That’s because…

I have noticed a significant decrease in Canadian license plates I see in Washington State. Makes sense. I just wish we could get annexed by Canada and kick out all the California tech workers that moved here.

If I know anything about China; I know they take military action as a last resort. Say what you will of China, but they don’t have a massive oligarch class that is waiting for the next war to profit from.

All they do is “trade max” into everything. There is LESS of a reason for China to look towards military action towards to Taiwan right now. If they were going to do that then there was no better time than literally the last several months with the US stuck in Iran.

I can only see them pushing to military action if the US did something extremely aggressive directly towards them.

The US is falling the fuck off. No one wants to be a US ally right now. Canadians fucking hate the US right now. China knows all it has to do is wait until the US inevitably pisses off Taiwan with its own selfish interests. And a natural normalization between them will occur. China is betting on Taiwanese citizens seeing as being “a part of China” again as more beneficial than not. Whatever “a part of China” ends up meaning.

When western economies fail as their dependence on the US sucks them dry… Taiwan will look at China as a better option if it remains as resistant as it has.

They must have accidentally targeted Hearts of Iron IV gamers with the recruitment ads. They did this to themselves. A mistake in their eyes; but I’ll take a Hearts of Iron themperor over a CoD Nazi anyday of the week.

He’s likely being told to show how he’s using AI in his classroom. The Administration and school that are telling him that are being told to encourage the use of AI in the classroom. The college is being told to incorporate AI in the classroom by donors and the institutions of private and public sectors that depend on capital investors. The capital investors are heavily leveraged into AI in their portfolio and using their other existing capital investments to push AI use in everything they can.

It’s the same reason we got “smart toasters” with a touchscreen and wifi. Any reason or rational that a college professor once had is being overshadowed by these structures. It’s a disease in our society that has existed long before AI.

AI just exposes it so perfectly and so ridiculously. In the past. You could convince someone why they might want their toaster connected to WiFi. It’s ridiculous, but it’s within a realm of reality. AI exposes the lies of incentives of capitalism so clearly. “This image is garbage and not even in a human way. It’s not a poorly drawn or contains a common misspelling. It’s literally hitting some internal feeling of anxiety when I look at it. That feeling of creepy, inhuman uncanny valley. And it will never go away”.

The problem with AI for Photoshop style stuff like this is not really in the outcome but in the ease of use and how easily it can result in something like this. We’ve had the ability to do stuff like this for as long as digital photos have existed. The problem is that in the process of deciding to have an edit done like this you’d at least have to go through another person with the skill. The person deciding on final photos is likely not even involved in the photography, the editing, printing, etc. In the past to do an edit like this you’d have to do it intentionally.

Now, you could literally have a single person tasks with “cleaning up the photos” and they generate some AI edits of a photo suggesting “college campus photo”. The AI is trained on millions of photos with campus website data and those photos have desperately been of photos capturing a white guy with two other non white people.

So, we get this shit. And someone that could be completely unaware of the edit and removal of a real person ends up picking the photo with the “most diversity”. My best faith interpretation is that at least.

But the weight loss of the person on the left is screaming to me that someone just used AI to generate edits and the AI literally just decided “there should be a black woman here” because we’ve trained it to assume that black woman should be in campus photos.

Ironically, it’s kind of AI just exposing our bias to compensate for real material problems (under representation of black woman in higher education due to systemic racism and sexism) by centering our photos around denying that material reality.

Body shaming the girl on the left makes it obvious this wasn’t because of the Gap logo.

I don’t think I missed your point. But we have shifted the goal post. Your comment was about very specific points related to criticism of China and labor conditions and why something like that would get you banned.

My reply attempted to be more general around those specifics. I was attempting to give you a perspective on why “stating facts” would be considered bad faith in a certain perspective. Hence the analogy I gave.

So I may have misdirected the conversation unintentionally. That wasn’t my intention.

I am not even necessarily defending .ml specifically. I don’t spend a majority of my time on that instance. You can see my post history. So, l can concede to being too defensive there. I should say I’m more defending what .ml means for ML (Marxist Leninist). I personally have mostly encountered cridge posts (usually hyperbolic) with good comment discourse there.

My intention was to explain the perspective of a literal Marxist Leninist and why the examples you gave in your original comment would be considered, in any leftist circle, a bad faith argument based on the INTENTION of them. The point of the statistics is to not ask “why are labor conditions like this” but to CONCLUDE that China is some corruption of leftism and “not real socialism”. It’s not meaningful in why it’s being brought up.

No ML is worried about addressing the labor conditions of China. But we aren’t interested in someone bringing up labor conditions in China who’s only reason to discuss is to reach a conclusion that is in favor to the narrative that is the larger problem of American Imperialism and pro capitalist propaganda.

One day, everyone will have always been against this.

It’s a double pointed quote. The first point is that we should be accepting of the masses that have heard our message of truth through the noise of the louder false narrative. The ed Sheeran backlash really was the first major major shift Ive seen in this. I was so use to the “this guy that said ‘free Palestine’ got silenced again” that is was so weird to keep hearing about it the next day. That others stood up in solidarity. It was such a shift from what I’ve seen since 2023. I almost didn’t know how to react to it.

