Nothing inherently good about being a political scientist! They are wrong or naive so often it is ridiculous. I think it is just an interesting example of how the people paid to think about such topics are still embedded in propaganda milieu and spectacle. You can very much become far more educated and insightful than one, it just takes healthy criticism and reading.

While I don’t salivate at the idea of war, and especially civil war, I can not fear it; dread and fear not always being the same thing or of the same source.

I dread and fear all war but also understand that the violence comes for us regardless, we just get to choose how to organize, become resilient, and strategically protect ourselves while also engaging in meaningful action. The ruling class will never let us vote them out. We may succeed at voting out their preferred sects of the political class, and thus agitate and build against them, but they will bring violence in response - violence that, per the dominant thought patterns, won’t be called violence. It will be joblessness, deprivation, essential services shut down. Capital strikes, etc. And such crises can then be leveraged to restore their preferred sects. Civil war is not likely to spring up early, but as a downstream outcome of repeated struggles like this, of preventing eventual popular will. We will also probably lose at least one round, assuming we cannot organize quickly enough. What that kind of thing looks like can be real horror, which is why we must organize. We need our losses to look like 1905 Russia not 1965 Indonesia. We should also be realistic in that these kinds if fights will happen earlier and more successfully in the third world and one of our duties is to support them, particularly as our governments and media apparatuses will be leading the charge to demonize them.

I’ll do what is necessary, while also acknowledging that my opponents are decent, but misguided and just as heavily brainwashed people.

Some will be decent and misguided. Others will be misguided but not at all decent, having cruelty and racism and a desire for domination deeply embedded in their psyche. It will be virtually impossible to sympathize when they do overy violence to us. They already do “civilly”, like with cops that harass and murder, particularly against black and brown people. Or like ICE. Or the soldiers that dehumanize the people in a country they invaded. Historically, those most targeted by them will rightfully want justice.

I just hope when it comes to that, fascism won’t prevail, whether that happens in whatever years I have left, or follows the generations behind me.

On the bright side, the world is rebuilding structures and relationships that can rein in empire. And in the US, the nascent left is relearning all of the old lessons of the last 300 years. The opposing forces are escalating and organizations are building, which is better than the unipolar malaise of the prior 40 years.

Yes, it’s horrifying what a small change in perspective - a new angle of criticism, for example - can reveal about our world. There’s no need to feel embarrassment, we are all embedded in a milieu of PR campaigns and a handful of political memes recycled indefinitely and it is so pervasive that it is not something that poli sci professors usually escape, either. Usually it’s the exact opposite. They repeat and entrench lines of thought handed down to them without ever critically engaging with it. Universities across the West teach collective action problems as if they are laws and not constantly openly contradicted by example or that politucs is a one-dimensional axis from liberal to conservative. The latter truly reveals how little they have questioned or learned and opens up its own interesting questions about how academia functions. But anyways, point is, even the people nominally tasked with becoming experts on these sorts of things don’t just automatically recognize this predominant myopia.

Recognizing such pervasive false perspectives and tropes tends to require a cold splash of reality that contradicts the narrative or extensive reading to discover new thought patterns. Or like in your case, talking to someone that has already done so. All we can do is be open to the constructive self-criticism like you make note of and to do our best to be personally morally consistent and empathetic.

The events that are the least emphasized are those that were carried out by dominant powers, particularly when they are still around today writing the history and propaganda books. The way events are handled is seemingly subtle, and the most powerful way they avoid emphasis is to simply never frame the violence they did in terms of its most wide impacts.

For example, you mentioned that you are from India. The greatest violences done to India in the last few hundred years were from the Raj, so the British. And those greatest violences were not the actual acts of ships and soldiers, but in things like this:

• Dismantling of industry and craftmanship in the subcontinent, converting production to the schemes of empire. Namely, producing crops like cotton to supply a British industrialized textile monopoly. This directly created poverty where before there was immense high-value production.

• Famines caused by extreme poverty and the imposition of imbalanced production where farmers had to farm export crops and even export food crops when there were famine risks. The British also did this to Ireland and other colonies.

• The less-talked-about but still incredible violence of poverty in general. Placing a hold on industrialization also meant no balanced infrastructure for the greater public (only what served export and British control), limited hospitals, poor education, more frequent death of one’s children, and so on.

• The tweaking of caste to be more racist and classist (per English tastes), creating internal strife and misery.

• Emphasizing other ethnic divides to use marginalization as a scapegoat for suffering and exploitation. The British created or escalated many of the ethnic rifts in the subcontinent, making issues like exodis from and neocolonialism in Kashmir or the partition more likely and more dramatic.

People that attempt to tally these things lay hundreds of millions of deaths at the feet of the British Raj. Yet such numbers are not well-known!

