Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it. I’m happy to hear it resonates. :)

This reminds me of a thought I had the other day, which went something like: some people (seems to be a US thing, can’t speak for elsewhere) are so stuck with the mindset of approaching politics as, “I am on equal footing with you in terms of knowledge and understanding” that it’s virtually impossible to get through on the information you give them alone. They have to first confront their socialized arrogance about knowledge and start to unlearn the idea that politics is some kind of easily universalized, mostly opinion-based entity.

Like if I look at my own progression of views, a significant difference in me being a “leftist” vs. being a “ML” (or thereabouts) was consciously trying to unlearn elitism and consciously trying to listen more (to marginalized people especially, but more importantly, to marginalized people who have theory/practice knowledge to impart, even if I didn’t know it in those terms right away) and talk less (resist the urge to comment “because I can” and try to be more conscious of why I’m reacting the way I am if someone’s take gets under my skin). This shift in mindset and attitude coupled with some partly guided exposure to theory was pivotal for me. I had a significant amount of “I can think smart so I can work this out just as well as you can” arrogance socializing to get through and a significant amount of viewing politics as overly simplistic in nature, and I see that same kind of attitude play out in other people, talking like their takes on politics have weight just because they are allowed to have one. When it’s like no, halt the universalizing, you need a framework to work from with a conscious motive behind it and that is found in sincerely caring about the plight of working class people, the marginalized, the colonized, and applying what liberators have observed about it who came before and who still exist now in developing socialist projects. It is humbling to get a glimpse of the depth of combined theory and practice that exists and has existed, and I would say it’s a good sign for people in the situation described if it is humbling because they are so often socialized to put their own intellect on a personal and cultural pedestal.

I sympathize with your position here, but I would add that some observable benefit has been had in his orbit. Using myself as an example, some of the grassroots energy and political education that came from people who supported his campaign, or who saw some kind of value in it even if they thought it was a lost cause, helped lead me to the views I have now. We shouldn’t underestimate the value of seizing upon working class movements to educate, provided it’s not faux working class reactionary stuff. And in saying this, we don’t have to give Bernie himself credit for it, of course. My point is just that we shouldn’t let the disgust with the situation deprive us of leveraging opportunities to fight against the indoctrination. This next election may contain such opportunities too, where we’ll encounter people who stubbornly want to do “fix it from within,” but may be easier to get through to when combining the knowledge we can present with certain campaign messaging that is getting them to think about things they’d otherwise have ignored.

Slight correction and further info on this:

Although it’s theoretically possible someone could train a language model on Reddit alone, I’m not aware of any companies or researchers who have. The closest equivalent may be Stable LM, a language model that was panned for producing incoherent output and some mocked it for using Reddit as something like 50-60% of its dataset, tho it was also made clear that their training process was a mess in general.

How a language model talks and what it can talk about is an issue with some awareness already, though the actions taken so far, at least in the context of the US, are about what you would expect. OpenAI, one of the only companies with enough money to train its own models from scratch and one of the most influential, bringing language models into public view with ChatGPT, took a pretty clearly “decorum liberal” stance on it, tuning their model’s output over time to make it as difficult as possible for it to say anything that might look bad in a news article, with the end result being a model that sounds like it’s wearing formal clothing at a dinner party and is about to lecture you. And also unsurprisingly, part of this process was capitalism striking again, with OpenAI traumatizing underpaid Kenyan workers through a 3rd party company to help filter out unwanted output from the language model: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn3kw/openai-used-kenyan-workers-making-dollar2-an-hour-to-filter-traumatic-content-from-chatgpt

Though I’m not familiar enough on the details with other companies, most other language models produced from scratch have followed in OpenAI’s footsteps, in terms of choosing “liberal decorum” style tuning efforts and calling it “safety and ethics.”

I also know limited about alignment (efforts to understand what exactly a language model is learning, why it’s learning it, and what that positions it as in relation to human goals and intentions). But from what I’ve seen in limited relation to it, on the most basic level of “trying to make sure output does not steer toward downright creepy things” has to do with careful curation of the dataset and lots of testing at checkpoints along the way. A dataset like this could include Reddit, but it would likely be a limited part of it, and as far as I can tell, what matters more than where you get the data is how the different elements in the dataset balance out; so you include stuff that is maybe repulsive and you include stuff that is idyllic and anywhere in-between, and you try to balance it in such a way that it’s not going to trend toward repulsive stuff, but it’s still capable of understanding the repulsive stuff, so it can learn from it (kind of like a human).

