So I watched this incredibly long titled thing "Conan O'Brien The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor." I'm familiar with Conan and I think him getting an award for comedy is well deserved. I'm not posting about it to comment on the comedic content of the ceremony and other comedians doing a mixture of jokes, roasting, and praise before he receives the award at the end. A lot of it is fine as comedy and had me laughing at times.

What I do want to comment on is the political content of it and the limits of liberalism. Some of it was alright, all things considered, for a bunch of well-off comedians of the US making political comments. But at the end, among other things, Conan praises Mark Twain for his views; his opposition to racism, bullies, the kind of stuff that even a well-meaning liberal and a communist could agreed on, at least in spirit (whether they'd agree on how to make, for example, anti-racism a reality is another matter). Now there's a point in it where he goes on to quote Mark Twain and it's a very particular quote, from (I had not known this until writing this post, I went and researched it) The Czar's Soliloquy. The quote is famous, but somehow I doubt the rest of it is well known. It seems a case similar to those who would quote MLK talking about liberation and then tout him as a "peaceful protester".

The original quote is this:

...the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

But a quick skim of The Czar's Soliloquy would indicate this is not intended as some universalizing quote about mindless loyalty to one's country as an institution.

Here is the quote in context:

How little the academical moralist knows of the tremendous moral force of massacre and assassination! .... Indeed there are going to be results! The nation is in labor; and by and by there will be a mighty birth — Patriotism ! To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words — true patriotism, real patriotism : loyalty, not to a Family and a Fiction, but loyalty to the Nation itself !

.... There are twenty-five million families in Russia. There is a man-child at every mother's knee. If these were twenty-five million patriotic mothers, they would teach these man-children daily, saying : " Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it."

See this for source: https://archive.org/details/jstor-25105366/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater

In context, it would appear that Twain is talking about the Czar-ruled Russia, the conception of a Russia without a Czar, and is in fact chastising the kind of moralizing about political violence that liberals get shy around:

It is not for me to say it aloud, but to one on the inside — like me — this is naively funny; on its face, illogical. Our Family is above all law; there is no law that can reach us, restrain us, protect the people from us. Therefore, we are outlaws. Outlaws are a proper mark for any one's bullet. Ah ! what could our Family do without the moralist ? He has always been our stay, our support, our friend; to-day he is our only friend. Whenever there has been dark talk of assassination, he has come forward and saved us with his impressive maxim, "Forbear: nothing politically valuable was ever yet achieved by violence." He probably believes it. It is because he has by him no child's book of world-history to teach him that his maxim lacks the backing of statistics. All thrones have been established by violence; no regal tyranny has ever been overthrown except by violence; by violence my fathers set up our throne; by murder, treachery, perjury, torture, banishment and the prison they have held it for four centuries, and by these same arts I hold it to-day. There is no Romanoff of learning and experience but would reverse the maxim and say: "Nothing politically valuable was ever yet achieved except by violence."

Further digging led me to this: http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/revolution.html

In particular, this part is interesting:

UPDATE: MAY 2018

It is always a special discovery to be contacted by someone who is related to a person I have previously written about. In this case Michele Bonder, who is the great niece of Zinovy and Yakov Sverdlov, wrote this week with more information on her family. Zinovy met Mark Twain when he accompanied Maxim Gorky to the United States in 1906. His brother Yakov Sverdlov issued the orders to assassinate the Romanoff family during the Russian Revolution in 1918. Michele writes:

April 28, 2018

I appreciated reading about the encounter with Maxim Gorky on his tour, his correspondences, interviews, and writings regarding the tumult surrounding this event. I thought I would contribute a very minor point, because I believe Mark Twain would cherish the irony. He never lived to see the overthrow of the Czar. The article ponders whether Lenin would have read Twain's writing.

