Seriously, if you guys don't start liking AI soon and letting corporations use it to replace intellectual and creative workers, then it will have no practical adoption except for mass surveillance, which means we won't be able to hide the fact that its something we developed just for mass surveillance

The Harrington tendency is dead in DSA, we literally passed an anti-zionist resolution at convention last year, members can be expelled for supporting Zionism.

I mean, its understandable. People were commenting about how much they love Dalí before I came in. As much as maybe I would like people to spend more time with other surrealists, Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Jean Míro, and the criminally underrated Honoré Sherrer; Dalí has had a lasting effect on people. I'd much rather have someone appreciate art or an artist I don't like for reasons they can't quite describe, than have them not appreciate art at all! It opens peoples minds more than an association with this or that ideology might close them, IMO!

People also don't want to face how separating the work from the worker is how we all get screwed over, its such a natural state of society that we have internalized it without realizing how anti-human it really is. And the hyper individualism that we are brought up in, people do this unconscious calculation of: if Dalí is a fascist, and I like Dalí, then I like a fascist, and i dont like fascists so DOWNVOTE!! -- when the actual social relations are much more complex than that. I'm kinda used to having controversial opinions, even among those who largely agree with me! I think maybe I get a charge out of it, so for that reason alone maybe is worth the down votes.

I guess I'd like it if people looked up non-fascist surrealists, to appreciate in addition to Dalí. But separating the art from the artist in surrealism is so contradictory. Its not like they just painted flowers or houses. They're like "this is what the inside of my mind is like" which is very compelling, and by definition, inseparable from the artist whose mind is being depicted in their own work

How dare you call me a racist? I'll have you know I have several friends who are cuban

I can def appreciate that, I'm sure that is what you mean. But sometimes when we say something, people hear something different. I dont wanna nit-pick your meaning, and we were talking about Dali. I just feel a lot of affinity for people who are silenced in society, and "stop being so sensitive," which isn't what you said, is often used in exactly that way.

Thats not butt play, its butt serious

5 ANARCHIST ZIIIIIINES

Def appreciate the thoughtful response. I agree in principle but disagree in premise. Like, I agree that there is a social problem where people are too dismissive of other peoples viewpoints, often going to the extremes of trying to categorize other people's arguments as fascist, when the person stating them probably isn't a fascist, they're just confused.

I think in general, society encourages people to be too abstract in our treatment of other people. We are so quick to shunt somebody in a category, and of course we can cite all these rationalizations and evidence, and the effect is just continued division within the people who pay the price for bad or draconian policies. Everything comes down to personal responsibility, whether you're for or against a certain view. And thats just not entirely true. There are myriad social causes for individual behavior: poverty, privilege, racism, sexism all have deep institutional causes and effects. In my own experience, I was raised in the country and had many "right wing" views. But my friends, who were more progressive and educated, accepted me, and over time, changed my mind, which opened the door for me to try and learn more and change myself.

So its really important to me when broaching a political subject to be tuned into the people I'm talking to, to take into consideration where they're coming from, to listen and be flexible.

Fascists (and billionaires) are intentionally pushing a message of "empathy is weakness." I find the claim that "people are too sensitive" to be the younger sibling of the more explicit claim. To me, empathy is a way of sensing truth in the world. Fascists want us to be less sensitive, so we aren't sensing what other people are experiencing, because most people if we knew, would feel empathy and want to change things. Ive seen the argument that it is merely arguing against "selective empathy," which I dont condone in principle, but in practice it usually means having empathy for the stockholders, rather than the people being harmed by political and economic policy that serves the stockholders interests.

I know what you mean, ive found people to take things very personally when I try to address certain issues with them. But returning to Dali, why is he so celebrated? Its fine that people like it, the philosopher Heidegger is still taught in universities and he was a straight up card-carrying Nazi. But Dali was, other than being kind of a slut for attention and self aggrandizement, not considered one of the surrealists in his own time. Yet now he is synonymous with surrealism? His own prestige replaced the entire movement, who included many socialists and antifascists. He was a vocal supporter of the Franco dictatorship, and of Adolph Hitler. Why does his art keep getting promoted as a leader in the surrealist movement? Is it talent, or is it hegemony?

Culture matters, because it affects people on a level that politics and academics can never. The Italian intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, theorized that culture was where most people got their morality. Unfortunately, the people with the power to promote culture, promote the culture that they want.

Given how closely those people cleave to fascism in recent years (if not always) and how monopolized the culture industry has become in the last 30 years, I think it is definitely concerning to see which artists are promoted and which ones are relegated to obscurity. So the question is: is Salvador Dali's work actually so important on a cultural level, that his personal views, which were rejected in his own time, aught to be acceptable in our own? Without being "too sensitive" I think that culture matters, and who is behind the dissemination of popular culture, and the currents which resist hegemonic culture and what it represents, are all extremely important considerations.

It's relevant information imo. The whole "separate the artist from the art" is such nonsense. The only people who want to separate the work from the people who create it want to get rich from somebody else's work. There is a dearth of surrealist art that is largely antifascist, but the only surrealist artist that most people are aware of is by a fascist who was rejected by the rest of the movement in his own time.

Art isn't just a picture or aesthetic experience, it is a relationship between the world and the people in it. You can look at art throughout history to understand culture, and culture is where people derive their sense of morals and truth. Fascism, by its nature, works to dissolve truth and culture into relations of naked exploitation. Dali was a good painter, but there's no shortage of principled criticisms about whether he was a great artist. So he doesn't objectively have amazing art. On the contrary, objectively, he was quite shallow and self-obsessed, and if art imitates life, what it is his art imitating -- the world around him, or the shallow and self obsessed artist himself? Perhaps that is the root of his fame, its incredible lack of substance promoted by a class that does not value substance, since substance is not a consideration in profit.

Dali was a fascist

training

You know which police department was nationally regarded as the most well trained PD in the country re: deescalation prior to 2020? Minneapolis.

Lack of training isn't the issue.

Incredible how "its not x its y" is being weaponized against critics of the establishment. Like, I really couldn't give a shit about Hunter Biden, he's a joke. Also fuck AI, I wouldn't defend it.

But what you're describing is a teaching method. Just because it gets aped by ai doesn't mean all comparisons are AI. Paulo Friere uses it heavily in his pedagogical method. It was also the name of a book series on teaching methods.. Both were written years, even decades, before the invention of generative text.

Its a basic way of explaining complicated concepts, where you not only have to describe what something is, but what it isn't. You are using a negating method by saying that the text of this tweet is actually not worth considering, because it was generated by AI. Its rhetorical sophistry, presented without evidence, to create confusion and cheapen people's ability to explain or understand complicated concepts, and criticize our own reality.

I dont agree with all of his points, but your argument is cheap and socially toxic.