Generally speaking, don’t take it at its word and consider it like it’s an assistant, or even just an ideas machine.

Example: I’ve used an LLM before when there’s a term I can’t think of the name for. I describe what I can remember about the term and see what it comes up with. Then, if it gives me something concrete to work with (e.g. doesn’t go “I don’t know” or something), I put that into a web search and see what comes up. I cross-reference the information, in other words. Sometimes the AI is a little bit off but still close enough I’m able to find the real term.

Cross-referencing / sanity checks are important for LLM use because they can get deep into confidently wrong rabbit holes at times, or indulge whatever your train of thought is without having the human capability to extricate itself at some point. So whether it’s a web search or checking something it said to you against another real person, you can use this to ground yourself more so on how you’re engaging with it. It’s not that different from talking to other real people in that way (the main difference is I would recommend having a much stronger baseline skepticism of anything an LLM tells you than with a person). Even with the people we trust the most in life, it’s still healthy to get second opinions, get perspective beyond them, work through the reasoning of what they’ve said, etc. No one source, computer or human, knows it all.

South Koreans and Japanese are not occupied

Yes, they are. There’s a reason people here tend to say Occupied Korea rather than South Korea. You need to learn about Korea’s history evidently. They faced enormous violence and repression, first under colonial Japan and then under US occupation, and the US occupation continues to this day. The whole designation of North and South Korea was literally drawn up by the US military.

Japan’s situation is a bit more complicated because of their part in colonialism and imperialism prior to and during WWII. But it would still be racist and reductionist to imply that Japanese people are a monolithic entity deserving of suffering because of their governance.

indigenous and black people as I said before they’re not considered citizens

Black people absolutely can be citizens of the US. They still face systemic racism on top of that. The Civil Rights Act was more of a diffusion of revolutionary energy than it was a solution to problems of racism, but it did further the rights of black people in the US and normalize them more so into the US culture as other regular people. If you’re thinking of what’s going on right now with ICE and all, that’s more of a broader violence of white supremacy and the institution of whiteness, and it’s not as simple as “everyone is going along with it” or something.

With indigenous people, it’s complicated by the fact that they wouldn’t necessarily want to be a citizen of the US. There are still indigenous nations who want their sovereignty respected. I can’t speak to the exact details of it, but I feel confident in saying that they are not generally interested in assimilation into the US project that genocided their ancestors and continues to treat them as less than.

That said, I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with excusing a lack of empathy. Regional barbarism, as I said before, is not a controlled implosion. And as we can see with what’s going on in the US right now, the mask off stuff with ICE is primarily hurting historically marginalized groups, not those who people would tend to be most disgusted with and have a harder time feeling any empathy for. I don’t think the liberal mask is really “better”, but I also don’t think accelerationism tends to hurt the people you think it will. The contradictions are what they are and we have to deal with them as they are, not turn up our noses because we don’t personally love everyone around us. You don’t have to be burbling with love to do a good strategic analysis, but if you aren’t motivated by compassion, it leaves one to wonder what you are motivated by. If there is one thing I take away from successful AES projects, it’s that they tend to have a great love for the people and a great interest in serving their needs. This desire alone does not make them successful, but it sure is a helpful motivator.

I’m sorry, what? You don’t care if peoples who are occupied by the empire suffer? Because the governance does imperialist bidding?

I get that, it’s annoying when someone who seems fine in a particular hobby area suddenly displays awful, barely related politics. Communist video essayists could do this in the same way but in the other direction, where they don’t even advertise their views, but instead just sprinkle it in now and then. Long as they’re serious enough in the delivery that it doesn’t get confused with ironic references.

So you don’t care if indigenous people in the region that gets called the US suffer? You don’t care if children in the imperial core more broadly, suffer? You don’t care if the collapse of the empire harms people outside it in the process? You’re going to turn around and say that people who have not done harm are deserving of harm by association, is that it? What kind of sick shit are you peddling to sit here and tell me that some lives are lesser?

What you’re saying sounds a lot like encouraging barbarism in the imperial core, in the hope it will somehow make it collapse faster. Which is accelerationism and is not how revolution is built. Worsening contradictions don’t automatically translate to socialist revolution, in the imperial core or anywhere. It still has to be built and people in the imperial core can still try to build and prepare locally, while trying to have solidarity internationally as well. It is counter to having an internationalist view to throw local under the bus simply because it isn’t as revolutionary as you’d like. It is counter to having empathy in general as well.

