Peanut

You have to account for the ratchet/motte-and-bailey tactics of the “other side” to co-opt energy mobilized against Conservatives into… Serving corporate efforts, wars, and basically just acting to the maximum amount of conservators while preserving the image of opposition.

Conservatives don’t get in power because the opposition is doing a really good job opposing.

So the problem is opportunistic parasitism build from a culture and social structure that rewards consolidating your wealth, and suggests the ‘good people’ use their power to stopper the leaks of basic social functioning at every other level.

So, good people don’t have the power to compete in such a system, and bad people consolidate, and opportunistically cooperate much better than most cooperative progressives seem to.

None of this would be possible without the idiot cult suckling fascist propaganda, but it’s definitely a more robust problem than that.

by neoliberal progressive rugpulling i’m talking about democrats/liberals running on progressive platforms, only to rugpull and basically be a more moderate version of rightwing corporatism.

a good example here in canada is when smaller progressive parties started gaining traction on voter reform to avoid the 2 party extreme of this context as we see in the united states. the liberal party (basically democrats) started running on the same voter reform platform, as well as the ‘responsible’ vote for ensuring that conservatives aren’t in charge, in our near two-party system.

after winning they said “oh that’s what voter reform means? oh we didn’t mean that at all lol bye.”

also like how carney got an easy win by not being an openly psychotic fascist, but is still pushing hyper conservative and pro-corporate political changes.

so it’s the same kind of ‘corruption’ of collective effort, in a different ecosystem.

we need ways to recognize and respond to this type of exploitation of shared environments and efforts, which is made difficult due to high populations with low reading-comprehension or ability to make sense of complex or contradictory environments.

people need to recognize when the body they are using to achieve a collective goal is being usurped or changed for usually antithetical reasons, and animal farm is all about the different ways this can happen.

the casual silencing of dissent, or obscuring/changing of wording or rules, or outright lies. again, the point of animal farm is that the system can be gutted or changed in essence, into the same oligarch serving capitalist system, despite being the ‘revolutionaries’ that escaped from their capitalist overlords.

you could even make the parallel to MAGA, since half of MAGA seems to think their movement is going to do [socialist policy,] just with the depth of obscuration needed to fool flat-earthers. so they will sign up for a direct crypto rug-pull i guess. no veils needed.

yeah, a lot of it is just that humans are dumb and can’t fucking communicate, or comprehend text past a socialized misrepresentation which most people just accept is the context i guess.

nobody else in this thread seems to comprehend how that doesn’t mean ‘communism bad.’ i wouldn’t really know, because the dogpiling comes mostly with “BAD BOOK, NO READ,” rather than any actual reasoning.

not every heuristic or example will always be useful in every situation, but i find animal farm and 1984 do a good job conveying certain tools or framings that are extremely relevant to current corruption and political happenings. whether it’s character assassination like hasan or other progressives, or direct assassinations like MLK. misrepresentations of people or their motives, which you see with basically every group that defends themselves from imperialist aggression, or even mild dissidents being framed as ‘terrorists.’ many academics and anarchists are bringing up polysemy and exploitations of context/system framing and other things, but shitty vague groupings like liberal/progressive/left make it hard to draw the clear boundaries of where systems start being treated like exploitable environment, which is the more general shape of the problem. we can actually model this stuff with modern academic framing, but the heritage foundation and types are actively in the government trying to burn and scorn as much progressive academia as possible.

again, you’re appreciated for actually interacting with my words, even if i still haven’t convinced you. thank you.

never said you were screaming, i was suggesting that as the alternative form of communication people choose outside of scientifically figuring out how to communicate across different systems.

i agree that associating the left as specifically authoritarian is bad and wrong, and i heavily disagree with that interpretation of animal farm. again, the ending of the book is that they became capitalists, not leftists. but i do think authoritarianism is bad, and associating it with the left is bad, even when leftists (tankies) do it.

and the atheism/feminism war was online and general media. it bled into a bunch of things like ‘gamergate,’ but the SJW framing was really big in the media, amongst other things. there were a lot of groups that were organizing against groups like the heritage foundation, which got discouraged or derailed by the culture war crap. lots of weird stuff, but just one of the more recent examples. you can use similar tools for other recent things like the anti-hasan campaigns painting him as a dog-abusing terrorism lover, or media campaigns against BLM/ANTIFA a while back.

anywhere you try to find progressive efforts, you see weird shit on fire for no reasonable reason, other than progressive groups still haven’t found a way to successfully communicate and cooperate, and probably a lot of intentional fire-starting from the assholes with money that the groups are generally aligned against, such as the heritage foundation, or their global counterparts.

also just a note, when i talk about ‘heterarchical systems’ i’m basically talking about anarchism.

we need to grow a whole new culture out of the corpse of a political system most of us or currently trapped inside of.

