OBJECTION!

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 4 hours ago

We don’t need regulation against AI getting too good or against people running AI locally. We do need regulation against the big AI companies to deflate the bubble, break up monopolies, and protect the environment. It needs to be focused on human needs instead of far-fetched fantasies, AI is more likely to destroy us via climate change than by going Skynet.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 19 hours ago

Thank you. There are some types like that, who overcorrect or take things too far. That Jank4life guy isn’t exactly the best representative of our instance with his low effort bait, and I have a lot of disagreements with Geneva_Convenience as well. But I have a lot of respect for Cowbee and Diva, for example.

Personally, I would like it if there was a place on the fediverse that was for more formal, academic level discussions, where personal attacks and accusations were strictly moderated on all sides. I think that people act more defensive and rude when they expect the other side to, and it creates a vicious cycle, which can also lead to people adopting “maximalist” positions. I’ve thought about creating a comm like that myself, but I doubt people would actually participate or accept me as an impartial moderator.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 20 hours ago

How about it?

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 1 day ago

I disagree with that. If I criticize western imperialism, it’s often assumed, regardless of what I actually say, that I’m supporting US geopolitical rivals. This has pretty much always been the case throughout history. Call for peace, say, after 9/11, and you’d be accused of supporting Bin Laden. Since the enemy is always painted as the more evil and aggressive party, it means that those who oppose war and imperialism will always get labelled as being the most aggressive and imperialistic. Historically, this was even the cause of the breakdown of the Second International, the split between social democrats and Marxist-Leninists. MLs opposed WWI while social democratic parties across Europe supported it.

And naturally, part of opposing war means refuting blatant misinformation about the enemy, because if the hawks can say whatever they want about them they can naturally make it look like war is an obvious choice. But the moment you start refuting misinformation, for example, the story about everyone in North Korea having to get the same haircut, you are now “defending” or “glazing” North Korea, regardless of any other, more grounded criticisms you might have of it.

For generations, the Western left has allowed such misinformation to run rampant, in order to avoid being associated with states like the USSR, and the result have been disastrous. Historically, unions expelled communists and radicals and did everything they could to appease the US government, and they were gutted anyway. Now, things have gone so far that even conservative liberals like Biden get painted as “communists.” What I said before, criticizing US imperialism, is more than enough for people to label me a communist, a tankie, whatever. Maybe you wouldn’t, but others would. The comment I responded to was specifically looking to “ragebait tankies” by glazing US imperialism.

In my view, we should speak the truth regardless of whatever labels are assigned to us, communist, socialist, red, tankie, pinko, they can accuse us of what they will. Wear whatever label with pride, and you can at least have a chance to define it for ourselves.

You might as well ignore it, or love the word instead, because you ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a red

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 1 day ago

I don’t understand why y’all think it’s some kind of challenge to “bait” us. Really, the easiest way to trigger us is to just drop some racial slurs. It’s that easy. But glazing imperialism or making insipid, ignorant comments about history works just as well.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · edit-2 1 day ago

Can I ragebait them?

Always 😄

US certainly had a bunch of illicit, criminal side quests

Lmao. Every bad thing that the US did was just a “side quest” that deviates from the overall pure and good intentions. Every bad thing the USSR did shows that they were inherently evil.

Mohammad Mossadegh was the progressive, peaceful, prime minister of Iran, who had zero alignment with the Soviets and only tried to assert Iran’s autonomy over its natural resources against the British colonizers who had built their entire empire off of stealing Iranian oil - deposed by the CIA in the name of “anti-communism,” and replaced by a literal monarch that spent decades hunting down and annihilating the Iranian left with secret police. But of course, that’s just a “side quest.”

Operation Condor, in which the US engaged in widespread election interference across South America, promoting right wing authoritarians and setting up “banana republics” to keep the cheap goods coming, that whole continent was just a little “side quest.”

Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where the US dropped massive amounts of chemical weapons on poor rice farmers trying to assert control of their own land and resources. Indonesia, the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of activists, teachers, ethnic minorities, etc, by the US-backed Suharto regime, once again, a regrettable little “side quest.”

Exactly how many countries do you have to do “side quests” of terror and looting in the name of “stopping totalitarianism” before they count as the “main quest?”

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 2 days ago

People are generally too obsessed with the current thing and the news cycle rather than the bigger picture.

For example, I hate Trump for ICE, the Iran War, and affordability. I hated him for those things yesterday and I’ll hate him for those things tomorrow. But people seem to think there needs to be constant, wall-to-wall coverage about how every time he sneezes it’s the worst thing anyone’s ever done and his mucus is now defiling the dignity of the noble halls of blah blah blah. It’s counterproductive for so many reasons, first it lets the enemy control the focus, second people just get tired of hearing it, third it takes the focus away from the GOP in general, when Trump is a lame duck who’ll be gone soon anyway. And the shit about how he’ll cancel elections was always exaggerated and unrealistic, but it was taken as absolute fact, you had people being like, “Oh, you sweet Summer child,” and whatnot just if you acknowledged the midterms would happen. So now those people have egg on their face and someone might see that and think, “Oh, people were being alarmist, Trump isn’t as bad as people thought after all.”

Not me, though obviously. Because I still hate him for ICE, the Iran War, and affordability. The same reasons I hated him yesterday and the same reasons I will hate him tomorrow.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 7 days ago

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 10 days ago

Noooooo! I created the Laser-Fitted Armored Scorpion of Death to help mankind, not to destroy it!

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 14 days ago

The Farsight XR-20 from Perfect Dark that can see and shoot through walls.

For no particular reason.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 21 days ago

I’m wondering how this historic feud came to be

The feud started when they killed Rosa a hundred years ago and we’ve been arguing about it since /s.

But seriously, it is essentially the same, age old disagreement between social democrats and Marxists, which essentially comes down to this. Social democrats are committed to working within existing systems, which means their views have to be compatible with what is allowed in the existing system. Marxists, on the other hand, are committed to international solidarity first and foremost. That means we won’t sell out a group to win an election. Because the ruling class does not want to allow international solidarity to form, they will inevitably force the issue, and limit the scope of acceptable views such that you have to betray foreign members of the working class in order to work within the system.

This is exactly what happened back in WWI. Before that, social democrats had pledged to support international solidarity and to oppose war, but when war broke out, the ruling class of each country put pressure on every party to support the war, and the social democrats fell in line and failed to organize any coordinated, international effort to stop or even oppose the war. Those who tried to, and took a more radical stance, were accused of all the things we’re accused of today: of being Russian spies, of supporting the other side (and thereby being “authoritarian”), of just trying to forment chaos or let the right win, etc, it’s all the same rhetoric just updated to the modern day.

Of course, there are many users on both instances who don’t fit in those respective sides, including people who aren’t really interested in the politics and just wind up caught in the crossfire as people make assumptions based on their instance.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 23 days ago

I’m also American, but I appreciate it. Frankly, a lot of it also just comes from being burned out by 20 years of Afghanistan, which made me skeptical of mainstream narratives and interventionism. A lot of what we were told about the wars in the Middle East were lies, and we have the same politicians and same media figures, none of them faced any consequences, so I’m more open to considering other narratives than I might otherwise be.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 23 days ago

I’m putting this behind a spoiler, because it seems like a good faith question but I also expect many people don’t want to see an answer.

click here

From the pro-Russia perspective (though I consider myself neutral), the separatists had the right to secede, the DPR was a legitimate state, and Ukraine sending troops to suppress them was “forcing itself into their sovereign land.” If the DPR was a legitimate state, that would mean that Russia was simply responding to their request for military aid.

So, everything depends on the question of whether the DPR, and whether Ukraine, were/are legitimate states.

From the pro-Ukraine perspective, the separatists were always just Russian proxies, armed men who seized government buildings and held an illegal and rigged vote, while the Ukranian government is a democracy representing what the people really want.