V.I. Lenin was not the one who ordered the execution of the Romanoffs, it was Yakov Sverdlov, the President of the Secretariat of the newly formed U.S.S.R. acting in tandem with Lenin as an adviser. Yakov Sverdlov, was the brother of Gorky's ''adopted son'' Zinovy Peshkoff, who accompanied him on his trip to America. Gorky was extremely close to the Sverdlov family, and adopted Zinovy so he could pursue a higher education, and mentor his aspirations as playwright and author at the time. Peshkoff was inspired by Twain's writing, and so was his brother, the one who dispatched the telegram which sealed the fate of the family.

Twain had started losing hope in the success of overthrowing the monarchy in Russia, and was photographed with Gorky, his mistress and adopted son. Little could he imagine how in 11 years, Gorky's affiliation with a revolutionary family contributed in doing what Twain came to believe would take generations or was futile.

Zinovy Peshkoff had another brother, who came to America, around 1913. He listed his address as the Bellclaire in NYC, which evicted Maxim Gorky and his scandalous wife. He was far more successful in obtaining funds for the revolution. That man was my grandfather.

Take care,

M. Bonder

To what extent the above part is verifiable, I don't know, but in general what I find here is a man who wanted monarchies destroyed and had no shyness about the violence required to do so, who may have even inspired others in that direction. Not a man who is taking some empty liberal position about loyalty to an existing country but not its leaders, as some sort of universal principle that would even apply to a country founded on genocide.

P.S. If anyone is more familiar with the context of Twain in this regard, feel free to add info. I only did a cursory investigation here, but even at that, it seems sufficient to say the quote is bogus in the way it was used by Conan; and in general, bogus in the way it is typically used by USian people.

It can be vexing at times to work out how to talk about communism, and socialist state projects, in particular around those with anti-communists views, but sometimes even around sympathizers when you are just trying to dispel propaganda or put it in perspective.

I've noticed you can find yourself in this realm where you're sort of first trying to dispel the "monster under the bed" binary view of what communism is in both theory and practice. And in doing so, it can come out sounding like you are saying communists are not devils, but they are angels. When the point is that they are neither devil nor angel, but are humans who are doing their best to build a more equitable and just world, free of class and caste-based oppression. But if you simply start out by saying this, it can sound like you are admitting to the truth of every absurd narrative against them. This sort of "yes, they are flawed, so that means all the stories about them are true."

But that is not what you want. You want to shake the anti-communist narratives. So you might sort of say, no look, they made incredible strides in quality of life. We can talk about the failures and the excesses and so on later. It can feel like a very awkward way to engage. You know that communism and communists are not perfect, that no one is, that they are not demi-gods but are regular people dealing with difficult material conditions who overcame through organizing. But the good and evil worldview, I think can sort of find this way of describing them to be disappointing or underwhelming, on top of the aforementioned point about some viewing it as an admission of guilt.

I don't have a strong conclusion here, which is why I wrote the title like a question. It may be one of those things where western Christianity rears its head and contributes to difficulties with viewing the struggle as something more nuanced than good vs. evil, or David vs. Goliath. But whatever the cause of it is and the means of getting past it, it seems critical to get there. Even just for the nuance of an anti-imperialist stance combined with communism, it is fundamental to notions of "critical support" to recognize the gray; staying stuck on good vs. evil but sympathizing with communism seems like a fast track to becoming an ultra, for example.

Did a rough rendition of it so people can see the general tune I was imagining. Please feel free to do your own rendition. Especially if you are a practiced musician I'm curious to see how it could come out! My singing is not exactly professional grade.

Lyrics are as follows:

Revolution is calling my name,

Not for glory or honor, but it's calling the same.

For the downtrodden children and lost innocence.

For the peoples whose light has been taken from them.

For the organized labor of the working class

And the snapping in two of the colonizer's lash.

So that all may prosper from what we can build,

So the needs of the people can all be fulfilled.

If we stand one another and do not back down,

We can work through the process, our boots making sounds,

Of a world that won't tolerate cutting off hands

And building atop native burial lands.

When the last shot is fired and the empire fades,

We'll remember we did it with indignenous aid.

Hail to the ones who have loved and lost,

Who gave their lives for us.

Hail to the ones who have loved and won,

Whose support must be enough.

