This type of comment is exactly why I choose to not be active in this site anymore, the essence of why socialism is dead.

Asking for solidarity has been reduced to “forever war” as a cudgel to just crush any sort of reasonable discussion or strategy.

I’ll be honest, your style is absolutely pathetic. Have you watched the last 4 years of garbage grifiting pro-China and pro-Russia narratives that the US MIC is washed out? Haven`t you learned by the “experts” that the US can’t run a real war for longer than 30 days without running out of ammo and the F-35s apparently are a couple of sorties away from just sponteniously combusting?

Who are you when the same Marxist-Lenist pro-China discourse grifters spent a whole fucking month circle jerking a military paradade, apparently the PLA is so fucking advanced the Trump may well sign the resignation papers right now, forget the supersoldiers landing in Gaza, every US Army general gets chills when he sees the stealth figthers and the hypersonic missiles… Its all true btw, I saw it on a fucking CGTN article.

Something must give, either the online ML communities are completely useless headless chickens following other useless grifters or… we actualy believe at least some of this is true therefore you have no excuse. China is militarily superior in some way that is more than enough to use as leverage for a fight for global socialism.

Yet after experiencing this for 4 years, now these explainers have the audacity to once again pull the smol bean China can’t help but finance a genocide and throw away the global working class. We pick the first choice then, we’re all clueless headless chickens who know nothing, following grifters who just say “China good” and “China wins doing nothing” when the reality is the US can snap their fingers and send China right back to the stone age.

Look, seriously and without memes now. If you actualy care, you’d know by now that there are dozens of different actions China could have taken, including and specialy the BDS movement which got global support. This is inexcusable and got nothing to do with this silly childish hyperbole “oh but you’re so naive you think the PLA can just liberate Gaza”, please take your head out of your ass.

Even the smallest anti-Israel actions we demand have been rejected, there is no point using a hyperbole to prove a point. The CPC has proven to be a social fascist party not very different from western left liberals. If this wasn’t the case they wouldn’t even consider allowing the continuation, let alone proposal of neoliberal reformism in China while pushing happy face imperialism on others. I have wrote extensibly about this, but yeah, I take one day to randomly check HB and I get reminded why ML(the pro-China chauvinist version) is a literal meme.

I’m sorry but cherry picking quotes to make the report say something vastly different than it implies.

Not that anybody cares beyond the traditional hexbear vibes based analysis. This shit gets upvoted because as usual nobody cares to read anything, at the very outset this is what they say, emphasis mine:

We began this project with a very different assumption: that stabilizing an ongoing rivalry is not only possible but can serve the interests of both sides—indeed, it is essential if conflict is to be avoided in a bitter global rivalry. The RAND project staff and other U.S. participants are deeply aware of China’s hostile, predatory, and sometimes aggressive actions, and that it is imperative for the United States to stand up to specific forms of bullying and manipulation. Our focus is not on ways to transcend or overcome the essential geopolitical disagreement at the core of the rivalry. Even short of transformation, we did not assume that a comprehensive agenda for coexistence—shifting the rivalry to a much less intense form of competition—was plausible at this stage. We sought in this analysis to assess a much more limited proposition: that even in the context of intense competition, it might be possible to find limited mechanisms of stabilization across several specific issue areas.

As noted above, we began this analysis from the proposition that the U.S.-China rivalry is not the product of misunderstanding or misperceptions: It is driven by conflicting interests, deep mistrust, and a mutual perception by both the United States and China that the other has the goal of disrupting and undermining their power. From the U.S. side, the contest is fueled by concerns about China’s authoritarian governing system and clear evidence of predatory and aggressive behavior across many domains of competition. An effort to stabilize this rivalry does not imply that the United States should downplay the effort to compete and defend its interests or make dangerous concessions in the name of easing the rivalry.

The specific proposals are exactly the type of liberal bait and switch the CPC loves. Who cares about what the US has to say about Taiwan or whatever?

The point you missed about this paper is that it is a thin veiled strategy to appease the Chinese with limited useless gestures while simultaniously openly admitting they have no intentions, basicaly admitting it is not even possible, to back down geopoliticaly and ideologicaly.

This is the epitome of reading shit and seeing exactly what you want to see and its no surprise e.g the CPC goes to the western world and pat themselves on the back when the Europeans applaud them. Yeah good fucking job on that “recognition of legitimacy” so anyway let me bomb every single one of your allies while your you open up your economy to our billionaire capitalists lol.

People like Norman Finkelstein have argued, throughout the genocide and as a tactic to gather sympathy, that it is a genocide and not a “war” exactly because the resistance is incapable of engaging militarily against the IDF in anywhere near the same level, at some point Hamas was killing less than single digit soldiers a day. For most of it there was no “resistance” at all, indeed it was just a genocide and not a war.