The second point is that we should not allow those that had direct support of this genocide to pretend that they were against it from the start. The Kamala’s, the New York times, the liberal Zionist that spent the whole time screaming “both sides” and “Hamas run health ministry”. They need to be held to account.

And finally, we are not there yet. We are at the “it’s unpopular to support the genocide” stage. We have conquer the messaging and the narratives of those that committed this genocide. But, until we have an actual material impact that allows the children of Gaza a life of dignity and prosperity, we have done nothing yet.

Take this as an inspiration to join the right side of history and work towards the material changes that do actually matter. Because a canceled concert or a poll like the OP isn’t a material victory. It is a symbolic victory. Let that symbolism carry us further in our resistance.

Let that let us welcome those that were decived and have learned from our words. While not forgetting that the criminals, perpetrators, and talking heads (media) that allowed this genocide should be offered no leniency.

We must not confuse these two groups from one another. It is vital to reaching material changes and justice for Gaza and all of Palestine from the river to the sea.

I’d guess there are vehicles that are used for maintenance on the route that would be obstructed by that. The problem hasn’t become so commonly occurring that they have gotten to the point of doing that yet. Simple solutions to uncommon problems are sometimes obstructive to common uses. I’d guess that’s the case here. No one’s bothered to design around an uncommon case that is usually most inconvenient to the idiot that didn’t follow the signs. Everyone else just kind of points and laughs.

If it hit a certain level of common occurrence I’m sure they’d do something more.

Edit: 8 day old thread. Sorry. I don’t know how I got here.

So you have no examples? Like, you don’t even have to link it. You can literally just tell me an example. I’m just asking for the bare minimum here mate.

My feed is full of Linux memes and pro Palestine posts. I’m not the charactercher you’ve constructed in your head.

I would ask you; have you ever listened to an MLs response to these things? I could do that if you want.

But, I think you’re confusing the moderation of an instance to maintain intelligent discourse with a conclusion of “they are denying facts”

I’ll give an analogy. If it helps.

Do you think a person posting “black crime statistics” in any “left leaning” sub would be taken seriously? Would that sub explain to every individual person the relationship of poverty, the relationship of policing black neighborhoods, the relationship of the for profit prison systems? The war on drugs, etc etc etc.

No, they would offer resources to these things. But the sub is not meant to be a place where “technically” style Ben Shapiro types are given a voice. They get banned.

Those types of people would not be welcome in any “liberal” space. They are not there to engage in conversation. They are there to say “black people are criminals”.

This is the same type of perspective that most MLs have on China or otherwise. It is not that we have a cult like view of China or other historically socialist projects.

So, yeah, maybe you got banned. But you were probably the 1000th person posting “statistics” that was never looking to hear the response.

Maybe you were. Maybe you were sincere in asking. But an ML run instance is not the place to learn that. It’s a place for discourse and criticism between people that already have a certain level of agreement in how they analyze the world (dialectical materialism being that method). At least on the level of being able to understand why the equivalent of “black on black crime” is conservative garbage.

If you got this far. I’ll gladly address what you linked. And my analogy is not 1to1. I have major criticisms of China when it comes to labor. But, we need to establish a level of understanding if you are actually interested in another persons perspective.

If not. That’s fine. But, you’re not in .ml. I am trying to have a good faith interpretation of your points. You will get that from good people from .ml OUTSIDE of .ml.

This you?

I really would love to understand where this idea that “Marxist Leninist = Putin supporter”

Marxist Leninist (myself included) hate Putin. Putin is literally the embodiment of western neoliberalism in post Soviet Russia. He was literally installed and supported by western aligned oligarchs and capitalist within Russia.

I really am curious where you get this idea. I’d love receipts. I really hope it’s not just “MLs criticize NATO”. I really really hope it’s not just a binary view of the world like that. I swear people view the world like it’s a football match.

Do you think Russia is still run by MLs?

The increasing rise of Fascism in America and many parts of Europe and you think puting Communist on “a list” for “security” has nothing to do with what that poem was talking about?

When you read the First They Came poem as a guide instead of as a warning. It’s fucking wild man.

I rest my case.

The only thing more annoying than .ml cringe posters are people that make their entire argument “.ml of course”.

I forget I’m from .ml most the time. Until I get a “oh you would say that as a .ml”. It’s pretty helpful for telling me that a conversation will go nowhere.

We allow it for the very fact that without a vehicle an 80 year old person is essentially being given a death sentence in most cities in our country.

I am all for requirements of driver’s license test be met past a certain age. But, we need to acknowledge that it’s not just that. Seniors need alternative methods of transportation. They are driving because that’s all they can do.

Whether this is basic public transportation or major expansion of senior specific door to door transport systems. We can’t just “ban them”. Because then the problem will just be a bunch of seniors just driving without a license or dying alone in their home because they didn’t get their medication that day.