NumaNuma

A rehash of "the devil made me do it" trope.

Why not ask the Chinese government?

❤️

"What? Me? On equal ground with the dirty commoner? Good heavens, no!" - bourgeoisie

Don't assume the readers/hearers of the propaganda all believe it. The military must maintain recruitment numbers and they'll spend a lot of money to do so. So we'll hear a lot about how great they are. The DOD even spends a lot of time and money providing props and such for Hollywood movies. They even help edit the scripts to ensure the US military isn't put in a bad light.

It's not that the brainrot runs deep. It's more that the propaganda does. Don't blame the people for the stuff they didn't consent to.

Haha. Stalin's got a way with words for sure. But you are probably right about anarchists not reading him.

That's kind of what I was afraid of. I'm genuinely interested in a compelling critique. Like I mentioned, I haven't seen one. I still sympathize with anarchists but I truly don't understand how we do the switch-a-roo to communism with a snap. Like, nothing in history has worked that way, let alone, it would seem, a transition from class society to classless, arguably the greatest achievement of all time when it's done.

But, yeah, this is probably wrong place to ask. I'll seek out another Lemmy I guess.

However, we must remember these people are people

Correction: these people are proletariat. We have the same enemy. Mostly, the only difference between us and them is that we're a little better at identifying the enemy than they are.

And those bears ain't even hexed!

Ferengi are the ultimate capitalist realists.

as Americans, how can we support struggles that are so far away?

Outside of laundering money to a leftist organization somewhere, I'm not really sure, TBH. Organizations like the International Socialist Alternative (ISA) exist as a kind of way to link up the global struggle across national boundaries. But I have no experience with them and don't know if that's a good or bad route.

And how come we are powerless to change things home?

This is all my opinion. I'm sure there's a way but I think it's pretty well-hidden. Most of human history is not revolutionary but rather the continuation of a bad system. So it's less likely you'd be living in a time of revolution than in a time under some class system that seems to be maintaining itself pretty well.

Having said that, we don't know when the opportunity will present itself either. So in my view, you may as well operate as if a great revolution is just around the corner. Educate workers, organize them, mobilize them, rail against the existing order, etc. The old "education, agitated and organize" addage.

So saying "we're powerless" isn't the point, I guess. Because we won't know whether we are or aren't until we try and either fail or succeed. Rather, I would say a better viewpoint is simply to acknowledge the fact that we aren't currently in a moment of historical change. But despite this, our work is pretty much the same either way. And it's a lot better to understand how political economy works anyway than to remain ignorant and be predisposed to the rat race of electoral politics and the whole spectacle of society.

Like, I can spot the neoliberal propaganda in Marvel movies quite easily. But not too long ago I didn't see it at all. I think there's value in that. I'm growing and learning. And I'm able to understand events in terms of class or class struggle.

Like the issue in Niger right now. As a liberal, I would be wanting to pick sides and know if they're good or bad and probably would have thought the new government was bad and we need to send in the troops. But as a Marxist, I'm like, "Oh, this is like international bourgeoisie against local bourgeoisie and local bourgeoisie has a current interest in decoupling them from neo-colonialism, which is good, but will probably betray that on down the line." Just being able to frame things by class and class interest is useful.

And, of course, in the context of the USA, your greatest impact is at the local level (county). Your vote actually does count there and it's at least possible to form a leftist org that forces policy changes on the local level to materially improve lives. Something along the lines of forming a mass line would be the approach here. But on the state and then national level, your vote is effectively useless. Because those processes are anti-democratic and they're mostly theater to give people the illusion of democracy and make us feel involved when really we're not actually doing anything that nudges power in the right direction ever.

Because it's not "failing", the Internet is fragmenting off into large factions. Step 1 has been capitalism commodifying information, resulting in most information taking one of two forms: siloed off into private databases or SEO sites designed to fish people into siloed off sites. Step 2 is now taking the form of political factions as the world becomes multi-polar again (China, USA and Russia, essentially). Large super powers push their domination in the form of information and each claiming they're right so you don't need to worry about all that other stuff.

The concept of the Internet being global is dead. The concept of the Internet being content created by regular people for regular people is dead. Search engines are just showing us this with their results. Which is why sites like duckduckgo aren't even enough at this point. We are, in effect, just entering a "dark age" of the Internet, where we can expect whole sections to simply not be accessible to us anymore.

To build an entirely new search engine, with broad indexing and showing us real results again that are relevant, you'd need massive amounts of capital. You can't get that capital from private investment because there's no profit in doing this. You can't get that from public funds because it's not in the interest of governments to go against their chosen hegemony. You'd have to grass-roots the effort, which would be a very precarious endeavor that, even if it launched (which would be a miracle), it would be difficult to maintain. Even models like Wikimedia aren't actually sustainable. Wikipedia ultimately curtails to the Western world, as it's moderators and editors largely make up the same hegemonic viewpoint. And Wikimedia doesn't have to do indexing of the entire web, which, at minimum, requires substantially more compute power than they currently use.

EDIT: It's also worth mentioning at this point that a project to "fix the Internet" is probably low on the list of things to "fix" right now. So any leftists taking on the challenge should be aware that they're spending gobs of resources and time on something that only the upper-tier of individuals care about in this world. Time and money would be better spent towards humanitarian aid as people get displaced due to climate change. Or in funding revolutions for areas of the world that are ready for it. By no means am I suggesting we should do a Google rewrite. I'm simply pointing out that everything we should have predicted capitalism doing to information is coming to pass and while things are shitty, they'll definitely get shittier and we shouldn't be surprised. Nor should we really care much, IMO. Because the core issue is just the contradictions within capitalism manifesting themselves into the Internet. Trying to fix the Internet is working backwards and, frankly, will probably be a fruitless endeavor. We Marxian-read leftists should know better.