In fact, the liberal economist Amartya Sen even applied this kind of logic to modern India and suggested that capitalism in India killed around 100 million people from 1947 to 1979. But how often do you hear Westerners talk about the mass death campaign of ongoing capitalism, citing millions every decade? Very few, because this is treated as “normal” and “natural” and not something imposed by the dominant system all around us.

A similar example is looking at the published numbers about deaths in Gaza. What we hear is an outdated number of people confirmed dead. It has almost halted for months. Is this because Israel stopped bombing children, hospitals, schools, refugee camps? No, it is because they explicitly targeted and disruoted the entire system responsible for doing these counts, the healthcare system. But even then, let us say the counts continued. Is this everyone killed by Israel’s genocide there? No! These numbers do not include the people dying from poor sanitation (Israel cut off water and electricity), of diseases, of malnutrition, of any kind of malady that could have been treated by the medical system the Israelis destroyed. The numbers of civilians killed by deprivation is usually larger than those directly killed in war. It is rarely reported as the death count of a given war, or in this case genocidal occupation.

So, the greatest missed events are those hidden from us without our knowledge. By controlling the definitions of terms like “killed in war” or “died under colonialism” or “excess deaths”. The events hidden by our thought patterns ingrained into us since we were young, taught to us by teachers and books and journalists and entertainment media. They weren’t all in on some grand conspiracy, either. At least, not most of them. They were also miseducated in the same way. It is a reflection of the ruling class, filtering down in myriad ways until it dictates our very thoughts.

What on earth is purist in what I said? Do you have nothing to say in response to my explanations? Am I right in them? Where am I wrong?

You should be against genocide.

Walz’s rhetorical strategy: “just accept the Israeli Lebensraum project”.

The guy that sent the national guard at George Floyd protesters is not your friend.

?

The Biden-Harris administration is massively pro-cop, providing the largest national infusion into cop budgets in history, has ramped up anti-immigrant policies attempting to outflank Republicans from the right, including working on Trump’s border wall, broke a strike, forced the public back to work by normalizing a pandemic, and is now committing a genocide via Israel.

What do you think it means to be fascistic?

I just laid out an honest assessment of the threats, the real and material things, the history and current policies. And you are now bailing rather than look at them squarely and actually respond to the content.

Please engage in good faith or not at all.

The issue here is likely that you aren’t familiar with what fascism was.

Trump, Biden, and Harris are all liberals, as in of the popular ideology of capitalism. They are in favor of markets to “solve problems” and tend to try to remove barriers to them. When organized labor threatens this, they try to have it both ways by saying they are pro-union while doing strike breaker things in action. When finance demands blood, they assent, whether this is domestic in the form of raising unemployment or cutting benefits to make workers more desperate or overseas using similar financial tricks or just straight-up war.

Fascism was a political movement that really only existed for a short period as capitalism emerged as fully imperialist and countries that had too small of a piece of the pie but a people that expected a big one had a serious contradiction between liberal policies (which would see their material well-being and status decrease) and the need for imperialism to carve out that inter-country exploitation to offset this. Fascism was born as an anti-liberalism, a faux anticapitalism, that sought a restoration of a semi-imagined past glory, an ascendant nation built on imperial expansion, and various aesthetics and scapegoats serving these ends.

It is currently impossible for a US president to be an actual fascist. The US sits at the throne of international capital and every major candidate seeks to maintain this system, not tear it up for further expansion because it is somehow behind the other powers and faces being imperialized.

What is possible is for candidates to forward policies that are genocidal, xenophobic, racist, warmongering, pro-cop, pro-state surveillance, personally aggrandizing, etc etc. Sometimes people say this is what is fascistic. But these are all common features of liberalism! The main difference between the Nazi (fascist) expansion and genocides of Germany Eastward vs. the US expansion and genocides of indigenous Americans is that the Americans succeeded. They had the power and time and will to carry out the deed. The horrors of fascism are of mainstream liberalism, they were all inspired by liberal imperial conquest, industrialization, and mass murder.

But again, none of the candidates are actually fascist, they uphold the liberal status quo. Trump is just more rude about it. He openly scapegoats immigrants while Biden and Harris simply pretend to care about them while implementing the sane or worse xenophobic policies. Notice how Democrats tried to outflank Republicans with their border bill? How they are projecting a “strong” border? That the Biden admin is completing sections of Trump’s wall? The massive ramp up of rejecting and deporting asylum seekers? These are all fascistic things. The difference is largely perception. Democrats don’t care about kids in cages when they do it. The topic isn’t even covered, there are no PR pushes. It fades into an uncognizant background normalization where the average Dem assumes it is all over without actually checking on the detention centers or listening to the people doing solidarity work for those inside them or the people waiting just across the border in terrible conditions.

And again, the Biden-Harris administration is committing a genocide via full material and diplomatic support for and defense of Israel.

