I don’t know. I can tell you, seeing what the game industry did to video games certainly helped me adopt an anti-capitalist lens. It was influences significantly beyond that though, that got me all the way to communism.

I mean, the game industry killed most of my passion for video games in a death by a thousand cuts. But that didn’t on its own get me in front of people who were talking anti-imperialism, talking Lenin, George Jackson, Michael Parenti.

As tempting as it is sometimes, doomerism is counter revolutionary. Not to be confused with being down sometimes or contending with depression. Taking a stance, even if meant in jest (and doomerism does go for dark humor sometimes) that suggests there is no hope is a problem. That’s not even getting into the problems with feeding narratives about exaggerated differences between generations, which is a divide and conquer thing, and doesn’t help us build solidarity with anyone.

There are observable differences between generations in culture and conditions they face, to a certain extent, but exaggerated statements about them that suggest helplessness or a fixed, doomed state of being is not a good idea. And the liberation cause is one where people have more in common, usually, than they have differences.

It’s also not just about privacy. It’s also about safety (historically, ads can be a vector for viruses). And it’s about having garbage shoveled in front of you that makes the internet borderline unusable. Which comes back to capitalism and the nature of every space becoming an ad-infested hell because consume product is the god.

That’s awesome, well done!

I kinda hate it, but I also don’t tend to like “prankster” type of humor in general. In spite of that, it’s hard for me to think it’s valid to be opposed to it generally if the people involved are all okay with it. So like, two friends “roasting” each other, okay, I guess none of my business if they are truly fine with it and enjoy it. But even then, are they doing stuff similar to “aftercare”? Where they reaffirm they really do love and appreciate each other after any digging is done. Because if not, it seems like an easy way for people to be in an unhealthy dynamic, where one of them is crying inside and just going along with it to get along.

And in the context of a sub like roastme, there’s nothing close to “aftercare”, no real off button on it, and it’s complete strangers. So it seems like a horrible setup for doing it in a way that is at all healthy.

Dream chasing under capitalism is similar to buying lottery tickets hoping to win the jackpot. They’ll let a few win big here and there to legitimize the idea of upward mobility, but the reality is, you are not going to be that person. And the “but technically I could be” mentality is what drives people in gambling, just as it does in driving them to believe in the legitimacy of capitalism.

(by smart contract, if I’m not mistaken)

No investigation, no right to speak and all that.

You don’t sound very confident on the details. I do appreciate the explanation and I am not trying to be snarky or dismissive here. But if you are trying to hold people to a standard of no investigation, no right to speak, I would expect a little more than this for being the one who has done investigation.

Here is part of the quote:

You can’t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to “find solution” or “evolve an idea” without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea. In other words, he is bound to arrive at a wrong solution and a wrong idea.

There are not a few comrades doing inspection work, as well as guerrilla leaders and cadres newly in office, who like to make political pronouncements the moment they arrive at a place and who strut about, criticizing this and condemning that when they have only seen the surface of things or minor details. Such purely subjective nonsensical talk is indeed detestable. These people are bound to make a mess of things, lose the confidence of the masses and prove incapable of solving any problem at all.

The full thing can be found here for discussion: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm

My takeaway as relevant to this is that it’s more about people who hypothesize and invent wildly from nothing and resist going among the masses to learn what they need and how it can be done rather than being about people who are skeptical in the year 2024 in encountering anonymous claims made to them about technology on the internet.

I’ve been in situations before of having investigated something quite a bit and facing stubbornness from people who haven’t. I can empathize on that level. It’s frustrating when you’ve done the work to learn and people act like their knowledge is equal to yours in spite of having spent little to no time on it at all. But I think there is a line we can cross where it’s going to sound like we’re saying “turn your brain off and take my word for it” instead of “let’s educate the masses so they are better informed.”

In this context, for example, how are we defining what “within reason” is for skepticism? Skepticism is more or less a kind of wariness. I’m having trouble working out where you’d draw the line for reasonable or unreasonable skepticism if we’re starting from the premise that the whole reason a person is being skeptical is because they lack the information to confidently draw a conclusion.