Looking at this trajectory and emerging with “Hamas is stronger than ever”, I’m sorry is just self-delusion at best. I do not fault you or anyone, do not take it the wrong way, Its good propaganda, but its one thing to say and another to wholesale believe it. It implies they do not need urgent allies, it implies the world’s continued cowardice is not a factor, it implies their situation isn’t at all desperate.

Wave a magic wand and pretend everything is as best as it can be since Oct 7th. What are you or Hamas going to do about the mountain of rubble that will take 50 years to clear up? What are you going to do about the complete destruction of every bit of key basic infraestructure. Gaza is destroyed and there is not coming back to pre-Oct 7th. This is Israel’s success. They’ve made Gaza permanently unlivable.

One thing the anti-Israel broad left discourse doesn’t understand, or refuses to understand is that humanity isn’t perfectly rational, this isn’t some Paradox game with clear cut “rules”, with a clean list of objectives you can number from from 1-10 and a map with a gold star saying “this is the objective you win or lose if you capture it”. The objective is the normalization of the genocide, again as he would say Israel has repeatedly done this killing sprees, “mowing of the grass” as he puts it for decades, each time with greater scope, greater violence, greater casualties and expansion of their influence.

Again wave a magic wand and pretend its all over now wash it all away as another “operation”, you look at the track record and its undeniably a success for them. Now defining a success as the same metrics as we do, assuming we share the same core ideas of what success looks like is a massive logical fallacy. Nazi Germany was successful in killing the Jews. They just weren’t successful in building their shitty little ubermench fantasy land. Indeed you’d find for many of them the greater goal may as well be irrelevant, they were in it just for the evil(in violence and pleasure) of it all.

I wont even touch the greater scope of Syria and Iran being cooked as these are gigantic victories on their own.

With regards to the “public opinion” keep in mind the vast majority still sees Oct 7th as Hamas committing war crimes. The original mainstream reporting still goes unquestioned by most. The situation is still just as bad and any such repeats will be met with even harsher measures. We know the only way out is complete destruction of Israel and that means a military victory against both civilians and the IDF. There is no such clean war BS. As far as the global opinion is concerned, as much as they hate the genocide, the majority is not supporting Hamas violent resistance either.

Global opinion is just as irrelevant as before, minus everything Israel killed and destroyed which made them feel bad, realistically Hamas still can’t even throw rocks at their tanks or they’re just terrorists.

Another user here once said that even reading a a Michael Roberts blog post is equivalent to getting a phd in economics just to be able to discuss shit.

I’m sorry but given this level of engagement here its no wonder xhs gets to roleplay as both a CN “ground news reporter” and econ expert. Very few people are actualy interested, I’m not calling anyone out but in general, nobody actualy cares about Marxist economics which is why IMO someone like him can sometimes literaly copy paste recycled mainstream garbage e.g monetary theory, mainstream policy, keynesianism, MMT(all garbage anti-Marxism) and pass it off as what “China needs to do” without ever actualy quoting an actual Marxist(Chinese or western) or do so very sparingly. Don’t get me wrong I think his heart is in the right place, its not malice, but its also not correct at all.

I do not know what competent means here I ought to think it should be more than regurgitating mainstream shit. Like how you can tune in to some Youtube CGTN “business” shit right now and hear the same stuff he talks about. Like clearly China isn’t doing socialism and its not realy on a path anymore(IMO) and its why the cracks are showing and instead of proposing taking a rifle and pointing at the capitalist leadership and influence among the CPC they rather daydream about monetary policy giving money to the poor(social democracy) while ignoring this is not a long term solution etc…

They were betting on voters not having any memory beyond like 2 weeks ago, maybe 2 months at best. If they think everyone only cares about the current news cycle than consistency doesn’t matter at all, its all about the appearance of caring about [insert random current issue here] while doing zero to actualy address it in the long term.

In general it is successful as political strategy most of the time as they can control the media in the first place etc…

Literaly not true

https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/new-data-on-global-poverty

If by “global south” you mean “China” then maybe. Otherwise the world is worst now than it was literaly in 1980. Between climate change and the worsening global economy, continuing to pawn off China’s situation as a reflection of the rest of the world is a fatal mistake, like frog on boiling water type of mistake.

The manga and anime industry is actualy important and they are firmly against it. I don’t think Nintendo makes any difference at all in the current stage, maybe in the future. AI fan works are vastly unappealing and several Japanese fan sites already segregated AI works. Making purely AI slop gets view but very little real engagement and sales.

