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People put way too much weight on the “power of human ideas.” They think if thee is a “free marketplace of ideas” then naturally the best ideas spread and take over. But that’s not how the real world works at all. The ideas that are propagated are those that reflect what is “going around on the ground” to speak, not whether or not the ideas are actually good or bad.
Oh so you like the Internet eh?
It’s just a fad, it’ll go away.
I remember when people used to tell me that.
Well the reality is that democracy is a shitty form of government to. So the internet helps fight shitty forms of government. The problem is that the internet doesn’t seem to help provide good alternatives. It is essentially indiscriminate on what replaces the currenty shitty form of government, even if the replacement then restricts the internets ability to fight the new shitty form…
Arab Autumn
They found out how gullable religion has made Americans. They will literally believe anything and fall in line like sheep.
“A Republican would eat a steaming bowl of shit if it meant a liberal had to smell their breath after”
How has it been weaponized against democracy?
It’s still the best way to get info not filtered by MSM. There’s a reason politicians in both parties are calling for increased social media censorship.
Haven’t you heard? Unregulated communication is our biggest threat. It tricked people into voting for the wrong candidate, which proves my point.
Its much more complicated than that, and yes contemporart information sources (i.e., the internet) have absolutely been weaponized by both state (Russia should come to mind) and non-state (say, ISIL, energy companies, etc) actors, as has been detailed in tens of thousands of pages of research and independent analysis focused on digital forensics. And its not just about the content (i.e., the ideological, cognitive apsects). It’s also about control of the infrastructure - think media capture by oligarchs such as Musk or the reverse enginering of social media algorithms by countries like Russia to reach as many people as possible.
I would argue it’s disingenuous to equate the activities of the two American parties in this field. If you were to take a comprehensive look at what they’ve been doing, there is a clear difference in their approach and intent. Where the Democratic Party wants to curtail the influence of foreign authoritarian states and local oligarchs by limiting their ability to spread disinformation, Republicans have been actively undermining these efforts, including by going after US agencies (such as the GEC) and independent researchers at NGOs. Why? Because these agencies and NGOs are exposing their lies and labeling their messages as misleading and dangerous. They are also exposing how aligned the Republics are with foreign authoritarian states.
Granted, I’m a bit biased. I’m one of those researchers. And dealing with SLAPPs and other measures by Republicans and their proxies has been undermining information integrity significantly in the last two years, within and without the US.
You’re absolutely biased, and spreading disinformation of your own. People in the US are much more likely to be subjected to disinformation and propaganda from their own government online than any foreign actor. It’s not even close- we’re being flooded with state propaganda from the US astroturfing farms, compared to a trickle from outside sources.
And it’s false to claim the Democrats are attempting to censor for our well-being. Whenever their activities are revealed in leaks or fulfilled FOIA requests, the vast majority is revealed to be censorship of criticism or dissent, or censoring anyone countering the state narrative. Truth and public good are not on the Dem priority list anymore than it’s on the Republicans’.
And worth noting, these censorship efforts are illegal. This is a crime spree.
It seems I am “absolutely biased” whereas you are clearly absolutely objective. My mistake!
He’s a known russian troll.
They’re not even good at what they’re doing, must be a low level troll :-)
Elon Musk happened. Twitter’s staff banned Trump after 2020 elections, but (luke warm take) Musk bought Twitter to reinstate Trump
Musk bought twitter to attack progressives in general. He then used it to empower whoever he wanted, and he saw Trump as a means to an end.
Well, Kraut of all people should know how one can change their mind in the span of a decade.
Context?
Kraut (then Kraut & Te i think) was deep into Gamer Gate and Europe’s far right, a large chunk of his video’s were political commentary. I believe I first learnt of him through the “XY Einzelfall” video by Shaun. One day I read a comment saying Kraut response was pathetic, leading me to a Destiny stream where he defended the map, not believing that all the cases on the map just “magically vanish” under scrutiny. There apparently was a video he made in response too.
You can no longer find the stream or video, the only hint being this reddit post, with one comment mentioning Kraut was on the stream. Kraut rebranded himself and deleted his past videos in the process. This is just hearsay, but I heard he was attacked really hard by the far right after attacking their own for pedophillia. He left political commentary and made history videos instead, though there are still hints of Islamophobia and Racism in his videos, or common jokes just earn more criticism because of his past. I can’t say, I don’t watch them. However he definitely isn’t nearly as much right as he used to be.
Yeah, how is that going in the Arab Springs countries though? Was that actually a glorious people’s uprising, or just another despot using an angry mob to do his bidding?
amazing how at the drop of a hat the mainstream media will shill for de-anonymizing trolls when someone makes fun of a corrupt politician
…it has?
I thought countries like China, Iran, India, and Pakistan ban access to social media and the greater internet because of the threat it still poses to information being shared and utilized by common citizens.
I’m fairly certain the flow information still has a net positive despite attempts to crackdown and control online interaction both from corporations and governments.
Pakistan’s PTI is still alive despite being stabbed by the military because they can effectively reach their voterbase via the internet. I don’t think anyone has actually taken a picture or video of Imran Khan ever since he was thrown in jail, yet he is as popular as ever.
It’s almost like They realized something…
We let the normies into our spaces.
There’s a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don’t pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
Anarchism is the worst social order, except for all others that have been tried.
Anarchism can’t defend itself. That’s the point. Either it gets coopted and recuperated under capital, or it gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes.
While Marxism-Leninism gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes and gets recuperated under capital after that.
The USSR lost the Cold War, but there’s plenty of ML counties still around. I’m sure you’ll whine they aren’t paradises, but they’re all generally progressing and developing in a positive direction (when they aren’t being strangled to death like Cuba)
Not a lot of anarchist spaces by comparison. There’s the Zapatistas and they’re pretty cool, but like, the record is pretty clear.
And before the end of the cold war, USSR was a reactionary country governed by an elite for its own interests. It’s the same in China. The same in Vietnam, the same in Cuba (but at least there they have the excuse of the unjust US politics against them).
Eliminating homelessness, eliminating illiteracy, eliminating hunger, increasing life expectancies, increasing graduation rates, increasing quality of life, actually existing socialist countries accomplish incredible things (some more than others, admittedly). They’re not perfect utopias, but you can’t ignore the context they exist within (i.e. they’re still developing countries and they exist within US global hegemony)
I’m sure you have some specific criticisms of China or Cuba or whatever, but they’re doing pretty fucking good considering what they’re up against.
While you keep on dreaming of utopia, I’m more concerned with defeating than US empire in the real world. Anarchism can’t.
Capitalist countries did the same thing without building walls to stop their population to flee…
I mean, anarchism was the initial state, so it has been tried. It seems that it is not very resilient against being replaced by other systems, so it can’t really be the best system in the real world.
Unlike the resilient anti-capitalism of Marxist states amirite.
It’s almost like you need to learn and evolve from the mistakes of the past to create systems that work in the present.
For example, when white colonizers land on your shores, don’t ignore them and start an escalating series of tribal wars to sell them war-slaves.
Also, maybe don’t have slaves.
See? We’ve already improved on proto-anarchism.
It was never not being weaponized, and never stopped being a place to organize.