None of this tackles a deeper question of cultural bias in a dataset, which is its own can of worms, but I’m not sure how much can be done about that while the method of training for a specific language means including a ton of data that is rife with that language’s cultural biases. It may be a bit cyclical in this way, in practice, but to what extent is difficult to say because of how extensive a dataset may be and factoring in how the people who create it choose to balance things out.

Edit: mixed up “unpaid” and “underpaid” initially; a notable difference, tho still bad either way

I like to tell people like this to read Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti. I forget in what detail atm, but he specifically goes over how Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy co-opted working class energy, while being opposed to working class power in actuality. In contrast with the Soviet Union, which had its issues, but was genuinely by/for the working class.

Like the thing these kind of people are talking about is sort of real?.. but it’s a rightist thing, it’s not something Lenin did or Stalin did or Mao did. There are shades of that happening now in the US, the rightists who claim to be ML or communist, but are also “patriots” (claiming there’s nothing wrong with being patriotic for a genocidal settler state developed into a global capitalist empire).

Also, I would say the use of the word “authoritarian” generally betrays how lacking a person’s political education has been and how desperately they need some grounding in history+theory from non-imperialist sources. Idk the origin of “authoritarian” as a term, but in practice, it gets used as a propaganda buzzword to contrast, claiming that “democracy for the rich” systems are “freedom” and other stuff is “authoritarian.” Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Under what rock the freedom is hiding, I don’t know. People get told such spooky ghost story narratives about how “authoritarian” those “non freedom” countries are, while ignoring what’s in front of them: the “rights” written on a constitution that is as reliable as you are rich and that’s about as far as it goes.

If there is anyone who could become a billionaire and then, somehow, without any working class force to make it happen, through sheer incapability to do anything sensible, become an eX-billionaire, it would be Elon Musk.

The Outer Worlds, one of my favorites. The messaging is a bit limited in its criticism of capitalism, but overall, it’s refreshing to see and it combines it with a game that is pretty brief and to the point (not getting bogged down in repeatable quests and such things). It’s also an RPG with choices that don’t always have black and white, good vs. evil answers, and that’s my favorite type of video game. And also, in spite of having some nuanced choices, it doesn’t do the enlightened centrism thing of making it sound like the clear worst faction of the game could be good ackshully; it’s pretty clear on that point and leaves more of the greyer stuff to side plots.

There are some paranoid levels of thinking in some of that stuff. Like when a person thinks someone is a “x foreign country spy” because they disagree. It’s possible for people to break out of that mode of thinking, but when they are in that mode, it’s next to impossible to get through because everything you say that is in disagreement is “because you are trying to deceive them.”

Liberals claiming someone is doing whataboutism seems like a component of this thinking, with a belief that the one doing the “whataboutism” is attempting to deceive. But although it’s (probably? I haven’t analyzed it in enough depth to say with certainty) possible for someone to deceive in that way, it’s also possible to compare two things for a variety of rhetorical purposes that have nothing to do with dishonesty. Such as pointing out the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world if someone tries to say x foreign country is “authoritarian” in contrast to the US being “free”; that’s not whataboutism, it’s a factual point that undermines the narrative of the US having some kind of greater moral standing from which it can properly judge other countries.

If anything, I would say imperialists, liberals, tend to be more engaged in actual whataboutism, even if unconsciously. Like if you try to point out something fundamentally wrong with the US, claiming that alternatives are way worse. Which in that regard also seems to be in bed with doomerism (or more formally maybe, capitalist realism).

I don’t like to speculate as a matter of principle, but given what I’ve seen in my own evolution and what I can see traces of in some others, I suspect fear underlies a lot of it, as well as pride; fear of the implications of what it means and pride in not wanting to lose the idealized self image of western supremacy. If the US, for example, is genuinely terrible to the core on a fundamental state foundation level, that means a lot of pretty big change is necessary and change can be scary. And further, if a place like China or Vietnam is actually just a genuinely better system on a fundamental level and has better QOL for its people, that means the west is not only not superior, it’s not even on an equal level of political competency. Instead, it’s actually lower and in the capitalist caste socialization of “everything is a rung on a ladder,” that means the west is part of the “gross/bad class.”

People don’t have to see it this way though. They can see it as it’s not something to be afraid of, but a wakeup call that what’s being done is not working for most people and never has; they can consider the notion of major upheaval as an opportunity for fantastic expansion of the possibilities they’ve previously had presented to them, within which can carry drastic healing, improved quality of life, both personal and collective empowerment. They can also see the pride thing not as a designation of lesser nation, but as a designation of better or worse quality of life and empowerment and so on. It’s important that people unlearn the notions of it all being about caste, and who is and isn’t “superior.” Socialist projects doing better for their people are superior in the sense of quality of life, people power, etc., not in the sense of some colonizer-centric mindset of civil and savage.