I don’t ask a detailed reply here, just consider it as food for thought and if you want to dig into it, you’re welcome to of course.

Would be helpful to explain why you think deception is impossible in that context. Crypto and NFTs have a lot of con artistry going on and it’s reasonable for people to be skeptical.

That sucks to hear. The day I can’t block ads on youtube will be the day I stop using it. It is just not worth the psychological damage of having that garbage blasted at me.

More than that, I think western arrogance just has a hard time admitting to losing in general. That whole capitalistic + supremacy thing of “winning means you have value and losing means you’re worthless.” They can’t simultaneously dehumanize and value their entity as more than conquest. If the western empire cared about human life, it’d also be more secure in how it acts and what it can admit. But then it wouldn’t be doing the violence it has done to so many peoples.

So I guess what I’m driving at here, is I think this sort of duplicitous language comes with the territory.

Great points!

Sounds similar to some stuff I’ve been trying to make more conscious and confront, which is to do with the expectations I have of myself and how realistic or healthy they are. A big one for me is social expectations I impose on myself. I tend to have this nebulous image in my head of a smooth, effective socializer that I sort of implicitly believe is what “most people” are and then I get upset with myself when I can’t live up to that, or I avoid social situations so that I can’t fail to live up to it since I’m not trying.

But this image is unhealthy, it’s unrealistic, and quite honestly, it’s not even what most people are. If I actually look at my observations of how others socialize without the lens of assuming they have some special knowledge or skill that I don’t, they’re kinda all over the place and some of them even make me look more like the smooth image I have by pure contrast of how awkward they are. But ultimately, it’s not healthy to view it as a ranking of skill anyway. Because, and this is important, socializing is not a competition.

Whether most of your problems of comparison and expectations for yourself are socializing or something else, you can apply similar understanding. For example, capitalism tends to get us thinking our competency in the workplace is a ranked system of value. But in practice, it’s not even truly a meritocracy. They just preach like it is to get people clawing over each other for personal gain. In practice, it’s generally wealth and power passed on from rich families to rich families and anybody beyond that is like a lotto player trying to get ahead.

You are not weak. You are struggling, as many struggle. Where communists, where the masses find the most strength is in each other, not from a special potential unlocked from within. You can find ways to try to maximize your potential in different contexts, but that’s still relative to you and your limits and it’s not gonna be a thing that’s the same maximum every day, or even every hour. A person who is sick has a much lower maximum than the same person when they are healthy. Same with a person who is burned out vs. not. Having a disability like ADHD changes what your potential looks like vs. being neurotypical, as well as being medicated ADHD vs. not medicated.

I will reiterate: It’s not a competition and unlearning the idea that’s been shoved into our heads all our lives that it is, is important. They try to make it into a competition, but it’s mostly only an actual competition in the sense of who among the lotto ticket buyers will be the winner. In other words, the forced competition of capitalism is more rigged and random than it is a real ladder that rewards you for being “better.”

You are not your contributions. You are valuable and important beyond that. We have to take that mentality seriously; otherwise, we’d be implying that the most disabled and dependent people aren’t important, you know? You can take pride in what you do when you do it, but if you view your value as hinging on how competent of a revolutionary you are, you’re still spinning on individualist, capitalist thinking. Don’t let capitalism devalue human life. Sometimes it can help put it in perspective to look at how you view others vs. how you view yourself. For example, if you would oppose it devaluing the life of a Palestinian in Gaza, why would you be okay with it devaluing your own life?

referring to the “Leahy Law” that prevents U.S. military assistance from going to foreign units credibly found to have committed major human rights violations.

If that were a legitimate thing, the US would have to cease giving funding to its own forces, much less its proxies.

Too many people believe western media uncritically when it comes to international stuff. The contradictory part is they’ll sometimes have skepticism, distrust, or even hatred for one or more major news sources that’s focused on their own country’s affairs. But when it comes to news about other countries, the same skepticism can be missing.

