Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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On one hand, it’s nice to be young. On the other hand, it’s annoying as hell to be treated as a child whenever I deviate from doomerism.
There is nothing more childish than doomerism. Doomerism is easy. (Realist) optimism takes effort. Doomerism is a way to avoid having to deal with the emotional pain of disappointment, it gives you license to do nothing and pat yourself on the back when things don’t work out. An adult understands that disappointment is part of life, but that the only mature choice is to keep trying.
As Gramsci said, as revolutionaries we must have pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will.
Thanks for writing this comrade. I needed it.
I appreciate this, I needed to read something like this today. It’s hard dealing with people who seem almost joyful that horrible things are happening because it allows them to pat themselves on the back like you said instead of actually looking into the why of a situation and trying to understand it better. It just leads back to empty liberal “good guys vs bad guys” great man history narratives where we, the people, are just the audience to history.
Fuck the academia gatekeeping and paywalling. Isn’t science supposed to be open source so people can learn from it and advance it fuck this shit man fuck capitalism.
try sci-hub or anna’s archive to avoid paywalls!
Email the actual author of the paper. Academics froth at the mouth in excitement at the thought of sharing their work, and the only people making money off of gatekeeping are capitalists.
Hello
Any sufficiently advanced anarchist revolution is indistinguishable from a socialist revolution. – Vladimir Lenin, probably
Were there that many in the first place?
I was thinking about making a post in ask lemmygrad about people’s reactionary takes that they still held.
Then I realised that if I were to do so, even if I tried to prevent a flame war (ergo not relating to AI, or other contested topics on grad), the mere notion of reactionary takes will start a flame war all on their own.
I admit it was partly so I could vent about some traumatic things that are still bothering me, but writing this I know it’s healthier to talk about them directly, but there is still a part of me preventing myself from talking about my issues with anyone, or even directly addressing things (in the sense of things that could cause conflict, as I am utterly terrified of it).
If anyone is still willing to share a reactionary take or two, do so here, but please keep rule 3 in mind at all times. I’ll avoid commenting on those takes.
As Marxists if we knew ideas were reactionary we would not cling to them. Its like asking what unknown unknowns we have.
Everyone here is a Marxist-Leninist and choosing to support the ML means to do away with reactionary positions. I myself used to be conservative and then right-wing libertarian and so used to have reactionary takes, but I have choose to do away with them as well.
A sort of silly one that I think of is probably my interest in fashion (silly in that it’s a pretty minor thing overall). Though I’m not sure it’d be called reactionary, so much as individualist. Anyway, the individualist brain worms part is that a part of me holds onto some of the stuff about good fashion = cool, important, good status. Stuff like that. Not to say I’d consciously treat somebody different on account of fashion, but unconsciously is harder to say.
I don’t tend to embrace fashion much in RL because I don’t really have the money to throw at fashion, so it’s mainly been a thing I’ve expressed in video games, historically. This isn’t to say the entirety of my interest in fashion is individualist bougie thought, but some part of it is. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with being interested in fashion and understanding the practice of it could go toward collectivist causes too, such as in uniforms in a war or design that seeks to promote a certain kind of culture. But I haven’t really put my interest in it toward that, so it’s kind of just this old paradigm hobby.
i am super guarded with personal information i share here, but it’s also often a space that people are welcoming and supportive. ultimately, do whatever you feel comfortable with
and yeah, part of the problem with reactionary takes is that there’s debate on what those are now, and people are unlikely to be self-critical enough to believe they have reactionary takes haha. it’s kind of a dilemma
It’s partly in light of recent events (why the the rule 3 pin was put up), and partly because I believe that we should always be striving to eliminate our own as well as collective reactionary rhetoric. Though on another hand, in the best-case scenario, we could use this as an opporunity for selfcrit and development of our ideas.
I agree, although it’s hard for people to know what their reactionary positions are and in what degree they are allowed to disagree
Italy, Turin. October 30, 2026
You can think of AI ethics what you want. What amazes me most is that people genuinely seem to like the art style many of these AI’s produce. It just looks like pure, soulless slop to me. But it’s everywhere. Stickers on lampposts are now made with AI. Pictures of food in restaurants are. Wedding invitations. I wonder how you’d look back on a souvenir of one of the most special days in your life years from now and it’s just… slop. Even drawing something yourself would probably be better.
The GPT asthetic is an artistic lowest common denominator of all the training data. It makes sense that many people would like it.
I imagine that after the american AI giants fall there will be a new wave of boutique AI companies that have more focused models and the different image generation companies will likely try to differentiate themselves from the GPT look and one another.
Can’t wait for YUP’s to hang their boutique AI art on their walls
hopefully at some point the novelty of making something very quickly will wear off in favor of what the experience of consuming it is actually like
I despise the glossy wet texture or the high saturation and gooey colors.
I feel like they took the “late 2010’s small gaming youtube channel” logo style and applied it to everything.
OMG, that’s so true. The last few days, I’ve been getting the same two AI drama shorts as ads where everyone looks like a human except for the women intended to appear attractive - they look like straight-up uncanny dolls.
I want a roll of copies of a sticker I got form a local artist, which is made to get on these AI images IRL, which translates to: FUCK YOUR AI IMAGE. And along the edges: PAY AN ARTIST, YOU FUCKING MISER. I might even want something of the eggshell variety, that one that either can’t be destroyed without leaving crap behind or the glue itself keeps some words on.
On a side note, I get this weird feeling that the digital is bleeding, like JPEG artifacts in actual printed images and such. It’s weird.