and you’re lucky if you’ve found the one anarchist/progressive space that works for you, but try to grow that effort into one that can affect the existing systems, and you’ll suddenly find your group is either a terrorist organization, or that the group hates women, and now you have to prove to a bunch of angry public reaction to any association with that woman hating group. it is constant for anyone actually being noticed as a danger to the status quo.

i’m usually trying to talk about anarchistic efforts that affect more than one small community, as individualized and isolated communities aren’t gonna do much the moment the big imperial body notices the potential for actual social change happening.

thank you though for an honest response to my words. posting in online spaces has only gotten more stifling over the years. just wish local efforts could connect to larger efforts, since we need multiple groups cooperating in solidarity, not isolated individualism.

they are teaching that stalin is evil because he is rightwing?

is anyone here actually reading the words that i’m typing before responding?

are you even human? did you comprehend any of the words being said?

i just enjoy the use of animal farm/1984 as little heuristic environments to convey simple ways that collective efforts are derailed, with a great simple short set of events that show how a movement can be slowly converted into something antithetical to the original collective effort.

a problem that still hasn’t been solved, despite any elaboration that could be had on the specific happenings in the USSR.

i care about the heuristics because they do map really well to other and current happenings, in ways that are useful for framing to people things such as the decades of neoliberal progressive rugpulling, or how the heritage foundation and types have been slowly reshaping the environment to benefit them, in a recursive corruption of existing systems.

it’s definitely more complicated than shown in animal-farm, but people already react as if this is the deep-end, and trying to copy and paste a textbook on USSR specifics would also have me back explaining the difference between patterns and substrate, which honestly shouldn’t be the case with animal farm, but it seems even (american?) leftists seem to have read it as ‘commuism bad.’

i think it’s a really good tool for framing the different opportunistic tools that derail progressive efforts, even to this day.

divide-and-conquer is sure as hell working really well lately. do you remember the atheism feminism war not too long ago? or the gender war? or more race-wars than you can shake a stick at?

there’s a reason why right-wing authoritarians and their neoliberal counterparts are currently dominating. animal farm is a really good simplified example showing how and why such a thing can happen, even when there’s a lot of support for progressive efforts.

you could show tools like the motte-and-bailey creeping of the overton window in both animal farm, and real life examples of leftist efforts being damaged or derailed.

authoritarianism is by definition counter to progressive efforts, and heterarchical systems need to recognize this to scale and survive with any success verses other exploitative systems. there’s no reason to ignore this message, even if it comes from a satire of the USSR.

also modern science is a good resource on how to accomplish this stuff. like building a big-stick resistant social immune system that doesn’t fuck us all to death. or we can just keep yelling and screaming at each other, especially the people framing the necessary science around progressive efforts.

you even see a lot of tools such a slander being used against people like hasan or other progressives right now. animal farm has a lot of good examples of character assassination. great resource for people with basic reading comprehension.

what government history book is teaching how right-wing style movements or oligarchical power are used derail socialist efforts? which history books are you suggesting be salient?

“Do you actually think nazis were on the left?”

if i thought that, i wouldn’t have said that they came after the left.

everyone thinks i’m anti-left because of the weird american interpretation that animal farm = ‘communism bad,’ and not that collective efforts can be derailed by failures of communication or education.

the failure of progressive efforts is that most progressive groups can be turned on each other because they can’t communicate or separate patterns from substrate.

‘divide and conquer’ is really successful, whether in animal farm or in basically every historical example of oppression.

again the ‘first they came for’ poem i alluded to with “Why the ‘national socialists’ came for the communists and socialists first.”

what this means is that the name ‘national socialist’ was obviously completely removed from the concept.

again, like the pigs in animal farm becoming removed from the concept of animals by the end of the book. why the book is an apt reference to actual systems, although more specifically around the unfortunate failures of early russian efforts.

again, the oversimplified american interpretation of ‘communism bad’ mostly comes from a thorough lack of reading comprehension, and memetic/socialized reification of that misinterpretation.

so again, stating that i was not calling the nazis progressives when suggesting that their name was being misused through blatant oppression of socialists.

you don’t think that socialist efforts get de-railed or coopted by opportunistic oligarchs or figureheads?

‘heterarchical systems need more advanced structure building to survive’ =/= ‘socialism bad.’

everyone is angrily lashing at their own misinterpretation of animal farm as a critique of animal farm.

like people who can’t comprehend building solidarity over stupid media driven culture war bullshit. yelling angrily at other progressives for being a different shape, or defending actual intentional derailing of efforts are weirdly not the solutions to the famous fallibility of progressive efforts, which you should care about if you actually care about progressive efforts.

didn’t say “this is why communism can never work” i was saying how collective efforts get coopted. the entire point of animal farm is that the pigs end up like the human ‘capitalists’ they were supposed to replace, by changing the rules and languages opportunistically, against the wishes or best interest of the people. this isn’t an argument against communism or collective efforts as a whole calm down.

