President #HoChiMinh is a figure with universal stature, a great #revolutionary who fought tirelessly for the best for #Vietnamese people and #humanity, and a very great but humble man Dr. Ruvislei González Sáez.
Saez, who is also VP of the #Cuba#Vietnam Friendship Association, affirmed that the great #ideology of President Ho Chi Minh, one of the most important figures in the 20th century, remains alive among the 100 million Vietnamese people & world #revolutionaries.
"Two common goals of these cosmetic 'normalizing' surgeries on children’s genitals are to enable #heterosexual penetrative intercourse, and to help the child #conform to #gender and sexual norms"
@Wuzzy all forms of nonconsensual genital cutting should be banned, including penile circumcision and medically unnecessary intersex surgeries. Right on.
#AI#AGI#ComputerScience#Hype#Ideology: "This introductory essay for the special issue of First Monday, “Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power,” considers how power operates in AI and machine learning research and publication. Drawing on themes from the seven contributions to this special issue, we argue that what can and cannot be said inside of mainstream computer science publications appears to be constrained by the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists. The result is that shaping discourse about the AI industry is itself a form of power that cannot be named inside of computer science. We argue that naming and grappling with this power, and the troubled history of core commitments behind the pursuit of general artificial intelligence, is necessary for the integrity of the field and the well-being of the people whose lives are impacted by AI."
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Polarization#Ideology: "Today, we live with the irony that the intense pitch and total saturation of political conversation in every part of our lives—simply pick up your phone and rejoin the fray—create the illusion that important ideas are right on the verge of being actualized or rejected. But the form of that political discourse—millions of little arguments—is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation. We mistake volume for weight; how could there be so many posts about something with no acknowledgment from the people in charge? Don’t they see how many of us are expressing our anger? These questions elicit despair, because the poster believes that no amount of dissent will actually be heard. And when that happens, in any forum, the posters blame the mods.
The mods do have supporters: “normie” liberals and conservatives who still put a degree of faith in the expert and media classes and who want, more than anything, to restore some bright line of truth so that society can continue to function. A central question of our current moment is whether that faith is enough to unite a critical mass of voters, or whether the medium we have chosen for everything, from photos of our children to our most private conversations, will simply not allow for any consensus, especially one that appeals to a population as broadly complacent as the American consumer class. Normies, who are mostly unified in their defense of the status quo, still wield a reasonable amount of political power, and they will continue to exist in some form. But, as even more of our lives take place within the distortions of online life, how much longer will there be a widely agreed-upon status quo to defend?" https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/arguing-ourselves-to-death
People who are so eager to #police some #ideologies often neglect to figure into the calculation just how many people want to police their #ideology, and just how few people actually share their exact views outside of their social bubbles. This uneasy agreement among #Americans to keep the state out of what you believe isn't as bad as you think.
Zizek explores many different ideologies that crop up around the topic of ecological disaster.
I don't agree with everything he says. I'm sharing this nevertheless, because it made me think if the reason for my objections is due to the text hitting too close to home.
@jackofalltrades yeah he seems to boil it down to the individual vs the systemic trope that is used everywhere else. I know my individual actions don't mean shit in regards to the whole b/c we need systemic change (needed it 30+ years ago) to really make a dent. But I am also not just going to bitch and moan about what rich fucks are doing. I am learning to collapse now to beat the rush so hopefully my kids (and theirs if they have any) won't be entirely fucked.
Is there any merit to framing conflicts of the recent past in ideological terms?
For example, the events leading up to WWII could be described as #fascism vs #communism, until you learn about the economic and military pacts Bolsheviks made with Hitler and Mussolini.
Sure, Brownshirts were fighting communists on the streets of Berlin, but once each side captured their own state, differences were set aside for the greater project of making their respective nations stronger.
The “checks and balances” part of particularly American liberalism is primarily about managing intra-elite competition and making it procedurally difficult to change the status quo.
American political culture has fetishized this set of elite management tools as some intrinsic good, as if what we really need are more filibusters to stop incredibly popular political programs that threaten the interests of wealthy elites from being enacted into law.
Yes, as Madison noted in Federalist #10, members of his class had been complaining about people voting for things they didn’t like and worried that any democratic process would inevitably favor the majority of the poor over the interests of his elite class. He instead proposes a republican system that would, for example, prevent debtors from voting against creditors to eliminate their debts.
This is why the constitution, an illegal coup against the US government, contains so many counter-democratic mechanisms (the senate, the electoral college, the 3/5 compromise, etc) designed to make it nearly impossible for popular majorities to change the status quo in ways unfavorable to elites.
As the United States faces yet another showdown over the federal debt ceiling, we examine the roots of the conflict by looking at the "North/Paul Strategy," a decades-old plan to provoke a financial collapse and then seize power. Rooted in libertarian economic theory and Christian Reconstructionist doctrine, Gary North and Ron Paul's ideas laid the foundation for the Tea Party and later, January 6th.
Dave chats with James Scaminaci III, a scholar and expert on Fourth Generation Warfare, and Frederick Clarkson, who has been studying religious extremism for decades, and is an expert on the New Apostolic Reformation.
They look at why economic eschatology is a persistent feature of American political life, and how we might break the vicious "cycle of doom."
Great interview. I especially liked the part where he connected energy-blindness of mainstream economics with its ideological role in maintaining contemporary power structures.
However, an important data point is that Germany's energy-intensive production dropped 11%!
Money (and thus GDP) is such a poor measure that lives separate from physical reality. As long as energy is abundant globally and supply chains function as usual, any local disruptions can be papered over, especially for a rich country like Germany.
We, the artists and patrons of #music in #Australia, condemn in the strongest possible terms #Knotfest and the headliner of this year’s tour, #Pantera.
Pantera’s singer, #PhilAnselmo, has been documented on multiple occasions to be promoting #whitesupremacist/fascist/neo-nazi #ideology. These actions have led to the recent cancellation of a great many of the band’s concerts in #Europe.
It seems that young #women (perhaps influenced by the #MeToo movement & #feminism more generally) are becoming more 'liberal' on issues from #migration to #racism when compared to males of the same age.
John Burn-Murdoch (FT) argues while this has been relatively down-played due to young people's relative lack of engagement with formal #politics (they vote less), this shift in the #gender patterns around #ideology may start to have a major impact on #politics in years to come.