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  I think falling into the science fiction beliefs about these LLM programs isn't good from any angle. Like, no, these things aren't going to Renraku Arcology all of us or turn into Skynet or whatever, and they're also not going to usher in Star Trek. They're just unimpressive incremental improvements (in some cases) of already existing chatbots and big data crunching programs. The novelty is that capitalists are weaponizing them to disenfranchise workers, that's kinda it.

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  I think an important part of understanding how strong communities stymie fascism is understanding how fascists use corruption to get buy-in. In a society with ascendant fascists, the fascists find as many ways as possible to reward those who take fascist action. Classic examples include things like giving favorable jobs to those that sell out their coworkers, even to the point of directly giving the accuser the vacated job of the accused. Regular people become incentivized to buy in to the regim...

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  Looking forward to another #bandcampfriday ! As always I'm looking for music recommendations. I've got eclectic taste but tend to prefer stuff with vocals over instrumental. My last three albums I got were from Genesis Owusu, Altamira, and Darkswoon, so like I really am into a whole spread of stuff. If you have recommendations please give them, and if not please boost!

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  Farmers will continue to mostly stick by Trump because A) "farmers" in the American context means farm owners, not people who farm and B) what farmers wanted from Trump was to get rid of the anti-slavery reforms that Biden did to the H-2A visa system, and Trump did that. Biden oversaw the largest anti-slavery enforcement operations in something like a century and introduced a broad swathe of anti-slavery reforms to the H-2A system, a system that exists basically only to create slaves...

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  People keep mocking Andrew Tate's arrestee outfit, but he was in the US and I think he was trying to respect our culture. He broke out the knee breeches and blouse so he could look like our most sacred child sex traffickers, the Founding Fathers. It's a high degree of cultural literacy if anything

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  Trying to explain the US-Iran war to a conservative: "so this is a classic case of a virgin aesthetic-warrior culture trying mog a chad based nerd logisticsmaxxer culture"

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  A major failure of US liberalism is a total blindness to enemies. Republicans routinely work hard to reduce the political power of their opposition, quite flagrantly: gerrymandering and the suppression of voters of color is an obvious one, but attacks on science and education also degrade important power bases for the Democrats, reducing the money and resources that can be marshalled for the Dems. Passing laws that make life difficult for queer people has the effect of making queer people move a...

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  I think one of the few big mistakes in Reconstruction era reforms was the centralization of the US military and the destruction of the state militia system. The founding generation had many flaws but they did hold a pretty sincere antimilitarism that they wrote into the Constitution, which modern liberalism is unfortunately blind to. The decentralized state militia system was a way to prevent a tyrant from taking control of a single massive imperial military, and because of how the fallout of th...

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  One would think the fact that America can't win wars would matter politically eventually

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  *Protestant genocide fan voice* wow these fake Democrat Arabs are really antisemitic

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  Unironically I do think LLMs are predicated on crimes against humanity in the sense that they are built on the pilfering and enclosure of common human knowledge. There are property right arguments that LLM companies have committed property crimes but frankly I don't care: I think more important is that LLMs have been produced through a process somewhere between ISIS blowing up ancient religious sites and the enclosure of common land. I would literally argue that LLM companies should be put...

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  RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@PallasRiot/117006331101791062 The US is extremely bad at war. The US military doesn't have a reality-based understanding of war, the US military doesn't practice warfare competently, the US defense industry is a sprawling system of graft and spoils, and the US political elite largely don't understand war. The US public is frankly even more tragically and shockingly moronic about war, and fundamentally the American public really likes and is very...

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  Important pollinator content!! Most wasps are way less aggressive than people think and they're doing a lot of important work in our shared environment. A wasp nest that's built directly on your home may unfortunately need removing, but if they're settled a good ways away from you, or you just encounter them foraging, you can just leave them be and they probably won't bother you.

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  It's fucking crazy that Canada is stuck with the unholy union of Ronald Reagan and Neville Chamberlain as their PM at this particular moment in history

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  I've never felt so vindicated as I have by Mamdani proving my major thesis about how the Biden administration failed prior to October 7th. Before Genocide Joe destroyed his presidency with his love of Mediterranean Rhodesia, his administration was the most progressive since at least LBJ and possibly FDR(the LBJ comparison is especially fitting). The Biden administration accomplishments were a long and varied list of good governance reforms and legitimately powerful, if largely procedural, fi...