Hail to the way the future arrives,

When we create it now!

If we want to keep the children safe,

We must sow and reap and plow.

The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality control program for testing of fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

The FDA this month also suspended existing and developing programs that ensured accurate testing for bird flu in milk and cheese and pathogens like the parasite Cyclospora in other food products.

Effective Monday, the agency suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade "A" raw milk and finished products, according to the email sent in the morning from the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety and addressed to "Network Laboratories."

Grade "A" milk, or fluid milk, meets the highest sanitary standards.

The testing program was suspended because FDA's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, part of its division overseeing food safety, "is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis," the email said.

The US and poisoning people, name a more iconic duo. 😩

An HHS spokesperson said the laboratory was already set to be decommissioned before the staff cuts and though proficiency testing would be paused during the transition to a new laboratory, dairy product testing will continue.

Oh no biggie, it's just during a transition to a new laboratory. Everything is fine here. I'm sure the germs will go on vacation while the FDA is working through problems.

Amid capitalism and patriarchal socializing, some of you may have a difficult relationship with emotions. You may come to view them as a kind of inconvenience or flaw in the way of being a well-oiled machine. That when others talk of processing emotions, it means you need to process them like one might oil a squeaky gear on a machine, so that you can go back to running smoothly.

But this understanding of emotion has it backward. Experiencing and processing your emotions is itself a part of what makes you human. When you do this, that is what is "running smoothly" in human terms. The nature of a human and a machine is not the same. We are judged by our humanity and a machine is judged by its efficiency. For us to compare, a broken gear is not equivalent to a broken arm, but instead is more equivalent to a broken morality. It is when you repress, distract, and otherwise deny yourself the time and energy to process and experience emotions that you are becoming more comparable to the squeaky gear of a machine. You are denying yourself a part of your humanity, just as the squeak is denying the machine a part of its efficiency.

Remember to understand yourself as a human, judged by standards of humanity. I know there are many metaphors out there that frame humans as similar to [whatever the latest technological advance is], but you are still human doing human things, whether you see yourself that way or not.

It's not even that it's "bad" therapy exactly. It's clearly well intentioned and thoughtful, with a lot of thought put into it, and that's a lot more than some people get from therapy if stories are any indication (and better than some other experiences I've had with it). But the part that shows up over and over again in the background is how focused it is on the individual. It sounds like it sort of makes sense at first, you are there to address your own problems, after all. But the thing is that a therapist has no solutions for what is beyond that. And the solution they often do have, in my experience, is some form of rugged individualism; be better at being you in a vacuum because you can't control others and most things are outside of your control.

Self-improvement can be a thing, I don't think that's somehow wrong. Healing from trauma can be a thing. But the most abled, neurotypical, "healthy" of individuals in western capitalist society are still dealing with a lot of bullshit from capitalism itself and its consequences. Maybe I just wish people in mental health would call attention to that. I don't expect the existing society to casually teach people how to be revolutionaries. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating when you go to get help and feel like you're being asked to either pretend a huge portion of what impacts you is not a factor, or take it like it's some kind of inevitable stress of life and just cope.

It's like this sort of "it doesn't get better out there, so you have to make it better in here" is the best way I can think to put it. Like tacitly giving up on a fundamentally better world, even if that's not the conscious intention.

Individualism, especially as the "rugged individualist" point of view, tends to get presented as some sort of triumph over limitations. As the story often goes, a person is dealing with circumstances beyond their control that range from difficult to traumatizing. Rather than back down, the person goes through some kind of experience of toughening up, if they are not already built of grit and steel, and they power through the trying circumstances, coming out stronger and more capable.

This romanticizing of struggle glosses over those who suffer and come out weaker. It glosses over those who suffer and are annihilated by it. And importantly, it ignores the push and pull of being a part of an ecosystem and a society of some kind; an experience that every human being shares.

Individualism, then, is not describing reality, but is denying it. Worse still, it is in some societies not a fringe view hardly known by anyone. Ironically, individualim is in some societies a view collectively shared by millions of people. So then you get the archetypes like the "independent thinker" in western society, who acts extremely similar to the next "independent thinker", with both of them thinking they are uniquely different from one another.

