Yeah discoverability is a huge issue. I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them. I know people in the fediverse have negative feelings about algorithms (and most that exist today are harmful) but does a transparent, community-managed algorithm have to be a bad thing?

Seems like a lot of people prefer bluesky for whatever reason. I wouldn’t know since I’ve no interest in either.

I’m not sure I follow. So who do we genocide then?

I don’t disagree but this conclusion doesn’t seem very actionable. What can be done to solve this problem? Is it more useful to try to equip Americans with a better understanding of these issues or simply navigate around their ignorance better?

I think it’s more helpful to identify that the issue is boots on our neck, not who is wearing them. What’s the point of fighting for a new government that’s hardly better than the last?

Even if there’s no clear alternative focused on human liberation today, it’s better to build consciousness so that one can be created than tug of war back and forth between tyrants with different colored flags.

The US has many flaws and these incidents were terrible. But these largely didn’t involve the modern intelligence apparatus we are discussing. We have large numbers of people here on Lemmy actively calling for a socialist revolution but they’re completely safe as long as they follow the law.

Try calling for revolution in China and see how it goes. Leaders of even relatively non-political protest movements or advocates for minority rights are frequently disappeared or executed. In the US, there may be isolated incidents of this nature (typically by local law enforcement) but largely social critics are free to organize legal resistance to the state without repression.

Of course, there are reasons to worry we might be headed in that direction. All the more reason to organize and resist while you still can.

To be clear, I don’t ascribe these actions to communism. China is not communist by any reasonable definition. I ascribe these actions to authoritarianism. While the US is somewhat authoritarian, it is less so than China (at least within its borders—foreign policy is a different can of worms).

There has been some debate about exactly what Marx intended by this phrase but regardless his intentions, in my view it was always doomed to be abused in this way. This was pointed out forcefully by Bakunin and other contemporaries of Marx in the socialist movement, and it came to pass exactly as they predicted. Who decides what constitutes “bourgeois interest” or “false consciousness”? The party of course, and who controls the party? The party leadership, or in other words, Lenin, Stalin, or whoever else manages to connive their way onto the throne. This is far from a proletarian democracy, and if that’s what Marx wanted, he ought to have chosen his words far more carefully.

This also dovetails with another key flaw in Marxism which is its class reductionism. Political leaders can and do have distinct interests from the proletariat, even when they may have once belonged to that class. We see this tension clearly in every supposed proletarian government in history, and many others besides. So in addition to the problems of top-down hierarchy, the decision to have Bolshevik leaders be full-time revolutionaries was also a large contributor to their alienation from the people whose interests they claimed to pursue, and the horrific violence they soon inflicted in on them.

The US may collect as much or more information as China but their enforcement actions taken based on this information are far far more limited.

My unpopular opinion is that this movie is just bad lol

Authoritarians everywhere: “You need my boot on your neck, because the other guy’s boot will be even worse!”

Thank goodness that would never happen in the enlightened, democratic West.

There is some truth to this but it overlooks the fact that the Bolsheviks were distinct from other socialist parties from the very beginning by their top-down, authoritarian party structure, with Lenin in control. As soon as they gained power, they immediately worked to impose this type of management on the entirety of Russian society by crushing first the Duma, then the Soviets, and finally eliminating any autonomy exercised by their own supporters, the labor unions. They also immediately began engaging in electoral chicanery and postponing or rigging elections in their favor. By destroying or subsuming every other institution in society, the party structure became the primary structure of governance, and Russia became a totalitarian state. Most of this took place even before the civil war and was arguably a major contributor to it.

So why did Russia become a dictatorship? Because the Bolsheviks decided it was desirable based on their understanding and development of socialist theory, and other forces failed to stop them for various reasons. It’s pretty much that simple. The civil war and foreign pressures probably strengthened this tendency but I don’t believe it was the primary cause.

And of course, almost every other socialist revolution since that time was inspired by the Bolsheviks since they “succeeded”. So they largely sought to impose dictatorships as well.

Ultimately it all goes back to Marx and his idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat which is one of the crucial flaws of Marxism in my view.

Blame the author for not putting a caption.

Here’s the paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2411258121

Gray areas are not missing data, they’re areas where weather was becoming less extreme rather than more.

Well I share some degree of pessimism but the future is inherently unpredictable. There may be a big change coming. We just have to keep fighting so that we’re ready to win when the opportunity arrives.

Removed by mod

I care about the wealthy and powerful being above the law while working class people get the shaft. Democrats claimed to be concerned about this too. But I guess it was all partisan theatre.

For real. Fuck Joe Biden, I regret voting for him.

Man I thought blue MAGA was just a stupid meme but I guess it’s real. Fuck the Democratic Party, I’m out.

I don’t necessarily disagree but I feel such actions are only meaningful when undertaken as part of a large, organized movement. There is no such movement currently. My presence or absence on Reddit is of little consequence individually.

Legally speaking I don’t know the answer but I think this would work best if a significant portion of coastal states would implement this together. California is big and does have an impact on its own, but all the blue states together could have a huge effect on overseas commerce.

That said, I could see congress interfering since this would clearly be an interstate commerce issue. Whether they will have the votes I don’t know.