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  And as a hint for radicals, the same is true for us. We need to never stop explaining, never stop doing the 101s, etc, these are just broad rules of mass politics

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  I think "socialism or barbarism" is a good bit of rhetoric but I'm not fundamentalist about it. I don't think it's impossible for liberal democracy to stabilize itself again. Frankly, leading up to the New Deal I think people had a lot more reason to believe that liberalism couldn't reinvent itself than we do now. In this sense I think we need to be both dedicated to a popular front against fascism, but also insistent on pushing as hard as we can for anarchist liberatio...

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  There's a strain of anti-Republican sentiment that says that Republicans are anti-government, that things like tax cuts and deregulation are modes of weakening or shrinking the government. Is that what ICE is? How about bathroom policing? Governmental vetos on healthcare? Infinity cop funding? Is that all "anti-government", is that "small government"? Red states, and Republican controlled federal government, doesn't look like a retreat of government power to me: it...

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  RE: https://mas.to/@BruceMirken/116936145274457352 Bill Penzeys is the strongest soldier of the republic tbh

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  RE: https://beige.party/@RickiTarr/116918286228168962 The threat of billionaires leaving is that they will take the productive capacity they own with them. Often that's not really possible, and we never have to let them do it when it is possible. They can't simply fabricate an appropriate workforce at the snap of their fingers, and it's a matter of policy choice to let them shutter factories.

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  Hey so I know this is uncomfortable but teenagers see porn and that's fine, it's not a new thing, teenagers have been furtively enjoying porn for as long as porn has existed. The idea that any exposure to any kind of sexual material will damage young people is, frankly, just an excuse to actually harm young people in profoundly domineering ways.

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  @DavidGoldfield@allovertheplace.ca All porn? Porn made by feminist worker collectives? Porn comics made by queer liberationists? Amateur porn lovingly made by exhibitionist couples?

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  I am once again reminding you that militarized borders are a modern invention, like a century old. Before the 1900s, "immigration" was just people traveling a place.

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  US Nazis wear masks because they are afraid of antifascist activists. It's not because they secretly believe that what they're doing is shameful or whatever else, it's because of the constant and vigilant work of antifascists. If at some point they believe they have nothing to fear from antifascists then they will march without masks.

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  As a labor organizer I can't overstate how important the Americans with Disabilities Act is to organized labor. If you have ever gotten your job to cut you some slack because of a physical disability or injury, or a mental health issue, or a learning disability, the ADA is what gave you force of law even if you didn't know it. I've been able to save the jobs of quite a few workers because of the Reasonable Accommodation process of the ADA The ADA was passed because disparate affinit...

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  European homes aren't weatherized because the kind of society-wide push that makes mass weatherization a reality requires spending that the austerity-obsessed governments of Europe can't stomach. They would rather boil a thousand of their children and elderly every heat wave than spend on making weatherization accessible and prevalent.

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  I wouldn't take a trillion dollars if it meant I had to be Elon Musk

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  The iron law of Republican politics continues to be that if you oppose Trump you lose. Massie is a nationally popular, extremely high profile figure with his own base and a fair amount of political talent; he's also one of the furthest right-wing Republicans, hands down. He lost by a comfortable margin. And Massie's opponent in like a total loser tbh, no political talent, has lost a bunch of elections, didn't show up to debates, has nothing whatsoever going on; this prima...

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  There are two kinds of right-wing content creator: "I am a professional n-word sayer and my life revolves around shakey cell footage of me getting shared around Facebook with links to my GiveSendGo. Please buy my shitcoin." And "Western civilization has fallen. Families don't speak to each other. Ba'al fornicates with demons in schools and town halls. We must support Chuck E Cheese for the sake of the risen Christ."

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  I'm using GrapheneOS's Vanadium browser on mobile and trying to switch to Qwant as the search engine. I successfully switched Qwant to be the go to search engine and then it promptly stopped working and now is just returning 403 errors. Any suggestions?