Before I learned about ML and all that, I was in that place to some extent, I think. But now that I have some idea of what to look for and know a bit more about international affairs and history, it’s really obvious how western media narratives about “human rights” are just narratives of convenience. The formula goes something like: “Is X country somewhere we want to prop up against Y country? If yes, X country is a bastion of human rights and Y country eats babies. Does X country actively oppose us? If yes, X country eats turbo evil cereal as mandatory breakfast meals in every citizen’s state-mandated bowl.”

It’s very cartoonish. And I mean I’m not even exaggerating to say it’s cartoonish. I think of this video, which was from decades ago, yet is still so on point for the style of propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1tfkESPVY

But one thing I’m not sure how to contend with is when people are deep in paranoia about “foreign agents” and “foreign propaganda” kind of thing. I recall one time online trying to show someone that video to make a point about western propaganda and they straight up refused to watch it. IIRC, they were also someone who had come into the convo thinking I was a Chinese shill or something, but weren’t open about thinking that right away, so I naively attempted some good faith stuff at first.

The kind of thinking where anything that contradicts the existing narrative must be coming from “the enemy” “in secret” is such a disturbing thing. I think, would hope, most of us here don’t fall into that trap of thinking. For example, even something as straightforward as anti-imperialism is not binary good/evil; there can be countries run by factions that are not empowering the working class, the marginalized among their people as a system of power, but are nevertheless an important force of opposition against the western empire, against foreign capital and its exploitation.

100%. And the indecisiveness, oof. 😅

I relate too much to Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place.

After seeing western empire news repeatedly call the genocide they’re doing to the Palestinian people a “war”, I’m getting to the point I just assume that if they call something a war, they are talking about something they or one of their proxies is being violent about and they are both sidesing it to make it sound less bad.

In my experience, it was more atomized, which isn’t necessarily good or bad, but was certainly different. It wasn’t consumed by algorithms at that point, so in that way, probably healthier. But it could also vary quite a bit based on where you went and how it was moderated. One of the first forums I ever hung out on was very small and niche compared to what a lot of forum stuff is now, so it was much more of a “everybody knows each other” feel than I experience with most of the internet now. And the few mods had a whole infraction system and were pretty tempered about stuff, which was probably more realistic to do with a group of that scale.

Some of the problems I see with the internet now are unresolved problems of scale and capitalism being a terrible fit for doing anything meaningful about them. For example, youtube algos that demonetizing people with false positives on stuff. On the one hand, how are they supposed to moderate the site reasonably at all? With the absurd rate of content being generated. On the other hand, capitalism would sooner fire every worker and make a robot run the site than payroll lots of human moderators, so even if the problem is hard regardless, they don’t even want to engage with it meaningfully beyond slapdash solutions that make life harder for people who are doing nothing wrong. There is also the fact that the upload rate would likely be considerably lower, if the site wasn’t designed to make regular uploads the main feasible way to get views. And getting views wouldn’t be so critical if people weren’t desperate for money. So that part does come back to capitalism. Panicking on content moderation because of where ads show up is also a capitalistic thing, only caring when the advertisers get upset about their product reputation.

Or another example, a popular thread on reddit in a large sub can get hundreds or thousands of responses. Most of these responses won’t get read or engaged with by anyone. So what exactly is even the point there? For people to scream into the void? Websites like that value engagement numbers intrinsically, but aren’t structured to consider the human side of what the engagement is even supposed to be for or how it will serve human needs.

I’m confused about your use of the term “culture wars”. Typically when I see it used as a pejorative, it’s from people who want to keep the status quo as it is, or play “enlightened centrism” and both sides stuff.

Forgot to mention, people with NPD are in the same vicinity as psychopathy, with not feeling empathy or shame. That’s an important part of why it isn’t just another mental health disorder to treat, and why it’s such a serious designation, as compared to describing a person as a little vain. People who can’t feel empathy may still be able to intellectualize it, so it’s not to say they’re guaranteed to be ‘evil’ or something. And people who do feel empathy can still do horrific things. But it’s a pretty serious characteristic of the disorder.