If only the real world was a straight line, and there were nothing such as authoritarian coopting of collective efforts, resembling right wing fascist authoritarian, wearing the corpse of an attempted social movement.

Why animal farm exists

Why the ‘national socialists’ came for the communists and socialists first.

You’re representing a high dimensional ecosystem with oversimplified boundings being flattened into a linear scale, and the ‘horseshoe’ is moreso adapting the simple heuristic to better represent the more complicated reality.

Sometimes the meaning of words is opportunistically changed, or the people directing a group change, and we actually have to comprehend and adapt to that.

A better representation of the political system is like a body where a bunch of organs seem to think cancer might be the best shape to be. Cancer as in ‘defining wider boundings of surrounding systems as exploitable environment’ usually ignoring how the surrounding body is literally necessary for sustaining life for the cancer itself. This is also where we would talk about things like instrumental convergence in natural/human systems.

So the linear line doesn’t really explain the constant rugged individualism usurping spaces in our complex high dimensional social reality. Ergo horseshoe heuristic.

Been doing this for decades, and somehow the billionaires keep out-money-voting me.

Not that trying doesn’t help, but the world needs more than the few good people spending all of their energy and power in filling the gaps of a system designed to leave gaps, specifically to enrich the less generous people via a hoarding competition.

Almost as if having cultures built entirely around letting less good people amass power while punishing those who actually contribute to the world around them.

Some reason, changing our culture to something that rewards generosity is just never on the table. Those who care enough to affect anything larger scale have already given up their power out of basic decency in a world full of suffering, or had it taken from them by those who chose hoarding and extracting instead.

Or people could just tax the rich to the point they can’t spend their time and power rigging political objectives, rather than doing literally anything positive for society.

Etc.

You’re even being downvoted for an entirely sensible opinion. I feel like the type of people to downvote this opinion are the type who don’t comprehend that boardrooms were creating slop using real artists that they control through economic suppression. The bigger issue is that most consumers don’t have the media literacy to tell what is slop with a lot of money put into it verses the quality that independent artists are able to put out when they can’t afford a team of economic slaves to polish their work, and the lack of media literacy drowns them under the salience and market dominance of Disney and Warner types.

But if an indie dev uses a local AI to accomplish the same polish that is currently only available to big corpos, they could actually make their real artwork look more competitive with corpo slop,

But people don’t have the literacy on ‘why’ AI bad, the same way people don’t seem to have literacy around opportunistic oligarchs buying the whole political landscape giving you a choice between mask off corpo leaches promising things antithetical to their actions, and mask on corpo leaches pretending to combat it. The solution weirdly isn’t “burn the technology.” much like the phones in our pockets, there is zero reason for them to be useless bricks outside of the proprietary data collection and gambling pipeline that has been deemed the “only safe option” as if a Linux equivalent is more dangerous than the corpo data collection and limiting of our own autonomy over our own devices.

Similarly the cloud, which is literally just “let us organize all of your local data for you on our computers. Keeping your data with us is just easier or something.” rather than just enabling people in their own local networks.

So the landscape being built for us is the problem, but we can’t get there when most people can’t spend more time absorbing a topic before taking the strong socialized beliefs that are given high emotional salience, because they socially feel that it is bad, not because of the decades of encroaching systemic oppressing that we have to crawl out of.

It’s not the indie artist using a tool that’s the problem, and that tool is stealing nothing from anyone, rather than using systemic exploitation as righteous artistic accomplishment like pretty much anyone with actual money for “labour.”

I mean, most people can’t recognize slop vs creativity normally. I think the results affect less the anthropomorphizing issue, since oir brains do run similar predictive processes in how we generate words based on context,

Although it can’t actively update its weights while navigating novel concepts, which is why you need a person to create novelty alongside the tool, or correct its mistakes, much like when you say the wrong thing and backtrack and correct. Your word generating process isn’t perfect, but it’s a useful tool that is useful alongside all of your other ‘tools.’

What i think the study is a better answer to is the people who call it a theft machine because it learned from things that exist.

That being said, rich assholes should not be able to turn around and claim ownership of the result of the learning based on the collective development and accomplishment of mankind, or life more broadly. We ‘steal’. A lot of useful intelligent tools from nature.

It’s hard to start that conversation though when the ‘bad’ thing they are doing is just learning or training.

We had the slop of 90s-2000s Disney sequels, even if it was a bunch of human interns having their time and energy pilfered with the threat of basic survival or right to spend time creating art instead of flipping burgers. All proper and copyright safe, but closer to the actual problem than some artists trying to actually create novel things with these models replacing the Disney interns that only Disney has ‘rightful’ access to, despite gaining success off of public domain, and then lobbying to shrink the public domain.