Furthermore, the western empire is not a controlled house of cards confined within a sterilized chamber. If it collapses violently, and there is nothing significant to counter that locally, it’s still an empire with far-reaching tendrils that has nukes and other kinds of militarized violence. Don’t confuse a controlled implosion with a violent explosion, in other words. Even from this point of view of people who live in the imperial core that seems to saying “their lives matter less than those in the ‘third world’”, their downfall is not confined to only them. And if imperialism can get dismantled to the point that that’s no longer the case, the (already flimsy) argument for valuing “third world” lives more also goes out the window, since the “first world” is no longer able to exploit those people in the same way at that point anyway.

Really depends on the situation. I’m not going to insist to someone that they associate with a person who is a drain on them, sans context. But speaking generally, in the imperial core, we often don’t have the luxury to be especially selective on who we associate with, if we want to make any headway on things. Most are not exactly ML and those of us who made our way to that did it because there were people who were willing to associate with us in spite of our ignorance and get through to us over time.

So what comes to mind here is, changes are often not dramatic and take time to formulate, but this doesn’t mean they don’t occur.

Consider it this way: If a single conversation could change a devout liberal into a budding communist, couldn’t a single conversation also change them back from a budding communist into a devout liberal again?

Our belief systems need a kind of process to them in order for us to have some kind of stability to how we perceive the world and how we act in it. So when someone has a belief challenged and when they are open enough to be considering that challenge, they are not just considering the challenge itself; they are also considering what the challenge implies about other beliefs they have, what the newly formed synthesis would imply about them as a person and how they act in the world, what it would imply about other people around them, what feelings it evokes in them, and so on. This is not to say everybody is doing this all consciously for every single challenge to a belief they encounter. But that they are likely going through some form of this process when evaluating information and beliefs and are probably doing it in more conscious detail, the more significant a challenge it is to their existing framework of belief.

So with this in mind and from the standpoint of what we can do as individuals in the world, we shouldn’t expect dramatic, instantaneous change, but instead try to form relationships (where reasonable, I am not asking people to befriend nazis) and be firm on what we believe and why where disagreements come up. Sometimes the first step may simply be the other person accepting that we have dramatically different beliefs and are also not a scary creature from under the bed (notice how some imperialist propaganda specifically tries to get people to consider any and all anti-imperialist dialogue as belonging to a scary faction, such as when people are called “Russian trolls/agents”). Once they’ve accepted we’re not a scary creature from under the bed, then they may be able to start considering what we’re saying. I won’t pretend this is a system-level solution, but when we’re talking about dealing with it in a disorganized manner where we don’t have party power.

I like that, will try to keep this in mind for myself and for the culture as a whole. Thanks for taking the time to go through it.

Thanks for clarifying, makes sense.

Thanks, yeah, that’s a healthy reminder. Reminds me, one way I try to combat it is to reframe my own situation as the result of a lot more than just me. For example, remembering the people who most contributed to my learning about this stuff. Or remembering a place like this and how it has contributed to my growth in it.

Thanks to you also for the info and reassurances. I can see your point, it probably does help that it’s a smaller place overall.

You can still point out what you view as a provocation and reply in a manner that doesn’t break the “be respectful” rule. Criticizing a user’s analysis is still fine, we just want to avoid personal attacks and other unhelpful reactions.

So if I understand right (roughly speaking, not going to try to hold you to this being exactly valid/accurate in every circumstance):

Person says: “You’re stupid.”

If you reply: “Don’t talk to me that way. That’s disrespectful.” <- This is fine, is pointing out provocation without attacking in return.

If you reply: “No, you’re stupid.” <- This is breaking the rule in return and both will likely be actioned against.

This is what we should be doing with liberals from other instances too, not just commenting “you’re an idiot” and leaving; even if the person in question ignores it, others who read the conversation are more likely to learn something if we’re providing useful analysis in our replies.

Agreed. I generally try to approach it with a mindset that it’s possible to get through and like you say, if nothing else, have something to show for it that others can learn from (including myself, who sometimes gets more clarity from working through the stuff and writing it out).