The real problem is China is arguably already the biggest anime related consumer and Mihoyo(the biggest CN anime games maker) is already incorporating AI sadly. Its frustrating because I had a lot of hope for them(Genshin anime etc), but now I see a future China will gladly use AI slop and continue to destroy JP influence. On the other hand CN gets nothing in the long term from this, instead of creating a real manga/anime industry, if they go the AI slop route it will just crash and burn when people worldwide push back against AI. Not like they care, nationalism and all.

Nevermind the random dengist comment trying to beg you to ignore it as some “online minority” literaly because they just found out yesterday CN internet is actualy shit oh no lmao. Specialy bad they even go as far as to claim it was not the protests that forced the CPC to end Zero COVID lol. Someone missed the damn memo because if it wasn’t the protests then it was just a heartless, cruel and pathetic decision that benefited nobody except the very same (neo)liberal urban elites they claim are just a minority.

A fucking parody of a dengist comment, a true time capsule of 2018 lol. The xenophibia and racism is good actualy because guess what, if we trust the plan enough it will be “interesting” to see if they cave “again”.

Wait didn’t they just argue it wasn’t a vocal minority that ended zero covid? Ask no questions!

You`re a yt essayist that makes one essay every 2 years who gives a shit go read a book.

The tweet is nonsense. These countries have been going through this for years now, Ethiopia has been trying to reestructure the debt for years before.

No you do not have to believe the US is making a genuine blunder going after Canada or Europe in an embarassing fashion, only succeeding in part because of their own incompetence and cowardice, in order to come back with the idea the real strategy is to throw fucking Zambia under the bus. Like I am truly sorry but the US could show up with a carrier and bomb these places right now and nobody would care.

The tariff war real goals remain as simple as they were at first glance 6 months ago or whatever. Its stupid Trump trying to brute force his way to an economic “win” because he doesn’t understand how tariffs work, I mean jesus we already went through this he literaly drafted that document with Chatgpt or whatever and people are trying to manufacture some grand master strategy plan? Realy? From the person with half a brain already turned to mush? Please…

AI tools like ComfyUI are already being used by artists to collaborate and bring their visions to life, particularly for smaller studios. These tools streamline the workflow, allowing for a faster transition from the initial sketch to a polished final product. They also facilitate an iterative and dynamic creative process, encouraging experimentation and leading to unexpected, innovative results. Far from replacing artists, AI expands their creative potential, enabling smaller teams to tackle more ambitious projects.

People who attack gen AI on the grounds of it being “soulless” are recycling a tired pattern of gatekeeping. In the 1950s, programmers derided high-level languages like FORTRAN as “cheating,” insisting real coders wrote in assembly. They conflated suffering with sanctity, as if the drudgery of manual memory allocation were the essence of creativity. Today’s artists, threatened by AI, make the same error. Mastery of Photoshop brushes or oil paints is not what defines art, it’s a technical skill developed for a particular medium. What really matters is the capacity to communicate ideas and emotions through a medium. Tools evolve, and human expression adapts in response. When photography first emerged, painters declared mechanical reproduction the death of art. Instead, it birthed new forms such as surrealism, abstraction, cinema that expanded what art could be.

Respectfully this author can go fuck themselves.

“The artists are just wrong” is the epithome of what makes academic Marxists sometimes completely insuffurable.

They use one example of a possibly useful use case for AI while not mentioning at all the already cases we had of AI artists scammers in literal art competitions or mass industrial scale AI art you can find these videos going back years now.

Stop arguing about it being a tool, take your head of your ass and see the actual real world harmful use of AI art. This isn’t a question about it being a tool otherwise we would have crashed out of digital art 25 years ago. Please tell me of the 1995 art competitions where people were fooled by someone taking a photo of an 18th century piece, mushing it together in Photoshop and then selling it as if it was real, successfully.

In the cases where this happened in the past, and it sure always did, art forgeries itself is something that exists for thousands of years, it was never at the level of industrial scale output and threatening competence and frankly it already puts AI defenders at a very bad.

What you’re arguing for is already something that is used for the worst case scenarios with little to not upside compared to traditional methods. You’re trying to find excuses for “best possible use cases” while ignoring the real existing bad use cases right now. Why are we not to make a moral argument? How can one reasonably say a capitalist is stealing from the workers labour but someone using AI to replace that labour entirely is NOT stealing.

But here is the ultimate elephant in the room this person is unaware. AI needs constant new input otherwise it will never be able to produce anything new. It means a constant addition of new data. It means a constant addition of new, unique and novel human labour otherwise AI models stagnate and become useless.

