If you say “capitalism sucks”, you are going to get reactionary thought and action. You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding without tripping the propagandized brain worms.

Extending your metaphor, this is what your average American’s brain looks like. There is a lot of propaganda and social conditioning working against you here.

Colloquial use of the word Nazi is pretty much synonymous with fascist, and I don’t really have a problem with that outside of - like - academic discourse and such.

I’ve felt the same as you and have been working to find like-minded people in my area, and have found some success, so I can offer a bit of advice. Even in deep red rural areas there is likely to be an active Indivisible chapter, and the people who participate in those groups - despite their closeness to the DNC - tend to be on the more progressive side of liberal and more willing to act beyond just electoralism. Usually in the rural red areas they will skew older as well, but there’s almost guaranteed to be younger and more lefty folks lurking in the group chat, they just tend to have less free time to dedicate to it or they may be more cynical about the protests. You can also find leftists by volunteering at places like homeless shelters, soup kitchens, etc. so long as you avoid the evangelical ones. I’ve also found like-minded people at farmer’s markets, though that’s usually a mixed bag, but if you do something subtle to make yourself visibly inclusive like a pin or a t-shirt with a progressive message like-minded people might approach you, but of course you might want to be careful about attracting the wrong kind of attention. Look for more hippie-ish looking folks and you’ll hit more often than you miss.

I’m still working at it but I’ve managed to find a decent number of like-minded people in a much shorter time than I expected by doing some of the things listed above, and this is in rural West Kentucky. Form relationships with the people you find and the organizing can follow.

People who try to convince you that words are meaningless are never up to any good. I’m sure it makes you feel real good about yourself to pretend I’m too stupid to understand instead of smart enough to see that words that are often misused still have meaning.

I would argue even further that genius is something that is cultivated in a person by placing them in an environment that encourages their creativity and is tailored to their strengths.

I believe that authoritarianism is the origin of class. All that it takes is for one person to draw a boundary, state “this is mine,” and then enforce that with violence. There is no end of history. Even if we do manage to create a classless society, there’s no guarantee that it will remain that way. To maintain such a society will require maintenance, and that means identifying and resisting authoritarianism when and where it inevitably emerges. It is therefore essential to have a word to describe the types of behaviour that can result in the reemergence of class society.

Explain.

Which is authoritarian in nature.

Trying to treat the level of authority employed as a policy choice, rather than a response to existing conditions, delegitimizes the use of necessary tools to defend the gains of socialism.

How you respond to existing conditions is a policy choice, and authoritarian methods are not necessary for defending the gains of socialism.

For example, one existing condition in the US is the fentanyl crisis. The US government has chosen to respond to this existing condition by continuing the criminalization of drug abuse and using the crisis as justification for imperialism in Venezuela. The US could have chosen to respond by funding addiction treatment centers and decriminalizing drug abuse.

Another example, an existing condition in China was population growing faster than their economy could keep up (ostensibly). China chose to respond with a one-child policy, restricting reproductive freedom. China could have chosen to respond by encouraging contraception and creating financial incentives and disincentives.

What you suggest is political determinism, implying that there is only one way that a state can respond to existing conditions, when in fact there is a vast range of possibility.

Look, western nations do often hypocritically point out authoritarianism in their geopolitical rivals for cynical reasons, but to pretend that the word was invented for this purpose and is meaningless just makes you look like an autocrat worshipping moron. It’s the same as how Trump supporters after being accused of being fascist insist that the word is a meaningless insult. The word authoritarianism exists because there’s a spectrum between a democratically elected benevolent leader and a ruthless dictator. You don’t want to confront the fact that they may have a point.

All states are authoritarian, some moreso than others. It’s true that some states do cynically accuse others of doing what they do themselves to delegitimize them, but it is completely valid still to single out certain states that are particularly authoritarian, and to compare them to others.

“Authoritarianism” isnt even real

It is difficult for me to imagine how someone could possibly convince themselves of this. What do you call it when a leader consolidates power around themselves, removing checks on their position and making unilateral mandates that are enforced through state violence against all who dare oppose?

The fact that annas archive exists despite how fucked up everything is right now gives me hope. Every time I start to feel cynical about the future I remind myself that there’s people out there working to preserve the art and culture of our modern era with all the most powerful corporations and governments working against them, and they’re succeeding.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Numbering systems all essentially evolved from base 1. People started out keeping track of wheat/barley using tally marks representing a single stalk, then creating different tally marks representing bushels, baskets, etc. More intentionally designed number systems based on things like the number of fingers on our hands came later.

If that were the whole truth you would have a point (at least for Donetsk and Luhansk, not all of Ukraine), but the extent to which Russia was involved in the separatist movement calls their popular support into question. It’s not all that different from how the US gives support to dissident groups in countries it’s interested in destabilizing, except in scale.

I think it’s also worth noting that the pro-Russia separatists are far-right extremists, which I think is quite an inconvenient fact for Russia given their “de-Nazification” justification for invading Ukraine.

You’re so steeped in theory and strategy that you’ve forgotten to defend the universal human right to self-determination. Ukrainians do not consent to being governed by Russia, and that is reason enough for me to side with them.

Said model contains gigabytes of a bunch of weights that can never go back to the exact words of the book.

And yet, the tech bros do have access to the exact words. The only difference is that they don’t share, instead choosing to extract value from it by training an LLM and (eventually, hypothetically) turn a profit. The product is created by processing the intellectual labor of billions of people into a formless amalgam of human creativity, which is then exploited for their private benefit.

If we’re pirates then they’re privateers, and I know which I respect less.

That’s because Dems are capitalists and always have been. Even when they had the support of powerful unions it was only the class collaborationist unions, never radical unions. The Dems were social democrats when there was a strong socialist movement that threatened capital interests, making it necessary for the capital owners to co-opt and redirect it. FDR implemented his reforms in the interest of preserving capitalism, not for the benefit of the working class. He saved the ruling elites from their own hubris, and they hated him for it.

That’s just the imperialists telling on themselves. They don’t consider what is Taiwan’s as Taiwan’s, but as being made exclusively for the US’ benefit.