I don’t think so. We’re usually going to default to community-local bans, “upgrading” it if the issue expands beyond a single thread. In the worst-case scenario, a temporarily banned user can create an account on another instance and use that if it concerns /c/mutual_aid exclusively (posting in other communities with an alt account will still be considered ban evasion).

Gotcha. Figured it’d be a long-shot with common tech design, but that’s good to know they’d have a means to do it through an alt if there was a crisis.

Thanks for the reassurances.

I can’t give specifics on this but we are aware of what goes on on the website so if this sort of situation happens I feel confident saying that we’ll figure them out.

That’s fair. I do trust that you keep an eye out in general. I think for me, it’s mostly past experiences causing me to want to pre-emptively bring it up.

The limitations of the tools you have on hand is real. And uh, I’m not sure quite how to put this, but I have to remember that the character of a tool in the hands of principled MLs is not necessarily the same as the character of a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie, i.e. to use this temp ban thing as an example, a temp ban in other contexts might be intended as a punishment, but you seem to be (can correct me if this misrepresents the intention in any way) wanting to use it as a means of helping with regulating emotional collisions. So in other contexts, a person might be inclined to view it as saying “you did bad” or even “you’re bad” when in this context, there are times it may be intended as simply “hey, cool it, come back when you’re feeling calmer.”

Which is one of those things where existing connotation can get in the way of intention. But it should help that you’re being very clear about the intention going forward. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think what I’m trying to get at it is the distinction of policing in an ML context vs. otherwise and how important it is for people who are used to policing in a non-ML context to remember that there is a difference.

I like the example you (whoever all put it together) gave BTW, with Bo Gu.

In particular:

He had been put in command by the Politburo, which shared responsibility for believing those tactics would work.

This is something I think about now and then, but I don’t always know how to put it into words. The shared responsibility of things, which normally gets neglected under the individualist framework.

So I do have a question or two, primarily about the issue that can occur on forums where one person provokes another (but does it subtly enough so as not to appear like the instigator at a glance) and then when the provoked one goes off, they get actioned against for personal attacks.

Basically my question is, what is your position on that kind of behavior and is it something you keep in mind as a possibility when looking at situations?

In my time here, it hasn’t really been something that has seemed like an issue. But given you appear to be saying you’re moderating conflicts more strictly now, I want to ask. It is an issue I’ve seen on a lot of other forums over the years. And the general problem of it on those other forums is that you end up with people who continuously get away with poor behavior, while other posters who they provoked build up a record of having been actioned against, which only entrenches the perception of the provoked as the cause of the problem, rather than the other way around.

Another aspect of this, which is not exactly the same thing but can be related, is I find it can end up feeling infantilizing, if in the face of conflict, the only thing you’re allowed to do is either ignore provocation or report it to a mod and trust they’ll do something about it. I admit I carry some baggage in that way because my experience with it has not been great on a lot of online places, nor in life in general, for that matter. But it does concern me not only from a personal standpoint, but also from the standpoint of what people are learning and how they are learning to respond to conflict. Forum mods are not generally mediators and I wouldn’t expect them to be, considering they are volunteering their time, have limited of it, and so on. But without mediating and without any attempt to hash things out even if it’s not always the cleanest back and forth, conflicts can stay unresolved and resentment can build. You could argue letting stuff go on too dirty can have the same effect or worse, so it does require some amount of maturity of behavior. But still, my concern remains.

I don’t know what the answer is there. I’m just not sure about the capability of temp bans and the like to meaningfully address these things. I get the value of a “cooling off period” but some things go beyond heat of the moment.

Another thought that strikes me is, in cases of instance-wide temp bans, if there is any way you could set it up to do this while excluding a particular “community”, I would recommend having https://lemmygrad.ml/c/mutual_aid as a default exclusion, since there are people here who need it to ask for help and it could be a problem for them if they are banned due to a conflict and can’t post there.

I find it’s hard not to feel a bit arrogant sometimes having ML views in the west. I don’t really like feeling that way, but I have the feeling sometimes. Maybe lingering arrogance from previous socialization is part of it. But I also think a factor is that the western status quo insists on being blind to the insight and direction that scientific socialism can provide. So it’s like you’re on “team science but applied to politics” and they’re like “nuh uh, that’s communism, communism bad.” And even with a basic understanding of the framework, you’re already so far past on understanding how things work and why, and what could be done differently. It doesn’t even mean you’re good at it in a broader, practiced sense (like you might be really bad at it compared to an average party member in an AES state), but compared to the average westerner with no understanding of it, it’s leaps and bounds just to have the basics.