Now where are you ever going to get that human training data? Is someone training a Lora at their PC vastly different from OpenAI and other tech giants doing the same? Again take your head out of your ass, go to Civitai and look at the fact the best models right now have been created and continue to be perfected on top of thousands of unlicensed stolen work.

On that level there is no difference between using it as a “tool”, you’re doing literaly the same shit as the capitalists. If you call yourself a Marxist and ever had the ball to say the artist garment maker is wrong to believe the machine which only real purpose is to give the capitalist another mean to remove him from the fruit of their labour is of no benefit to him then you’re not a Marxist at all, you`re contrarian larping.

What is the upside? That magic machine doesn’t work without the mountain of dead artists behind it continually making new and unique training data. The magic machine has no purpose but to make us more “efficient”, yet this efficiency manifests itself only through either slop or literal scam. The magic machine is disgusting which is why they try to hard to pretend its not the actual Magic Machine doing the work.

God how can you be a Marxist and not see any of that.

If there is any worthwhile criticism to be made about the online ML on these niche lemmy communities like HB-lemmygrad I am sure as well not going to start with such a low bar.

There is tons of things you could say about it but having a discussion on revolutionary defeatism from people at this complete level of dishonesty is just self harm.

What is that meme “but for a brief moment we created a lot of value for our shareholders” but liberalism and them thinking they’re actualy changing the world at all, let alone for the better. “But for a brief moment I felt happy that I was able to cast my meaningless vote and believe change was just around the corner” you say as you sit on a cave eating some wild dog rat in the post apocalyptic WW3 climate change wars or whatever garbage.

Literaly irrelevant Iran is already a BRICS member, literaly got bombed to shit and literaly got Chinese and Russian thoughts and prayers as an aid response as it was happening, tough luck sucks to suck.

Unfortunately “multipolarity” grifters are pretty easy, they get to benefit from US incompetence and generaly just being far easier to just say “evil thing = US conspiracy” and get a lot of people excited. As you well note you don’t even have to be a leftist at all because its just far easier to just agree with the message and ignore the source, specialy if the message is particularly comforting and what we want to hear.

I used to follow these people much more closely years ago, what they were saying about Russia-Ukraine was correct but that quickly became problematic when you see where their real interests line. All those pro-Russia chuds who jerk off to “multipolarity” which is realy just Russian chauvinism and nationalism. Where was a communist ever supposed to believe in this shit? The cold war was literaly about ONE polarity i.e the communist complete liberation of the working class worldwide under one cause NOT these sub-imperialist fascists dividing up the world into their own backyard as the US loses influence.

But again, in that context, just hearing US BAD and this is the only hope because anti-US equals good no matter what can be comfortable at first. But ultimately personally I definitely realized they have absolutely no skin in this game because Palestine was the litmus test and just saying US bad while jerking off to multipollarity shit(e.g BRICS grifters) doesn’t actually help anyone.

As someone who used to give a lot more credit to these slime fucks, I just think unless they were out there demanding Russia and China actualy do something after Oct 7th and throughout 2024 they can go fuck themselves with their multipolarity shit, yeah go write a substack about how Russia and China are just following the great master plan and how this is day 126417th of the continued US defeat towards multipolarity(basicaly every Mercouris video lol) while jerking off how Great Russia got it so good right now.

Nah his downfall started years ago with his stupid undelivered promises. You see, Ironman actualy builds cool shit. Ironman actualy has coolshit to show off. Ironman is actualy competent.

Its been years that people on e.g YT have been shitting on Tesla autopilot being a scam, literaly running over children in tests etc. Then his tunnel shit makes him look like a clown and THEN his silly ass looking space ship manages to explode some half a dozen times.

I don’t think Elon would be able to maintain his early fandom because he is not just about Tesla anymore and even if he was its not 2016 anymore anyway. Tesla can’t compete with e.g Chinese EVs. Just go look at the comparisons and except for arguably performance Tesla is absolutely dogshit.

TL;DR Elon lost everything that made him appealing and even Tesla is shit compared to the overall EV market these days. Even if somehow the Twitter deal didn’t happen I doubt he would be much better now.

99% of business quit investing in AI before they hit big…

You can trust literaly every single election polling saying the reason most people supported Trump was the economy.

Bidenomics shit was just pure gaslighting and democrats are clowns. On the one hand the progressive wing makes empty appeals e.g Bernie’s talk about billionaires etc and on the other hand they were all clapping and dancing because the stock market was rocketing due to the AI bubble. They know what they’re doing, literaly everyone in the top 10% were making money as a consequence, corporations making record high profits due to inflation hikes.