However, the pro-Russia side would counter that the Euromaidan uprising was controlled by American proxies, and involved armed men seizing government buildings and then holding an illegitimate vote to oust the president. Then, they proceeded to ban the opposition parties popular in eastern Ukraine, denying them a chance to voice their positions, or to persue secession through peaceful, legal means.

So, the question of who is legitimate depends on which armed men seizing government buildings you read as foreign proxies vs representing genuine popular will.

The reason why I consider myself neutral is simply that I treat both groups of armed men seizing government buildings with equal skepticism. Perhaps they’re both fully proxies and it’s just a proxy war, or perhaps they both legitimate, and the people in the disputed regions genuinely wanted to secede. But I’m not willing to treat one group of armed men seizing government buildings as legitimate and the other as proxies, without good reason, because I consider that biased.

But there does seem to be at least some genuine support for secession in the east and if that’s the case I fail to see why they shouldn’t be allowed to leave. If there wasn’t, then Ukraine wouldn’t have banned opposition parties. If Ukraine wants them in their country then they shouldn’t have restricted their voice in government.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 24 days ago

People place too much emphasis on Hitler’s oratory skills because the idea of one guy hypnotizing everybody with speeches is a simple and appealing narrative. You can find his speeches on Youtube and they’re mostly just angry shouting, maybe it’s just that norms have shifted in response to him but it really doesn’t seem like anything special.

To understand the real story you have to understand the broader history at the time. I started writing this comment and it just grew and grew so I apologise for the length.

Socialism in Europe

In the early 20th century, socialism was growing in popularity and labor movements were becoming more organized. Marx had predicted a simultaneous, worldwide revolution, with the working class uniting across every nation. During the Russian Revolution, countries across Europe sent troops to stop it but failed, and there was a fear that the USSR would sweep across Europe with the support of socialists in each country.

The reality was that there were major differences between the social democrats in Germany, France, and Britain compared to the Marxist-Leninist USSR, one major point of contention being WWI. Lenin argued for “revolutionary defeatism” where socialists would openly call for the defeat of their own governments and take advantage of the state’s difficulties to overthrow it. Social democrats believed in gradually reforming the system and working within it, which included not making serious waves over the war, and only really criticizing it on principle, in the abstract.

In Germany, the SDP voted in favor of selling war bonds at the start of the war, indicating their willingness to go along with it. However, towards the end of the war, once it was clear that Germany would be defeated, a revolution occurred.

The German Revolution and The Spartacist Uprising

In 1918, sailors at Kiel saw the writing on the wall and mutinied, defying orders to deploy against the British navy. This happened organically, without leadership or a clear political agenda beyond being unwilling to keep fighting. But it would soon become clear that the reich had fallen and that the war was lost.

Two factions emerged that tried to steer things in different directions. One was the social democratic SDP, and the other was the communist Spartacist League, later the KPD. The Spartacists wanted to enact radical reforms and to set up a council republic similar to the Soviet system, while the SDP wanted a parliamentary system. The SDP won, and executed the Spartacist leadership, which led to an irreparable rift with the KPD.

In order to form a governing coalition in the new parliamentary system, without any chance of working with the KPD, the SDP had no choice but to ally with center-right parties. And because they had no choice, that meant the center-right parties held all the cards.

The Weimar Republic

Having lost the war, the new government had no choice but to accept the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which included ceding territory, war reparations, and demilitarization. But there was roughly a decade, the 1920’s, when they were able to rebuild, recover, and make some social progress. The German film industry in particular thrived, with films like Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927) establishing Germany as the cultural center of this new medium (which would last until Hitler destroyed it, leading many talented filmmakers to flee to the US and lend their talents to Hollywood).