So I don’t know. I self-hate arrogance and ego in general. But maybe that feeling is my way of coping with how politically illiterate people tend to be. Arrogance rather than despairing about it or something.

I think it’s normal to feel that way about it. The weird part is the notion pushed by liberalism that we’re supposed to look dehumanizing practices in the face and turn the other cheek (e.g. “rise above” like life is some kind of contest to see who can act more pious on the surface). I think there are various forms of this out there, like “don’t stoop to their level” that shame people just for having a human reaction to outrageously unjust circumstances. Obviously we don’t want to fight barbarism with barbarism, but what we call barbaric acts usually take a lot of conscious effort to put them into practice broadly. It isn’t something you accident your way into doing as a system. Liberal thinking would have us believing we must be hypervigilant about any desires to fight, lest we slip into “corruption” of intent and practice and “become what we sought out to destroy.” But history doesn’t really back up liberalism on this. For example, the AES states that get regularly vilified were/are closer to kind saviors than corrupted villains.

So basically, I would say what you feel is a desire to fight back against injustice and they’d have us fearing this basic desire in ourselves. Even the figure of Jesus, who I think is where some of this image of “turning the other cheek” comes from as culture, has a part in the bible where he whips the money changers in the temple, overturns their tables, and drives them out of it. Bit adventurist of him (😛 ), but I like to point at it as contradicting the narrative that he was just this “pacifist figure and people should be pacifist like him.” To what extent he was even a real person and matches any of the narrative, I don’t know, but the pacifist narrative has holes and reminds me a bit of the more modern thing that happened in the US with the civil rights movement and portraying MLK as “nonviolent” in order to be able to put him on a pedestal after assassinating him, while vilifying more “militant” aspects of the movement.

I don’t know if this matches the exact most up to date psychological definitions, but my understanding of it is:

• ASPD (Anti-Social Personality Disorder) is the main one where the diagnosis contains one of malignant intentions and behaviors.

• Psychopathy is a bit more murky and can have overlap with what gets defined as NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) but if the research of James Fallon is to be believed (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/ side note: I don’t vouch for this particular source, it’s a quick one I could find on his story for the moment), psychopaths can exist insofar as they are incapable of feeling empathy, but they can still intellectualize empathy and if raised in the right kind of environment, can behave in generally “pro social” ways.

From this and other things, I tend to extrapolate that people start with certain predispositions, but what is produced from these predispositions can vary quite a bit. I don’t have a source on it offhand, but I recall for example a story of someone in a more communal culture who had “voices in their head” (in the clinical meaning that people would associate with debilitating schizophrenia) but for them, these voices were actually friendly and supportive.

So I would say, as a general rule:

• In a long-term view of planning and building, we should expect that some people will have a different psychological starting point than the norm and account for that in how we think about systems and communities, especially when it comes to repeating issues that keep cropping up and make life harder for people (e.g. in the case of disabling conditions).

• However, we should avoid viewing predispositions as being behavior defining (rather than behavior influencing and even then, it can get into eugenics-adjacent territory and just kind of self-fulfilling prophecy nonsense fast focusing on what people are predisposed to if you start labeling it as leading to “good” or “bad” behaviors).

• For people who already have established behavioral patterns, communist vanguards have had to apply reeducation or force in some contexts, but I don’t think it’s particularly practical to get bogged down in fine psychological delineations in this process. It could be very wasteful and missing the forest for the trees to expend more energy on how people are different than how they are the same, when dealing with limited resources and difficult constraints (which is going to be a reality in any ongoing power struggle). The capitalists benefit from this focus because they can use it as a wedge to divide and individualize people, but we more so want the reverse, for people to relate and connect well. And for the most part, looking at the motives of a person’s material conditions is probably going to be more telling than any DSM chart will ever be.

This thought hasn’t fully crystallized, but it occurs to me that a reason capitalism can appear so resilient at absorbing and diluting social causes is because it actually wants social causes to exist and leverages them actively. Not just in the sense of tax breaks for charity, but also in the sense of soft power through “charitable donations”. Those who most fund an institution can also choose whether it’s able to continue, which means the institution will tend to bend to their requests out of self preservation if nothing else.