I can personally attest that Wolff’s “Let’s Talk About Socialism” helped open me up to the idea of it. Though I think he also softens it to a somewhat misleading degree at times, IIRC. Don’t know anything about Piketty.

Reminds me of that sketch The Expert. Seems like the gist of it is analogous to he wanted to draw seven red lines, strictly perpendicular, some with green ink and some with transparent ink, and when the expert told him that’s impossible, he said, “I am richguyinnovator, hear me roar!” And reality did what reality tends to do.

Also seemed like the media was trying really hard to turn it into some kind of real life version of The Martian, when it was pretty clear from the start it was over for those people and there was nothing heroic or brave about what the guy running it was doing; just needlessly playing on the razor’s edge of existence, living out a delusion of human supremacy over nature. I almost want to say it’s like a microcosm of capitalism as a whole in that way. The way it acts like it can dominate nature somehow, while ecosystems we depend on face collapse as a result of the unsustainable systemic practices.

People who think like this need to read up on what the gov did to the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program for kids. Slander and violent destruction of the BPP’s efforts as a response to feeding children.

As Kwame Ture said (and someone correct me if I’m misusing this out of context): “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

Yeesh, sounds like she is very resistant to accepting an alternative POV. I do wonder with people like that if they basically are only ever going to be swayed by example (e.g. organized working class power happens in their area and they become a part of it). IIRC, there was someone in passing kinda like that in the How Yukong Moved the Mountains documentary, who admitted to having been skeptical or resistant to the changes at first, but saw value in what was being done when the results came to pass.

I’m going to answer more generally first: I’m not sure it would really be healthy to. That you are attached to others and cherish your time with them seems healthy to me. If this fear is paralyzing you in some way, I could see reason to be concerned and perhaps urge you to seek out a professional to talk to if at all possible. But if it’s just that it occasionally bothers you, that seems pretty human to me.

More specifically: As you do mention some preoccupation with it that you view as abnormal and seem to want to know more about it, I would ask you to consider… is it that you feel you need to understand death so you can cope with it? Is it a knowledge gap? A curiosity thing? If you are someone who wants to be as informed as you possibly can so you can face something, then you may have to either accept it’s the one thing about life you will never really know until it happens, or it may help to explore fantasy stories and different religious takes on it to feed your desire to understand it better (if that does apply). Though you can’t know, you could get a clearer picture of how human beings tend to view death and what they do about it, dissecting it on a cultural and materialist level, so you can sort of “zoom out” a little.

Another element to consider is, would you consider these thoughts intrusive and obsessive? Because if they are, it may help to practice welcoming them in, rather than trying to push them away (if that is something you think you are doing). Similar to anxiety spirals and being anxious about being anxious, becoming upset about the nature of an intrusive thought can make it worse. (Disclaimer here: I’m not a professional, just going off of what I know from personal research.)

I’ve noticed what (sounds like) a similar wall with more than one person where they are more or less willing to agree with me that the current setup of things is a mess, but the moment I start talking a solution that is more than reforms, the Cold War type of indoctrination kicks in (I’m USian) and I feel suddenly like I’m being putting on the hook to justify people or countries (which are in their minds) monsters. IME, it seems to have something to do with the extent to which a person still thinks the US project is some kind of “flawed, but admirable project”, and believes perspectives presented to them by imperialist media on other countries with little questioning. But maybe this is a whole other different take on it too if she calls herself an anarcho-pacifist; although I do wonder because I was once at a point where I called myself a “libertarian-socialist” before I had any exposure to theory and I just sort of thought that made sense because it sounded like the “not controlling and violent” way of doing things. Demystifying and dismantling the fog of Cold War stuff seems to be an important element in getting through as well as serious reading of theory, if only I knew how to get there with people. I think Luna Oi’s videos and streams on Vietnam helped me some with concretizing defenses of socialist projects, though my ability to memorize details and share them to others is abysmal, so I would have to convince people to sit down and watch.

I feel you. I do like the pretty colors of them when I can actually see them and some shows are pretty neat in how they put the colors together, but I only find the noise tolerable in that context (which is usually at more of a distance) and most fireworks set off casually or in a context where I can’t even see them just end up feeling like I’m surrounded by loud noises I don’t want to hear. People also set them off at any and every hour in my experience, and any and every day that is near the 4th and sometimes other holidays too. 😐 It would prob be more tolerable if there was like an hour during which everybody did it and then it’s done.