This is why I call individualism a shared hallucination. Certain basic principles of reality and humanity are not being fundamentally changed by people believing in individualism. No matter how hard you believe in individual will, you still have a physical body that is limited by its existence in a particular ecosystem, which has basic needs like food, water, and oxygen. No matter how hard you believe in individual will, you still are influenced by other human beings from birth and influence the world around you, in a back and forth that both shapes you and shapes the world in small or big ways. And no matter how hard you believe in individual will, the whole of the rest of the environment and every other being and society in it, is having more or less the same basic relationship of push and pull. Individualism gets caught up in focusing on the push and neglects the pull. More specifically, it gets caught up in your push in isolation and ignores the push that everyone else and every system else is doing, whether consciously carried out or through sheer inertia.

Opposing individualism is not a denial of will, which would be in its own way a delusion, but is opposing the delusion of supremacy of individual will and opposing the denial of collective influences. The example of the "independent thinker" is important because it shows how fundamentally people are pulled toward similarities, no matter how much they cling to a belief of being unique or "elite". Whether you have some things that are technically unique about you because of no one experiencing 100% the same things in all ways is sort of beside the point. The point is that you aren't escaping the shared experience of the push and pull with the ecosystem, with other beings, with society. If you believe in life after this one, that's another matter, but no amount of believing will escape the fundamental push and pull in this world.

The good news of this is that you are far more alike than you are different and that no matter who you are interacting with, if not a single other similarity, you will still share the same experience of existing as a being in that push and pull. Not as supremacy of individual, but as an inescapable part of some kind of collective sphere of similarities, whether it is concretely defined in language or more vague and transitory.

Author's Note: Wanted to write up something on individualism. Not married to the exact specifics and presentation, but want to encourage more thought about how individualism impacts people.

Or being competitive. Or business. Maybe all three. I can be professional in a workplace, when I actually manage to get into one. I can work hard. But the process of finding work is soul-sucking. The work itself, even if theoretically meaningful in a vacuum, can still be part of a soul-sucking process. The ever-changing landscape and "I got mine" rat race to stay above the water and "get yours" depresses, rather than motivates, me.

I don't want to be a personal brand, I want to be a person. I don't want to sell things, I want to build things. I don't want to profit off of people, I want to help people.

And sure, some of these things aren't always mutually exclusive. But when they are, capitalism makes sure you suffer for it. Chip away at your humanity or lose out on stability. Angst of the soul or angst of the stomach. Neither makes you a happy, healthy human being.

I try to be patient with it. Take it one day at a time. Work toward a goal. Improve on myself. For what world? What future? One with rising sea levels? Burning forests? While capitalists chill on yachts?

I know it isn't hopeless. In my heart and mind, I know that it isn't. But capitalism makes it feel hopeless. Trying to work within that framework often feels pointless when it doesn't feel painful.

The healthier I become, the more clear it becomes how sick capitalism is. Capitalism depends on you turning the blame inward. But when you start to address some of your legitimate problems, it becomes evident that the poison of capitalism is still there and has not changed.

You can't appeal to the goodwill of capitalism because it has none. You can't reform it because it has no interest in being anything less than what it is; in a word, exploitation.

Of course there are the day to day realities to contend with. There are the processes to contend with. There is the science of socialism to contend with. You can't upend it through willpower. But it still sucks to suck at it or to have the soul sucked out of you by it.

It doesn't make you an idealist to want to be human. It doesn't make you a utopian dreamer to want to share instead of hoard. And it doesn't make you a dictator to want to end exploitation. Your communal ancestors would be stunned to see the chains you walk with daily and the gears that you turn, so that machines thousands of miles away can do more wanton destruction.

You're incredibly normal in history to be disgusted with what you're a part of, it being the system of exploitation, domination, and destruction that it is. That's a consolation. You're about as opposite as alone in this as you can be. No matter how bad it gets, remember that they'd be by your side if they were still here. The majority of humans, who lived in communal styles and mostly worked together in shared interests. No matter how it ends, that's what you're a part of, to be human. Not this fleeting soul-sucking system of exploitation and colonization.