Search yourself on google like this: election economy worse before:2025-01-01

Now whether the report itself can be 100% trusted I mean who knows who cares, at least its consistent with what we knew from both 2024 before and immediately after the elections.

The whole pokemon as “our childhood” angle while just sitting there as Nintendo continues to be one of the most inherently evil companies…

But sure this tweet sentiment isn’t wrong either, take a swing at the right for once.

However, when we are currently blowing past so many climate turning points and the effects that climate change will have in the next few decades is already certain, China using this economic strategy when it could potentially be unleashing its foreign reserves to make massive green energy investments or grant money to countries trapped in IMF SAPs comes at the detriment of billions of people.

You’re extremely correct and just to double down on this I even think you’re somewhat putting it mildly at best. There is no damn long term strategy at all, otherwise how does someone even begin to square this with Xi’s reinforced commitment to opening up the economy, denouncing BRICS as “not a bloc” years ago, renouncing the cold war as being decidedly over, praising neoliberal imperialism(“globalization”) as a no alternative system we can only hope to improve somewhat?

Some people said e.g neolib thinkthanks that China had a “grand strategy” for the ME, go look at Atlantic, CIS, RAND etc etc…

Some Atlantic ghoul says this

Another factor is the Chinese have had a very clear understanding from the very beginning that not all Middle Eastern countries are in need of Chinese financing. They are more so clients of Chinese technology and Chinese products rather than the recipients of Chinese assistance. That is also another element that shapes Chinese thinking when they look at the Middle East: they see partners. They don’t necessarily see countries that are deeply in need of China’s help.

This is something you find in google in literaly 10s flat. Are their analysis right or wrong? Well just look at the damn results, look at the massive ghoulish disasters on the back of these clowns, financing Israel as some grand plan to stabilize the ME? Bringing KSA into BRICS? Patting themselves on the back for doing some BS money printing on their capital built on top of slaves? Building “green energy” shit while shaking hands with the US-Israel? Etc the list goes on and on.

There is no god damn long term strategy because their actions have zero coherent patterns besides doing some good which is immediately followed with something bad. Someone is more interested in using HSR stations a cudgel instead of addressing the massive failure in bringing any sort of progress to the class struggle or addressing the logical conclusion of dengs reformism and opening up in the current climate.

if there was we would’ve seen even tiny crumbles of this over these past 10-15 years, there was none. Maybe Pelosi could`ve been that moment, but yet another issue as I pointed many times, pro-China rethoric can only resort to smol bean excuses, unironicaly while doing military parade porn.

We’ve become the meme, its sad, but China is simultaneously very very powerful, but also riddled with problems, weak, surrounded and incapable of doing literaly anything etc… But wait there is a military parade now, so back to China is very powerful etc… but oh wait we noticed they made another deal with the US, back to China has no options, its pragmatic etc.

Ultimately we’re harsh because China is not acting in their self interest by abandoning the world and global south anti-imperialism. Making excuses and rationalizations shouldn’t come from a chauvinist perspective(“China owes us nothing” dipshits on twitter) unless you’re ready to admit the consequences will also fall on them for not acting now.

Until there is some talk to privatize the SOEs, TVEs, natural resources and land

This is quite literaly what top Chinese economists have been proposing in the recent years. Look at what someone some CPC economists themselves say.

Zhou Tianyong is Director of the National Economic Engineering Laboratory at Dongbei University of Finance & Economics and Director of the Economic Accounting and Innovative Development Committee, China Society of Economic Reform (CSER). He is also former Deputy Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies, Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (National Academy of Governance).

4. Implement household registration and state sector reform

Household registration restrictions should be fully lifted to allow children to access education in the cities where their families work. At the same time, providing diversified housing supply to reduce living costs and improving social security coverage for migrant populations are essential. Together, these measures would support the transfer of labour from low-productivity rural agriculture to higher-productivity urban industrial and service sectors.

SOE reform should deepen through an overhaul of employment systems. Fiscal management should be restructured by placing county-level finances under direct provincial oversight and township finances under county administration. In parallel, merging and downsizing agencies and streamlining non-productive personnel would improve SOE efficiency and the effectiveness of public service delivery.

The share of state-owned assets in total capital should be reduced from 40% in 2023 to below 20%. Alternatively, reforms could follow the Temasek model by using profit margins as the primary metric for SOE performance. Another approach would be to adopt asset profitability as the core evaluation criterion, with most SOEs required to meet or exceed the average return on total capital. For non-monopoly SOEs, mixed-ownership reform could also be expanded to introduce private capital, which is more efficient, as the dominant stakeholder.

This neoliberal garbage is what passes for mainstream economic discussion in some China circles.

You can find more if you care to actualy search for it.