If you oppose the horrors of fascism, you need to begin actually questioning and opposing the forces that create and maintain them. That includes fighting against people like Biden and Harris, who have at least as substantial of a legacy of such material harms, if not more. Again, genocide. Do not support genocids. That is not an okay thing to do.

Or do you disagree?

The bangle organizers are basically just faux velvet over a dowel if you want to DIY!

Amazing

I just don’t understand why we can’t start the exact same revolution these people want during the primaries.

Revolution does not follow the electoral cycle. PSL is constantly doing work. This is just a vehicle for reaching those who do not understand politics beyond electoralism and to raise the correct position that both capitalist parties create and maintain our oppression.

There is not going to be a revolutionary movement that begins work during a primary and then has completed the revolution at its end. Revolutionary work requires building organizations over years and decades.

It would make much more sense to win over/capture the party and then push that platform in the general.

The party will never allow that lmao. Every attempt to work within the most viable party for this, the Democrats, has resulted in them changing their own rules. Just see how it worked out for the members of the DSA who took over in Nevada.

You get real power to get actual shit done without risking fascism by letting the GOP win due to the spoiler effect.

Biden and Harris are just as fascistic as Trump. They are nationalists committing genocide scapegoating immigrants and people overseas and pumping huge sums of money into cops’ funds in response to uprisings over racial policing and racial oppression. They are just polite about it and use the right euphemisms.

Their policies are, in fact, the main driver of an ascendant right. Their policies degrade conditions and the response to them and fail to address the scapegoating that marginalization provides.

If someone can make the “revolution is necessary” argument, that should be a perfectly acceptable plan.

Of course it is necessary. You think the capitalists will just let you vote them out of power?

I think they just want complete collapse so they can try and rebuild, which is complete psychopathic nonsense.

Please do less bullshit guessing and actually learn about this topic.

Don’t vote for genociders. It is an incredibly privileged position to vote for someone genociding an entire people as if it is just a normal election year.

And don’t kid yourself on what Dems will do. They don’t actually fight for any of that particularly hard because they know you will vote for them anyways, even I’d they commit genocide. In fact, the thing to do if you care about others’ welfare is to demonstrate that you are not an automatic lever pull, that you require real concessions. Otherwise you are just a cheerleader for their entire program indefinitely, and that includes genocide.

Who did the killings? What are the numbers on social violence, social murder, in the previous status quo? The capitaliat status quo is one of poverty and disposession, hard lives and early deaths due to a lack of infrastructure, safety in workplaces, poor nutrition and healthcare, environmental degradation, etc.

That violence is intentionally maintained by the capitalist order, it is violence done to every working person, but particularly those in the global south like Nepal. Include it in your calculations. Watch it dwarf those numbers.

The vast majority of every poverty alleviation statistic for the last 50 years has been China.

Generally speaking, third world countries do not advance without tackling the worldwide capitalist system. This is because it is set up to enrich international corporations largely seated in the heart of first world countries, particularly the US, and can only sustain itself through the maintenance of profits acquired through exploitation of those third world countries. Unequal exchange, forcing international business-friendly labor laws on them, preventing them from building up their own industries so they must import necessities, structuring their economies around whatever the imperial core needs (lithium, oil, an underpaid service industry), forcing them into situations where they have a ton of dollars and therefore must import using them, etc etc.

Under this scenario, conditions in these countries regularly degrade. Poverty and a lack of infrastructure, low wages, and the necessity of a pro-international-capitalist government means petty autocracy around the basics of life. High unemployment, rates, few prospects, a brain drain, and eventually internal violence via black markets, the associated organized crime, the government, and those who correctly recognize the problem and attempt to directly combat it (fighters for national liberation, socialists, etc). Things are not good and they rarely get better, quite the opposite. They shift according to whims far outside their control at virtually any level, as they are enslaved by capital right down to their national government. Resistance movements rise up for simple things like insigenous rights, land rights, etc, and the federal government suppresses them with far greater violence.

When organized anticapitalist forces win a revolution, they tend to work directly against the problems that fomented the revolution. They address issues of land rights, abolish systems like feudal relationships and the most heinous capital relations, invest in public education, utilities, housing, etc that were denies by their xapitalist comprador governments.

And the US responds. It attempts to destroy them, as it requires control over its vassal states to maintain its position at the top of a conveyor belt moving their resources and other labor products over to itself. Much of what you see that is negative in countries run by socialists is of that particular legacy. The US killed 20% of the population in North Korea and tried to isolate it so it spawned Juche. After the fall of the USSR, its primary trading partner, the US unleashed a massive series of sanctions, attempting to starve the country of everything needed to run it. The meme of a starving, poor North Korean is from the poverty created by fuel and food from sanctions. You until the late 80s North Korea regularly outperformed South Korea. This playbook has repeated many times. Those countries that can both carry out the initial revolution and then defend it against attack do much better than the alternative offered to them.