For real, and the information in those stickers/posters is very cluttered and hard to make out. That’s why graphic design is so important
It’s an interesting thing to see how different places can bring out differenct versions of yourself. My hometown is a bit rough and I was always doing dumb shit while growing up there. Then I moved abroad and lived in a big city and I basically became a very mellow and laid back person and a disciplined communist. I had stable relationships and spent my time doing praxis and activism and whatnot. I recently moved back to my hometown again and before I knew it I am dating several people at a time, living on a benzo prescription and I’m basically going through the region like a rogue whirlwind. I probably do not respond well to sudden big changes.
Other than that, there was some news in The Netherlands about there being ‘Gen Z protests’ which were feared to cause riots like in France and Spain. Several football hooligan groups responded that they would defend their cities if it came to riots. All of them are far right groups as well so you know they’d just target minorities instead.
The minute the news dropped I couldn’t help but think that it would never happen here. People here are far too timid. Some of the people around me seemed genuinely scared, though. But as the day goes by, nothing is happening. All a big nothing burger, which I could tell you beforehand.
Doesn’t deserve it’s own thread but get a load of this: https://youtu.be/Wj_GdHSo7PU
Fight fascism with one simple trick: ✨Keynesianism✨, never tried before and totally not what got us here in the first place. Fascists hate her!
Keynesianism as a relief valve for worker unrest relies on empire, which is in decay. Hence the push to Balkanize Russia and to the precarization of immigrants.
For your own privacy you should consider removing the tracker part from links that you share.
Thank you
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The EU new age restriction laws mean that subreddits about sexual health or transgender surgeries aren’t visible anymore, unless you give them your personal data. And since I’m a communist and those subreddits can be very personal, I don’t trust them with that information. They’re not making anyone safer, they’re just withholding important information, which leads to people being unsafer. If it was China, I wouldn’t mind giving them my data, but this is the EU we’re talking about. Fuck the EU
Use a VPN so that Reddit thinks you are opening the site from outside the EU.
Totally forgot about VPNs. Firefox apparently has a built in VPN that works perfectly. Thanks!
Use a VPN
Always good advice.
I’m realizing that if Marx was alive today, he would 100% be the sort of guy that would use Excel or LibreOffice Calc as an everything app.
I’m talking a giant spreadsheet with random notes, links to other books, and images and graphs on any cells.
And poor Engels would have to parse this mess.
2 days later, I have nothing to add, because this is a matter of fact and possibly even scientifically verifiable
Seeing Brazilian “commentators” on social media referring to Bolsonaro as “President Flavio” makes me cringe so hard.
Omonoia, Cyprus
based cyprus
Sometimes I end up hearing about some famous actor celeb type death as a thing people are talking about online and it feels weird to watch because they’ll be all sad about it and I’m just sitting there thinking like “ok.” Like it’s not that I don’t sympathize about loss, but at some point some years back, I decided I didn’t want to have anything to do with celeb stuff anymore. And as a result of that and class consciousness and such, what I see when I hear about X famous celebrity death is “some rich person I don’t know died.” They probably weren’t an overtly terrible person or a notably good one, but then again, in the Yankee celebrity sphere, they could have easily been a lowkey zionist. So all the more reason not to put them on a pedestal. They may have done some good work as an entertainer, but if that’s reason for me to mourn them, there’s a long list of nurses and teachers and so on whose names I don’t know who I feel I should be mourning the loss of long before I ever bother with the sympathy for an entertainer celeb death.
I mean, I value the arts as a medium and I value the work people put into entertaining others, but mourning the loss of some entertainers who got a bougie life off of being popular as an entertainer doesn’t seem like a good use of my energy.
Lately there’s been a string of celebrity deaths who were child actors. Those are always tragic because of how much growing up as a working actor instead of a normal child harms a person. In terms of education, finances, socialization, sex abuse, addiction, and everything really, it’s plain horrific. It’s barbaric how there’s still a giant exemption to child labor laws for the entertainment industry.
Hayden Panettiere, Carla Jeffery, and RJ Mitte all died in their homes in their thirties. The reported details are understandably vague for the most part, but I’m pretty sure they were all suicides by overdose.
I hadn’t heard of those, that is sad. I’ve long felt that child actors shouldn’t even be a thing. There is really no need for entertainment to have child actors. If someone really wants to do media with children characters, especially in modern day it’s perfectly feasible to do animation and have an adult do the voice.
Oh, if you were referring to Patrick Stewart as the recent celeb that died, that one is an interesting case. He interpreted Lenin in Fall of Eagles. Some scenes are very good.
He’s one among more than one I’ve heard mentioned recently-ish (I forget who the others were). But that is cool to know.
I’ve been thinking. For me the world has basically been, for the most part, physically stagnant. The concrete is the same, the city is the same. The infrastructure is the same, maybe the air is a little bit cleaner. Beyond the internet and electric cars, it feels like I’ve grown up while the world around me has grown old.
While in china [at least on the coast], I can imagine someone my age remembers smog, backwaterenedness, the factories being replaced with these high tech, clean, safe cities as they grew up.
Idk this is my daily dose of pretension feel free to move on
I don’t know if you should worry about pretension. I have had similar thoughts and feelings, and I mostly chalk it up to a lack of economic activity.
This is not just in response to the condition of the built environment but for emptiness of the streets as well - there are plenty of people that live in this or that neighborhood, but it seems everyone is inside on their devices. I love content just as much as the next guy, but if we (Western core perspective) had a healthier society and a healthier economy, I think that you would see more people out doing something productive (either economically or socially).