But people are more eager to be mad at the technology than the complexity of dealing with the opportunistic assholes that will use every tool, technology or otherwise, to ensure they get to have power over our collective rights and autonomy.

Is already standard for companies to further ‘optimize’ by creating problems that they can charge extra to solve.

I mean, advertising to begin with is just a way for people with existing capital to make themselves more salient regardless of their product quality.

But if you don’t even need a product and can charge people for the right not to have every experience made worse, or more annoying or time consuming, the whole point of the market has lost the plot at the expense of the people.

Like paying rent on features that have traditionally just been available after purchasing a thing, like vehicle seat heating.

Only going to get worse unless we change out of a system built entirely around individualized extraction and competition.

The story is impenetrable

actually thought the story was much more clear than in any of the souls games.

largely boils down to a bunch of cosmic forces trying to do their own thing or gain their own gains. we understand everything from the abandonment of metyr and her fingers, to the classic nobility/mythology relationship between the gods, lords, and extended family.

we know that gods can have two bodies, and that they can act against each-other. we see how the finger’s influence has affected all of this, and how ranni the witch is actually in a state of escaping that whole situation by killing the important half of her older brother, and less-important half of herself in order to escape the two fingers.

there’s way too much to even summarize succinctly, but i always find it baffling when people say the story is more vague than their other titles. lots of meat, and it all makes sense in the larger world they built, even if some questions are still left open.

also everything around radahn. what a tragic badass.

really love how scadu DLC resolved the family conflicts around ‘kindly’ miqella creating a sycophantic bubble that justifies his usurpation of other people’s autonomy, etc. actions of mohg and malenia making a lot more sense when you realize that, just like everyone else, are just tools for the cause.

the cause being fucking his really cool older brother who doesn’t seem interested.

i don’t remember a whole lot in the souls-verses resolving anywhere near as clearly as a lot of the stuff in elden ring.

also i think it’s much less “you’re supposed to suffer,” due to the RPG grow-as-you-explore vibe they went for, and many people complain about how you can make the game too easy, but i think it’s a good balance that makes sense with the world you’re exploring and how you explore it. except for the scadu DLC. the scadu DLC wants you to suffer.

We only needed a couple for research, and it shouldn’t have been enough for people to go this ham with it. Should have been one big effort like the large hadron collider. The rest could be local stuff so people can run for their own use case. Basic storage should mostly be a local effort as well, but local smart environment hype got usurped by non-local environment connectivity, cause basic digital privacy stopped being a concern for too many regular people some time ago. Frankly the instrumental convergence turning development into to corpo frontend slop doesn’t help anything.

All technological and social development will be usurped by the Epstein class until we fix our social structure, and nobody wants to listen to the academics on that front.

Not the MBA economic magic circle around neoliberal corpo capitalist soothsayers who are all playing ball on the “don’t disrupt the hierarchy” court.

As a fan of science and technology, I really hope we can work with actual experts in finding a way to grow a new system out of the current flailing corpse acting as a system.

Like every other valuable thing for humanity, it is being bastardized to fit the fantasy of the Epstein class parasites.

I hate how people getting scammed by near monopolistic monoliths casually being fraudulent in their advertisements is them being “idiots” rather than just victims who haven’t spent their whole life navigating the myriad ways billionaires are researching to more elegantly fuck us. Why consumer protection is supposed to be a thing, why anti-trust is supposed to be a thing, and people are trapped between fascists and a “tactical vote” alternative that has done very little to stop the fascists from casually dismantling these protections.

Good job media for always individualizing the problem and blaming the victims.

People talk about how AI confabulations are going to doom us all, because people want to rely on it for fact checking rather than a salience guide.

Meanwhile the sitting president of the world’s most powerful country, and those around him, speak more lies than truth intentionally.

I’m much more scared by the people, because I know developing AI to be functionally useful while also intentionally ignoring reality will lose out to AI that actually managed to properly navigate and compare large and varied bodies of beliefs.

Why I like open source efforts. I’d rather not have to worry that my dissenting thoughts need to be affirmed by the government or billionaires before I explore it in a safe environment with a rubber duck that can hopefully help me navigate the complexity.

Although if the AI can’t push back when you are conveying low probability beliefs, given other things we know, you could spin yourself into a delusion. Although people vulnerable to that are already vulnerable to socialized delusions.

We’ve also tried, “encourage people to care about learning how the world actually works.”

But this has been widely unpopular because the type of people to listen to that are already the type to be doing that. The rest are happy even if everything they believe is completely detached from reality, as long as they can enjoy the belief personally and socially.

TLDR: I think a functional AI would do what you say, and upset a lot of people, but with enough people actually having access to properly weighed beliefs would definitely heal some of the problems currently careening the whole of humanity towards collapse on the shoulders of billionaires and corrupt politicians.