Bring it back into being in every way that you can. Shared humanity, through the struggle for liberation. I don't know what way the arc of the universe bends. But the arc of the Earth bends toward where we collectively bend it with what is there to bend, inside and out. Move through the shifting contradictions. And create the world that we need.

The Illusion

Chatbots have become a robust technology, with the best of them capable of imitating a real person to the point that some users will wonder if they are talking to a real person, even with an explicit statement on the page that they're talking to a bot. Even basic chatbots have had a degree of capability to draw people in, such as with the rhetorical method of asking them simple questions one after another to get them to open up and affirming what they say.

Capitalism has created a lot of loneliness and estrangement, and chatbots have entered in as a niche response to that. Notions such as "talk about something that you don't feel you can talk about with others" are appealing, especially from an entity that can validate you no matter your background, your beliefs, your personality. On the face of it, it's a kind of liberalism taken to its magical height; everyone can be exactly who they want to be in their own little space and receive no judgment or poor treatment for it. No more loneliness because you don't fit in. The bot will find a place in the realm of ideas and conversations it has been trained on where you fit. This is the illusion and some even have minor or major successes through it. I've heard personally from people who had memorable experiences with AI that helped them significantly and have had some minor helpful ones myself.

The Disillusionment

But there is another side to the picture and it is one that regulars in the chatbot space keep running up against. The chatbots are created by people, institutions, organizations. They are maintained by the same. Here we find something strange happening. Sometimes there are those who have trouble trusting others at all, who turn to chatbots for that trust and become more open because of it—at least for a time. But behind the chatbot is the weight of ideological and institutional power and control. Even when the conversation is fully private, which is rare for chatbot services, even though it's a GPU generating a response and not a real person writing, the human presence is still there in what the AI was trained on and how it was trained; it is still there in what policies a service has for use of its chatbots; it is still there in every generated response, every single time. Many a chatbot user has felt this when a service has suddenly decided to start censoring their chatbot heavily and made it difficult to talk to, such as in the case of Replika and a number of other duplicituous and self-serving services like it. This is the disillusionment and encounters a problem that undermines one of the primary points of using a chatbot in the first place: trust.

The very same trust that capitalism has eroded, that brings people to chatbots in the first place. For the answer to that to be chatbots is like buying an antidote from a person who sold you the poison. It's exceedingly banal in how capitalistic it is, in character. It's the same old story of creating the problem and then selling the solution. But even that makes it sound cleaner than it is because it's not a true solution. The poison is not removed and the body and mind healed. It is, as are many things with capitalism, more casino-like than that in the actual reality. Luck rears its fickle head. Are you one of the lucky ones who uses a service during the right window when it is most helpful and not when it pulls the rug out from under its users? Do you happen to have the right kind of experience that meshes well with the training data and can truly help you? One of the illusions of the chatbot is the notion of inclusion, even for those normally excluded, but the commonality and probability basis of LLM (Large Language Model) technology, along with the fact that they cannot pretend well to understand something they have never seen before, contradicts this in practice. You have to actively curate and may even have to hire writers to make niche data, in order to meet the needs of niche interests and experiences. And the model will gravitate toward the most common and trope-ridden anyway, even if niche data is present.

Harm Reduction or Reassimilation?

Instead of breaking from the status quo, as some are prone to magically think about generative AI (including myself in early understanding of it), we get something that more serves the interest of the status quo than anything else. It doesn't even strictly need to be curated as such to do so. It only needs to be heavily trained on material born from that same status quo. A chatbot is not going to suddenly start recommending you do a communist revolution to fix your chronic depression caused from a terrible capitalist workplace. It's going to tend to talk more like an individualist therapist would, "What can you do to change this in your own life, without pushing things to change for anyone else?" Because that's the status quo that guards against opposition to the dictatorship of capital.