But then the Great Depression hit. People all around the world were struggling, and the war reparations placed an additional strain on the Germany economy. To make matters worse, the governing coalition of the SDP and center-right parties enacted austerity measures, aimed at balancing the budget instead of economy recovery, and the reduced revenues meant cutting social spending at the time it was most needed. Unemployment skyrocketed. People were desperate, and furious at the government, labelling Chancellor Brüning “The Hunger Chancellor,” and the SDP lost credibility by association.

People wanted change, and the wanted an explanation for how things went wrong.

The Stabbed-in-the-Back Myth

Enter, the Nazis. The Nazis provided a simple explanation for where things went wrong. Things went wrong when Germany was defeated. Germany was defeated, because the socialists had turned traitor and betrayed it.

There were bits and pieces of truth in that narrative. Lenin had called for socialists to do that, as he did in Russia, but few in Germany had really listened to him. The SDP had fully supported the war, which caused Lenin to fiercely denounce them. There was eventually a revolution, but by the time it occurred it was already clear Germany was defeated. In that revolution, the faction that was more aligned with Lenin’s ideas had been crushed.

But, by lumping both factions together in “the left,” and ignoring any facts that didn’t fit, they were able to weave together people’s frustration with the current government with their fears and animosity towards the communists into a simple narrative that played on people’s patriotism and the pain of having been defeated.

Then, they took it a step further. Because it was somewhat hard to ignore some of these inconsistencies and the fact that the two factions on the left hated each other’s guts. But what if the connection was that they were both being manipulated into betraying Germany, on behalf of a sinister force behind the scenes?

Antisemitism and Nazi race theory

In mideval times, it often happened that kings wracked up tons of debt, often on pointless military adventures, and when the debts couldn’t be paid, they simply blamed it on the Jews, which also conveniently let them seize their assets when they expelled them from the country (a similar approach to what the Nazis did). There was a lot of preexisting racial prejudice and stereotypes, going back centuries if not millenia. Framing things in racial terms allowed the Nazis to take advantage of existing stereotypes and prejudices, and also allowed them to present an alternative to the class-based narratives of the left.

Racial equality was a relatively new idea that was not broadly accepted, and the Nazis were able to frame the very idea of equality as another Jewish conspiracy.

How did Jews end up in control of everything if white people are the superior race? In the Nazi view, the ideal is a balance between thought and action, in line with the image of a “self-made millionaire.” Some races, they claimed are inclined towards action, but not thought, and so their “natural place” is to be put to work in service to others. Jews, on the other hand, were too inclined to thought rather than action, they were uninterested in actually building anything and only interested in finding ways to take what others had built. In order to prevent white people from acting against them in a strong, decisive way, they promoted ideologies like communism, which called for racial tolerance and compassion. As the Weimar Republic had made early strides in trans healthcare, this was also called a Jewish conspiracy to weaken and soften white men.

Hitler becomes chancellor

As the economic conditions continued to decline, and as the far right grew stronger and gained more and more seats in parliament, neither the SDP nor the KPD showed any interest in reconciling. The SDP denounced the KPD and the Nazis as being equally bad and undemocratic and the KDP accused the SDP of being “the moderate wing of fascism.” The SDP saw the KDP as a liability that would alienate their other coalition partners, and the KDP did not want to associate themselves with the disasterous austerity policies the SDP’s coalition was enacting. Not only did they oppose each other in parliament, but they even fought each other in the streets, even as the Nazi brownshirts were pushing them both out.

Eventually, the SDP/center-right coalition no longer had enough seats, and nobody was willing to form a coalition with the Nazis or the communists, which triggered a constitutional crisis. Most parliamentary systems have rules and contingencies for if a coalition can’t be formed (in part because of this), but the Weimar system lacked clear rules. Without a majority, the government simply couldn’t govern, and with riots and street-fighting breaking out everywhere, there was a fear of full on revolution.

This finally brings us to the 1932 presidential election, between Adolf Hitler, Paul von Hindenburg (a center-right candidate backed by the SDP), and Ernst Thälmann of the KDP. Hindenburg won, and his chief concern was restoring stability and protecting business interests, and he appointed Hitler chancellor with those goals.

