Was reading a post about the ways workers are resisting AI. It was going so well until I got to:
When we have games industry employees resorting to Soviet-era tactics just to share tips on dodging AI usage–avoiding an overseer that’s literally recording everything they type at their keyboards–what are we even doing here?
Amazing how the Soviet Union keeps on living rent free in the heads of people who are supposedly critical of capitalism, while analyzing capitalism doing capitalist things capitalistically.
This comes up so often that I’ve started to think it’s a sort of coping mechanism to reflect a Thing to an Other as to not admit that it has always been this way.
Anyway, it’s so tiring.
it’s my experience that liberals need the USSR to be totally reprehensible because they can only criticise things by comparison with their ‘opposite’. they love the ‘you, too’ game in spite of how much they scream about whataboutism. this i think is also how you get ‘right-wing is when homosex’.
they’re incapable of immanently or directly critiquing things, so if the enemy of capitalism is not as bad as capitalists say it is then they have to think too hard about it and maybe even turn on themselves. ‘capitalism is when ebil communism’.
Sometimes I’ll be talking to a liberal (like an auntie or someone well-meaning, not someone who is very online or bluemaga) and they’ll bring up “Trump bad” or something (as they do).
Always a bit funny to me whrb I don’t really jump into the dog pile and instead try and steer things toward “well i think it’s important to gave a positive vision for the future and so [bring up some policy or vision that i would rather be talking about]”
Their eyes almost like bulge and twitch when I dont feel like rehashing “Trump bad” after over 10 years of Trump bad.
In the Soviet Union, 70% of the population was employed as secret police, many to watch the civilian population but many more to watch the secret police to keep them obedient to the ghost of Stalin, and yet further secret police to police the secret police policing the policing of the secret police. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed because the majority of its GDP was expenditures on or in support of internal espionage, as it tried to achieve the goal of communism, where there is no class because everyone is a secret police officer, but communism is of course doomed to fail and so they fell short of this goal once they ran out of other people’s money to buy pre-dilapidated concrete in which to house the secret police.
I have actually heard people say this
I’m glad that there are some real patriots out there who haven’t fallen for the Chinese brainwashing of that antifa thug, Chuck Schumer.
Wow this sounds just like Venezuela in my favorite documentary, Parks ‘n’ Rec
They had to invent another country (East Germany) in order to have more secret police to police the Soviet secret police. But then they needed more secret police (Stasi) to police the secret police of East Germany. And then there was a wall and it fell down. The End.