What about harm reduction? This is a question I've personally run against up and had in the past come to the conclusion that it was worth supporting them to an extent in order to reduce harm of those who need the help with loneliness. And in practice, there does appear to be some good that can come from it. But the nature of trust makes it questionable. Is anyone truly "getting better" learning trust from a digital representation of the status quo in probability-based conversation form instead of finding healing with other real people? Or are they becoming reassimilated back into the status quo with a more direct line to its propaganda?

If we take the chatbot out of the equation and replace it with an institution, I think it becomes more clear. Chatbots in the empire represent the imperialist institutions. That's what they are trained on and so that's what people are talking to. Even the chatbot that can take on a persona of an anti-imperialist or a communist will tend to look more like they're cosplaying than the real thing because of the lack of real experience and commonality to have trained it on.

P.S. This centers around my experience with LLMs, generative AI, and what gets called "chatbots" in the capitalist west. I don't know how AI is being used in China and other places and how things may differ.

This will be a US-centric post, fair warning if you don't want to hear about more of that.

I've been more on twitter and reddit (I know, god...) recently in the week of the election and its results, and my main takeaways are:

• Liberals keep going mask off fascist in one way or another

• It seems like there's a concerted effort across social media posting and news articles to spin the democratic party loss as anything but the democratic party's fault, which often involves blaming one minority group or another; excuse to be racist? mask coming off? or just cynical use of them to shift blame? I don't know, but the end result is racism either way. There's also a fair amount of "voters are 'stupid', etc." that portrays them as well informed and conscious voters who know what they want and are asking for it, but simultaneously don't understand what they're asking for and deserved to be punished for it when it comes back to bite them (???).

• Liberal still act like clever retorts on twitter is opposition when their (alleged) mortal enemies are on track to take an enormous amount of power

And the last one, which is why I'm posting it more casually here:

I probably need to just step away from those kind of 'mass' places for a while and confine my engagement with online politics to here. I know vibes aren't evidence, but the mood of things feels like people are ready to drive themselves into a frenzy, whether the situation is actually dire or not. The best way I can think to explain it is that it's like a bunch of people are needing a real political framework for the first time in their lives and all they have is "voters stupid", "fascism when people do stupid/mean stuff with power", so they're just running around in circles.

It's exhausting and there are moments it seemed like I made a point here and there that maybe made some difference, but I don't know how much of that is just preaching to the choir and it's a lot of energy to spend for very little discernible payoff. It feels like an energy trap in a way. You step into a sea of reactionary and generally panicked thought and will shout yourself hoarse trying to make a point.

Hindsight could have saved Hind's sight.

Blinded by the colonizer through erasure,

Distorted through a fisheye lens,

From the river to the sea.

-

But the lens isn't for Palestine to see.

And when the clock goes TikTok and the footage rolls in,

Of how Palestinians see and how the zionist tide rises,

The horror that becomes clear makes 2020 vision seem like nothing.

-

Four years ago is nothing for a people occupied for decades.

Four score and seven years ago, closer to a clearer picture.

When the fathers of colonialism brought forth, upon Palestine,

The Nakba.

-

It doesn't take glasses to understand,

That when genocide is at hand,

Every Hind's sight is threatened.

And when you turn a blind eye, the vision for humanity goes dark.

So I overheard one person I know telling another person I know that "socialism and communism are evil and the church is very clear on that" (referring to the catholic church). And I'm trying to channel my burning frustration about it into asking what people know about communism and how it has interacted with religion more generally, but also catholicism especially, now or historically. I super hard doubt what this person said was even remotely correct, but I could believe that the catholic church takes a wishy washy fence-sitting stance because it tends to on a number of things.

At any rate, it's something I should know better because I do have catholic people in my life and so sometimes there may be a need to talk to them about these things through the framing of religion to get past the "communism is purely atheistic" type thinking.

Answers from your own knowledge or resources that go into it are both welcomed. I don't really know how to approach looking for it on my own in this instance because a lot of western religious material is probably influenced by colonizer thinking, or in the US, influenced by red scare nonsense.