With the ongoing constitutional crisis and unclear rules, Hitler found a legal argument that essentially gave the chancellor dictatorial power. The streets already belonged to the Nazis. When the first concentration camps were built, they were for the communist KPD, and the SDP raised no objections, not realizing that they would follow not long after.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 25 days ago

The US is more or less where China was 100 years ago with the Qing dynasty. The corruption, the distrust of foreigners and intellectuals, the failure to recognize their weaknesses, the reformers who didn’t go anywhere near as far as they needed to and still got shot down and treated with suspicion. The reason China isn’t making the same mistakes now is because they suffered so much in the century of humiliation.

Part of the US’s problem is that people have been so isolated from consequences. If we get overextended from too many wars, so what? If we lose a war we just move on to the next thing. If we fall behind on science because we prioritized religion, so what? If we listen to what some influencer on TikTok says about vaccines instead of to scientists, so what? If people storm the capitol building, so what? No matter what happens, everything will just carry on as normal. Everyone’s just fucking around, not even being able to imagine what finding out will look like. And when there are consequences, they’re always framed on an individual level.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 26 days ago

That’s complete and total nonsense.

That’s not how war works and not how it has ever worked or will ever work. If a war is justified, then it is justified to not only repel the enemy troops from your borders, but to counterattack within their borders in order to reduce their ability to continue fighting. That does not make it “a different conflict” when you do.

I can’t believe people are still dragging out the same absurd talking points that social democrats used a century ago when justifing throwing bodies into the meat grinder of WWI. "We are only fighting against defeat" they said. As if, in their minds, once the German lines were broken, the Allied forces were going to just stop at the border! It’s completely and utterly delusional. Or rather, it is bad faith, because they knew, and you and I know, that’s not how anything works.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 26 days ago

It’s not the Donbas war I’m questioning, there’s a reasoning chain that’s understandable. Both geopolitically, strategically and culturally.

It’s the full scale invasion of 2022 I’m questioning. There’s no chain of thought leading to that invasion, other than greed and lust for blood by Putin and his inner circles.

What are you talking about? The DPR requested Russian military assistance. If the DPR was legitimate and had the right to defend itself, then Russia sending troops in at their request was legitimate.

As long as they do exist, national governments should be able to defend against other nations attempt to gain control over them.

Disagree.

Because if we do assume, at one point we get a global government and abolish the national states. Then it’s whoever carries the most power (that’s war machines), that’ll be able to decide the values of such a government. And by extend shape the culture that’ll impact everyone.

So we have to feed the largest war machine on the planet because otherwise the war machines win?

Yeah, no. It’s not a fight over having war machines or not, it’s a fight over which war machine gets fed certain minerals. I have no real stake in that.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 26 days ago

There’s a line.

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 26 days ago

Do you think Russia is in a right to invade Ukraine?

No. No more than I “supported” Al Qaida and 9/11 by opposing going to war.

It’s miles apart to be against an aggressive occupational force with no clear goals, and not support a country’s right to defend itself.

I don’t believe countries have an inherent right to defend themselves, and if I did then I would say that the DPR had the same right.

Somehow, the extreme anti-war stance of not supporting even “defensive” wars makes me a bloodthirsty warmonger, a “tankie,” while you’re the one arguing that we didn’t build and deploy enough tanks. Exactly as I described: “war is peace.”

OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml · 26 days ago

I only really saw it for myself when I said, “I’m completely opposed to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel. I don’t have a problem with Jews existing,” and they responded by accusing me of being a “liberal Zionist” and “supporting genocide” and then blocking me.

I remembered Cowbee saying something about them before, I just looked it up and I gotta give props as always because he was calling them out 9 months ago for not reading theory of doing praxis and just watching Bad Empanada, and for apparently calling Hexbear “transzionist” and accusing them of defending Contrapoints’ stance on Israel, which is just bizarre.