LeninWeave [none/use name, any]

@Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml if you look in the modlog now, you can see the explanation by Alaskaball, it was a misclick on the phone UI when trying to ban a different user.

Of course I am. It would be pretty silly to make the same (bad) argument

No, I mean you are no longer discussing Wildmimic’s comment or the point of the comic (which were both comparisons between how Russians and Americans ARE treated, in reality). You’re making a separate argument that is beside the point of all of these.

Do you think they are prepared to admit that the US has more freedom, because I sincerely doubt it.

If “they” is Wildmimic, they clearly did so in their original comment. That was the whole point of the comment, actually, that Americans were more free to protest.

Absolutely false. These foreign interventions are always extremely unpopular, including the topic at hand.

American support for the Iraq war was about 75% before it started and reached above 90% during the early days of the war. Arguing that foreign intervention is always unpopular in America is simply a denial of reality. As a general rule, Americans have been easily convinced to support these interventions unless they felt they were substantially personally affected in a negative way, as was the case (for example) during the later days of the Vietnam War.

You don’t think that MAGA is motivated by terror? Rural America is collapsing, and they have been taught to fear the cities their entire lives, not to mention the fact that they have no skills to get a job there, and no money to find a place to live. Russia has no monopoly on fear.

We can revisit this when MAGA has had to deal in living memory with rampant child prostitution and death due to poverty, as well as roving squads of nazis committing murder with impunity in the streets. To even compare the very real experiences of Russians in the 90s to the possible fears of Americans today is ridiculous. The 1990s caused 3 million excess deaths in Russia based on 1991 mortality. I’ve become convinced reading your reply that you don’t actually understand Russian history as well as you think you do.

There is no more Nazism in the US than anywhere else - at least until fairly recently.

First of all, lmao. The nazis were inspired by manifest destiny and American racism. Second, that line referred to Russia, not the US. It was Russia where nazi gangs acted with impunity in the 1990s under Yeltsin - installed with the help of the American government, which they bragged about at the time.

(And it would be great if the Nazis weren’t all getting Russian funding).

This is just Russiagate nonsense. Your genocidal settler colony doesn’t need Russian influence in order to be racist, and whatever minor meddling Russians might or might not have done did not have a significant impact, especially compared to domestic factors and even other lobbies such as the “Israelis” (another genocidal gem in the empire’s crown). I think you and I are unlikely to find common ground because we see a fundamentally different version of your country.

So people who live in a country aren’t responsible for the actions of their government? Then why hold the American people responsible for Venezuela? Why should they be expected to protest? The government just does what it does.

That user is saying that the fact that Russians face more danger for protesting means that any lack of protest reflects less poorly on Russian people than on Americans who face less danger, not that this is a win for the Russian government.

You are making a separate argument. @floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com was saying that Americans can dissent more easily, so the lack of dissent reflects more poorly on them than on Russians. Regardless of the fact that genuine radicals are violently suppressed in America (true), it’s clear that the average American is fairly content (and often even thrilled) to live with the violence their government has perpetrated abroad for its entire existence.

To address your completely separate argument, the fact is that Russians are held responsible MATERIALLY (not just in the moral judgements of others or in social media posts, but by sanctions and travel bans) for the actions of their government and Americans are not.

I mean, one big difference is that Venezuela, unlike Ukraine, wasn’t violating ceasefire agreements to continue ethnic cleansing.

LOL, Russia brutality crushes protest and America doesn’t. Point Russia? You guys are hilarious.

That user is saying that the fact that Russians face more danger for protesting means that any lack of protest reflects less poorly on Russian people than on Americans who face less danger, not that this is a win for the Russian government.

Agreed, AmeriKKKans I think are mostly content to live with things like this because they aren’t affected personally.

TBH the damage the US does to the world is so much massively larger than Russia that it’s not possible for the “international rules-based order” to even approximate proportional fairness to the sanctions and measures currently deployed against Russia no matter what is done to the US. The whole international community is such a naked exercise in hypocrisy it’s incredible.

Edit: sorry, in case it wasn’t clear I’m speaking to sanctions and other such measures because the cudgel in the meme says “visa ban”.

I’m not active in much mainstream social media, but I’m not aware of many people who attack normal Russian citizens

You’ve never seen racism against Russians expressed online? People call Russians “orcs” all the time, and that’s only the most obvious example. Half of Americans seem to fully believe nefarious Russian plots decide their elections with absolutely zero actual evidence. The comic is also talking about visa bans, which are a real-world consequence for all Russians and not just some social media thing.

especially when they’re complaining about their government?

This is just emphasis for the joke, but I assure you that I have seen this too. Also, as I said, the comic specifically refers to visa bans, which do actually affect Russians who oppose their government as well.

I’ve never been a fan of the whole «А у вас негров линчуют» rhetoric. Is it not possible to fuck America, fuck Russia, and fuck the so-called state of Israel?

That’s great, you can have that opinion. The comic is about how actual consequences exist for enemies of America but not for Americans. Also, at the time the USSR said that, it was, in fact, extremely true and a very apt way to point out the hypocrisy of the Americans presenting themselves as the champions of human rights - which is once again happening today.

Who is it strawmanning? It’s a joke about how the entire “international community” turned on Russia in an instant but America and their dogs (“Israel”) can do whatever they want. That’s true and obvious to anyone who has even lightly kept up with the news for the last few years.

