol of their oppression.

We wouldn’t have to worry about white supremacists shites seeing it as ‘their’ symbol and a rallying cry, because they’ll all either be in gulags (where they can’t see it) or rotting in ditches (where they can’t think about it).

yeah it’s a double edged sword

Put yourself in the CIA’s position and consider the value prospect of setting up instances:

• Lemmy is open source.
• Anyone can federate.
• The original Lemmy has no privilege or primacy over any other instance apart from being established first.
• You have entire nations full of people (who have been so pre-conditioned by red scare that many of them are 3rd-generation brainwashed) who will eagerly amplify your voice, and having the loudest voice is the biggest factor in this kind of framework.
• Lemmy is designed to protect your anonymity, so the танкиs will likely never be able to prove you’re behind it.

The cost-to-benefit ratio is so good that you’d be mad not to.

We need to scrutinize Chomsky’s work. Like comb through it and catalog his positions on various issues, and what courses of action he advocates and opposed. What popular ideas (that he’d obviously be exposed to) that he omits.

We know that the empire works to infiltrate and corrupt leftist, socialist and communist movements and we now know that Chomsky was one of the most successful examples of that in academia and theory. I have a feeling some dedicated scrutiny could bear a lot of fruit, but I have almost no free time before Chinese New Year hols.

It explains why nobody with any clout ever did anything about it, when everyone could see that it stood to do a lot of harm to a vulnerable demographic. And the idea that it could be weaponized into a hate group and directed at things isn’t absurd when we know that that’s been done with extremist religious groups.

Yeah, and that is also why recent Chinese history is a huge part of the education system from a very young age.

I hope it doesn’t come across like I am demanding sympathy. To me, it is more about recognizing appropriately the entirety of liberation struggle and avoiding falling prey to reducing it only to static characteristics, for lack of a better way to put it.

I think the most salient part of the point they’re making is that those protests/parades don’t have any positive material effect, that they are a pressure valve that protects the imperial core from more significant consequences. They’re acutely aware of the entirety of the global liberation struggle, and Western protest culture does not contribute positively to it.

To address the derisive tone of calling them ‘parades’… When people from the Global South give feedback or advice on this kind of thing, Western Leftists ignore them or patronize them. They dig their heels in and double down on the righteousness of their ineffective methods while a significant portion of them continue to uncritically agree with Capitalist media’s portrayal of any actual Socialist governments - In Pacific Asia, in the Sahel, in Latin America - as brutal dictatorships and problematic. Doing things like calling Western Protests ‘Angry Parades’ is a very effective filter when talking to Westerners to see if it’s actually worth discussing politics with them or if they’re more likely to yell at you for undermining the ‘Leftist Unity’ that was needed to get Kamala into the White House and save the world.

I watched Trumbo (2015) yesterday. Dramatised biography of Dalton Trumbo. Had no idea the guy who wrote Spartacus (1960) was a comrade but that makes a lot of sense.

Anyone got more info on Trumbo from a communist perspective? That his other big movie in 1960 was Exodus leaves me wondering if there were other less savoury influences to him coming off the writers blacklist than were shown in this film. But then I’ve not seen Exodus… it sounds like obvious Israeli propaganda but I have no idea.

Whenever I hear people posit that the US aggression against Venezuela is a distraction from the Epstien files, I can’t help but think it’s the other way around.

Whatever happens with the release of those files, the Capitalists don’t have a lot to win or lose from that situation. If by some miracle Trump actually faces justice, he’ll just be replaced by another puppet.

But with Venezuela, things can go really well or really badly for them. Venezuela’s fate is the issue that capitalists have a significant stake in.

“Shitty working conditions” is very subjective.

They’re allowed to go to the toilet.

And if you’re working in the city, you’re there by choice and moving back to a rural life is an option.

And you got free healthcare.

And the company has to provide boarding if you can’t afford your own place at city rental rates.

How does that all line up against working at an Amazon Fulfillment Center or Walmart?

What isn’t subjective is that shitty working conditions in China are improving, while shitty working conditions under neoliberalism are getting worse.

Something important to note about China’s private sector compared to Western liberal ones, is that it’s highly regulated, and because of that a lot of the disgustingly abusive ways that private corporations treat the public just doesn’t happen there.

For example, with ads in apps. It’s just accepted knowledge that with ‘free’ apps, you are the product and the app sells your data and/or attention to advertisers. In China that’s all extremely regulated: if you see an ad, it’s got to come with some kind of special offer or deal that benefits you, and not in bullshit “mark the price up and then discount it back down” kinds of ways.

So in the West the app sells your attention to the advertisers; in China the app sells access to you and the advertisers give you coupons and discounts (that automatically get processed by the app’s payment system) in exchange for your attention.

And the most important part is that if people report an ad, the government will be on the side of the public when it investigates, as opposed to the toothless reporting systems that nobody bothers with in the West.

The net effect of this, and many many other kinds of ‘authoritarian’ regulatory laws that don’t exist in the west, is that I’m not experiencing the same kind of enshittification in China as I am in the West.

Except in the picture on the left, someone’s actually reading it.

Something’s gone wrong if you’re looking in the node_modules folder.

Considering how LLMs work, you might be one of them.

Maybe not anyone here, but it’s nice to see people like Alice unafraid to say it in liberal spaces.

This was my read as well. His Stalinism is to us Marxism-Leninism, and his ‘true’ Marxism Leninism is to us Trotskyism.

If China had followed the kind of Leninism he advocates, of just relentless hostility to the West, it’d be as broken and hopeless as Russia is now.

I think the most powerful response to someone accusing China of peacefully coexisting with the West lies in three observations:

• The people that control the Western world clearly see China as a threat to them and want to destroy it

• AES and anti-imperialist states around the world are either explicitly protected by China from US hostility, or rely on China’s economic stability to survive the West’s economic hostility.

• Anyone who has actually been to mainland China will agree that the quality of life for workers is far, far better for Chinese than it is even for the Western labour aristocracy. The only exceptions are people who have an income stream based on maintaining anti-China rhetoric and internet debate bros who would ‘lose’ if they admit it.

Someone should deadpan organise a crowdfunding campaign to help Biden pay for his treatment.

https://youtu.be/4T0KrRJ0jTo

But also

https://youtu.be/N5dC-YlN_x8

Also remember that a lot of people, including Chinese, are boycotting this movie because of actress Gal Gadot’s pro-Zionist views. That is definitely a good thing.

If I have any criticism to level at Andy’s video, it’s that he didn’t mention this. The rest of his piece I feel in agreement with.