You might be thinking, “hey, but what about Japan or Taiwan or Estonia? They are doing okay.” This is true, though you should keep in mind that they have been propped up in order to act as forward bases against targets of US Empire, namely Russia and China. And they are reigned in and will be subjugated as soon as it is seen as more beneficial than not for US interests. Japan experienced this in the 90s when the US created a massive recession for them.

I prefer a sourdoigh Detroit style (and vegan).

Drawers with dividers. Like people use for jewelry. People also use them for things like watches, pens, knives, etc, anything collectible and around the same size. So there are differently-shaped options. They come in every material you might want - plastic, coated cardboard, wood, steel. The main advantage of using a box or sealing drawers is that they won’t get dusty over time.

Here’s one made of acrylic that could hold most of them, assuming they are very flexible: https://www.amazon.com/Watpot-Acrylic-Jewelry-Drawers-Organizer/dp/B09WMCPJT3/

If they aren’t very flexible then look for something like a bangle organizer: https://www.amazon.com/Glenor-Co-Bracelet-Jewelry-Removable/dp/B07Q32R79N

That’s twice in a row you’ve just made something up on my behalf rather than criticize what I actually said. The first was that I allegedly say tankie means communist (I obviously disagree) and now you say I am calling MLK a tankie, lmao.

For your benefit, I will remind you that I said you would have called him one, as in back when he was alive and organizing. This is for the reasons I already stated and that you have not responded to in any way.

Surely that is because we make it do that. We cripple it. Could we not unbound AI so that it genuinely weighed alternatives and made value choices?

It’s not that we cripple it, it’s that the term “AI” has been used as a marketing term for generative models using LLMs and similar technology. The mimicry is inherent to how these models function, they are all about patterns.

A good example is “hallucinations” with LLMs. When the models give wrong answers because they appear to be making things up. Really, they are incapable of differentiating, they’re just producing sophisticated patterns from a very large models. There is no real underlying conceptualization or notion of true answers, only answers that are often true when the training material was true and the model captured the patterns and they were highly weighted. The hot topic for thevlast year has just been to augment these models with a more specific corpus, pike a company database, for a given application so that it is more biased towards relevant things.

This is also why these models are bad at basic math.

So the fundamental problem here is companies calling this AI as if reasoning is occurring. It is useful for marketing because they want to sell the idea that this can replace workers but it usually can’t. So you get funny situations like chatbots at airlines that offer money to people without there being any company policy to do so.

If AI is only a “parrot” as you say, then why should there be worries about extinction from AI? https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk#open-letter

There are a lot of very intelligent academics and technical experts that have completely unrealistic ideas of what is an actual real-world threat. For example, I know one that worked on military drones, the kind that drop bombs on kids, that was worried about right wing grifters getting protested at a college campus like it was the end of the world. Not his material contribution to military domination and instability but whether a racist he clearly sympathized with would have to see some protest signs.

That petition seems to be based on the ones against nuclear proliferation from the 80s. They could be simple because nuclear war was obviously a substantial threat. It still is but there is no propaganda fear campaign to keep the concern alive. For AI, it is in no way obvious what threat they are talking about.

I have persobal concepts of AI threats. Having ridiculously high energy requirements compared to their utility when energy is still a major contributor to climate change. The potential for it to kill knowledge bases, like how it is making search engines garbage with a flood of nonsense websites. Enclosure of creative works and production by some monopoly “AU” companies. They are already suing others based on IP infringement when their models are all based on it! But I can’t tell if this petition is about that at all, it doesn’t explain. Maybe they’re thinking of a Terminator scenario, which is absurd.

It COULD help us. It WILL be smarter and faster than we are. We need to find ways to help it help us.

Technology is both a reflection and determinent of social relations. As we can see with this round if “AI”, it is largely vaporware that has not helped much with productivity but is nevertheless very appealing to businesses that feel they need to get on the hype train or be left behind. What they really want to do is have a smaller workforce so they can make more money that they can then use to make more money etc etc. For example, plenty of people use “AI” to generate questionably appealing graphics for their websites rather than paying an artist. So we can see that " A" tech is a solution searching for a problem, that its actual use cases are about profit over real utility, and that this is not the fault of the technology, but how we currently organize society: not for people, but for profit.

So yes, of course, real AI could be very helpful! How nice would it be to let computers do the boring work and then enjoy the fruits of huge productivity increases? The real risk is not the technology, it is our social relations, who has power, and how technology is used. Is making the production of art a less viable career path an advancement? Is it helping people overall? What are the graphic designers displaced by what is basically an infinite pile of same-y stock images going to do now? They still have to have jobs to live. The fruits of “AI” removing much of their job market hasn’t really been shared equally, nor has it meant an early retirement. This is because the fundamental economic system remains in place and it cannot survive without forcing people to do jobs.