For example, among America, “Israel”, and Russia, which ones can still participate in international sporting competitions and which has one of the most sanctioned economies on Earth? These sanctions obviously harm even Russians who do not agree with their government, whereas Americans have zero consequences, even those in the government. That’s the joke in the comic.

Just submitted my application.

LMAO, lemmitors from liberal instances will downvote this but don’t have the courage of their convictions to make a comment.

https://lemvotes.org/post/lemmy.zip/post/56356205

Not that I’d be able to reply to those comments since the instances these cowards come from are defederated from us.

Are you sure Muslims aren’t actually secretly all supporters of the “kill Muslims” party? /s

I agree with everything you said here, I think I’m just more pessimistic about how narrow the actually useful applications of LLMs will be.

I agree with you, however they still tend to act mostly after some damage has been done. That’s the purpose of the socialist market economy, to allow development of productive forces but catch it when it goes wrong. That doesn’t mean capitalists are prevented from making harmful decisions to begin with. The difference with Hong Kong is that there’s basically no catching, it just gets worse and worse.

As I said, a typical recent example was the housing bubble the government had to step in to catch. It was allowed to go on for a while before it was stopped, and it did harm people during that time.

Commodification of housing is a recent example. They were allowed to do harm, up to a point. When the bubble popped, the state caught it to prevent it from doing massive harm.

This is a strange question to even ask. China has labor exploitation, China has capitalists, China has rent seeking behavior, these are all things that do harm people and the Chinese government acknowledges them. That’s what the socialist market economy means, you take the bad with the good.

In many of those applications, we are seeing that the required labor is not reduced. The translations need significant editing, just like machine translations of the past. The summaries contain mistakes that lead to wasted time and money. The same thing with the code, plus the maintenance burden is increased even in cases where the code is produced faster, which is often not actually the case. Companies lay people off, then hire them back because it doesn’t work. We can see this being proven in real time as the hype slowly collapses.

I lump these distinct tools together because they are all conflated anyways, and opposition to, say, generative AI and LLMs is often tied together by liberals.

I’m not a liberal and I’ve been extremely cautious to avoid conflating different types of so-called “AI” in this thread. If you keep doing so, we’re just going to be talking past each other.

We are experiencing a temporary flood of investment in a tool with far more narrow use-cases than Liberalism will acknowledge, and when this proves divorced from reality and the AI bubble crashes, we will be able to more properly analyze use-cases.

100% agreed, and it can’t come soon enough. In a few years at most we’ll see where SNLT was actually, meaningfully reduced by these tools, and my prediction is that it will be very narrow (as you say). At that point, I’ll believe in the applications that have been proven. What’s tragic is not only the wasted resources involved, but the opportunity cost of the technologies not explored as a result. Especially other forms of “AI” that are less hyped but more useful.

I’m against both the idea that AI has no utility, and the idea that AI is anything more than just another tool that needs to be correctly analyzed for possible use-cases. Our job as communists is to develop a correct line on AI and agitate for that line within the broader working class, so that it can be used (in however big or small the capacity) for proletarian liberation. It will not be some epoch-changing tool, and will only be one tool in a much larger toolbox, but it does have utility and already exists whether we like it or not.

As I said, I agree. It’s not special, it’s just treated as special by the people who hype it, to potentially disastrous consequences. The use cases are unproven, and the mounting evidence indicates that a lot of the use cases aren’t real and AI actually doesn’t reduce SNLT.

I think that’s a problem general to capitalism, and the orientation of production for profit rather than utility.

True, but like I said, companies don’t seem to be able to successfully reduce labor requirements using LLMs, which makes it seem likely that they’re not useful in general. This isn’t an issue of capitalism, the issue of capitalism is that despite that they still get a hugely disproportionate amount of resources for development and maintenance.

I often see opposition to AI become more about the tool than the use of it under capitalism, and the distortions beyond utility that that brings.

I do oppose the tool (LLMs, not AI) because I have yet to see any use case that justifies the development and maintenance costs. I’ll believe that this technology has useful applications once I actually see those useful applications in practice, I’m no longer giving the benefit of the doubt to technology we’ve seen fail repeatedly to be implemented in a useful manner. Even the few useful applications I can think of, I don’t see how they could be considered proportional to the costs of producing and maintaining the models.

I agree with you here, although I want to make a distinction between “AI” in general (many useful use cases) and LLMs (personally, I have never seen a truly convincing use case, or at least not one that justifies the amount of development going into them).

Fundamentally, in my opinion, the mistaken way people treat it is a core part of the issue. No capitalist ever thought a drill press was a human being capable of coming up with its own ideas. The fact that this is a widespread belief about LLMs leads to widespread decision making that produces extremely harmful outcomes for all of society, including the creation of a generation of workers who are much less able to think for themselves because they’re used to relying on the recycled ideas of an LLM, and a body of knowledge contaminated with garbage that’s difficult to separate from genuine information.

I think any materialist analysis would have to consume that these things have very dubious use cases (maybe things like customer service chat bots) and therefore that most of the labor and resources put into their development are wasted and would have been better allocated to anything else, including the development of type of “AI” that are more useful, like medical imaging analysis applications.

People blow themselves up enough learning to cook meth from books and from other people, I don’t think they should be taking instructions from the “three Bs in blueberry” machine.