So like, capitalism doesn’t have some metaphysical power to absorb and dilute social causes (which is how it can feel at times when you watch how easily it can happen in real-time). It’s that there are processes of capital that are already directed toward making use of social causes for expanding power, so when a new one appears, all capital needs to do is evaluate if it can work for that and dilute it as needed to make it work if it doesn’t at the offset. Once it has latched on, it starts using its broader range of voice to try to take over what the conversation surrounding the cause sounds like. And it is the job of activists to dig their heels in with as clear and organized messaging as possible and shout out the capitalists on what the actual issue is; and build solutions that form socialist community power over the capitalist predatory charity model.

• Remove obstacles: don’t have a library card but it’s an option? get a library card; having too much trouble deciding what to read? find a recommended reading list and go from there
• Set up an environment for it if possible: ideally somewhere quiet with minimal distractions, where you can have good sitting posture and good lighting; if you’re reading digitally, see if you can get an e-ink device, which is more similar to reading from paper; make sure your internal state is ok too, e.g. hydrated, sleeping alright, have sufficient time to read so you won’t feel rushed etc.
• Read what’s more appealing first: too dense and melting your brain? try reading something else and see if it’s more engaging. use that to build motivation toward reading other things.

Remember, it’s not about willpower, it’s about transitioning to a way of doing things that better facilitates reading for longer and more consistently. Laziness points at willpower and implies you’re choosing not to use it. But you obviously have a desire to do it, so that can’t be the whole problem. Something, or things, are in the way.

A great example of this kind of thing which pertains to exercising, not reading, but is similar in spirit. I remember this streamer/youtuber who had a treadmill he could use while playing video games at his computer. By having the treadmill right there, he was far more likely to do exercise. Whereas if he had it off to the side, it was easy to not get around to it.

I started writing a couple different approaches to this, but they didn’t seem quite right. I’m going to try again and see if 3rd time is the charm.

An important thing to remember is that reactionary “questions” often carry with them assumptions or claims that aren’t necessarily true. It’s framed like a question, but structured like a statement.

And you aren’t owed them a serious response, in part for that reason.

Let’s go through these to demonstrate what I mean:

Why do we always have to put ourselves and our cultures last by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims

The implicit claim: “We [already doing a lot of bullshit with the assumed ‘we’] always [assumes this is something that is constantly happening and never goes another way] have to [implies the ‘we’ is disempowered and has no say] put ourselves and our cultures [doesn’t even get into what those cultures are but judging by what follows, the implication is ‘white’] last [so claiming that not only are people accommodating the priorities of another group, but that this puts their own priorities dead last] by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims [claiming not only that pork is not served in school canteens, which the question provides no evidence for, but also that it’s “because of Muslims” and it assumes that pork is some kind of pivotal culture thing that is being pushed aside].”

Phew, that’s a lot of horseshit in one small sentence. And it’s not a real question. It’s a form of rhetoric that is meant to evoke a response. The implication is that something is being taken from you and the expected response is, “I have to take it back.”

Oh but it goes on:

or allowing underage girls to wear a hijab in school, to let their families oppress them

Look at how fast the rhetoric has shifted. Before it was implying that the “we” is a disempowered group who “has to” do stuff. Now it implies that the “we” is actually the one in power, who is making the decisions, “allowing” the dress codes of girls to be determined by the girls’ families instead of by the “we”. So already we can see that hint of white supremacy doing its thing of pretending to not have power, even as it exercises it, and vilifying the non-white cultures.

Why do we let people immigrants live off our government benefits when they haven’t paid a single euro in taxes before they came here

The implicit claim: "We [here we go again] let people immigrants [once again implying the ‘questioner’ is actually among the group that is in charge, after all] live off our government benefits [another unproven claim that in this case is likely absolute horseshit of exaggeration and distortion] when they haven’t paid a single euro in taxes before they came here [this one straight up doesn’t make sense - how and why would you pay taxes before you come to a place? last I checked, taxes are based on a government taking a portion of what you make to go to funding. if you make nothing, a portion of 0 is 0].

A further point is that they are using the word immigrants, but I have to wonder if they are even actually referring to people who are all immigrants by choice or if some of them are refugees. And refugee is an even more vulnerable position to be in than somebody who really wanted to be, and planned to be, an immigrant.

So I mean, if you have to, you can look at them like the “Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about” meme.