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Comment by sotasota

1 year ago

If you ever wondered what it was like to live during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, well, we are living in the Western version of that right now. You don't speak out during the revolution for fear of being ostracized, fired, and forced into a struggle session where your character and reputation is publicly destroyed to send a clear message to everyone else.

Shut Up Or Else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

Historians might mark 2017 as the official date Google was captured.

I feel like the fact that you are able to say this, and the sentiment echoed in other comments, is a pretty decent sign that the "movement" has peaked. It was just a few years ago that anybody voicing this kind of opinion was immediately shot down and buried on this very forum.

It will take a while for DEI to cool down in corporate settings, as that will always be lagging behind social sentiment in broader society.

I think we're a ways from the severity of the Cultural Revolution.

  • Yes, but it didn't get there overnight. At what point was it too late to stop? We've already deep into the self-censorship and stuggle session stage. With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.

    • >With many large corporations and institutions supporting it.

      Corporations don't give a shit, they'll just pander to whatever trend makes them money in each geographical region at a given time.

      They'll gladly fly the LGBT flag on their social media mastheads for pride month ... except in Russia, Iran, China, Africa, Asia, the middle east, etc.

      So they don't really support LGBT people, or anything for that matter, they just pretend they do so that you'll give them your money.

      Google's Gemini is no different. It's programed with biases Google assumed the American NPC public will accept. Except they overdid it.

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    • With all due respect your opinion was better when it was viewable as pure hyperbole.

      Mao kicked off the cultural Revolution in May 1966. By August the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. That’s 4 months.

      The cultural Revolution was sudden.

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    • It kind of did. There was a civil war in China, Mao pushed out all competing factions, and had complete political power.

      This is a bug in a chatbot that Google fixed within a week. The only institutional rot is the fact that Google fell so far behind OpenAI in the first place.

      I think the ones shrieking are those overreacting to getting pictures of Asian founders of Google.

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  • That's what everyone thought just before every single horrible thing that happened in history. The Cultural Revolution or, e.g., the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. Things change slightly every day and then afterward you realize that everything has gone wrong, right around when people come knocking on your door.

  • Agree but we are pretty much spot on in woke mccarthyism territory, which used to be widely understood as a bad thing.

    • Who got executed/sent to prison for treason? I don’t keep up with current trends genuinely curious if they’re sending people to jail for not being woke

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  • At least they did something about the landlords.

    • What exactly did they "do about the Landlords" other than murdering middle class landlords in favor of an inescapable Fedal Lord that is the Communist State?

      Hiding much or all of the rent on the balance sheet of the State, while paying prison wages for mostly-compelled work and making people live on the edge of resource starvation, is simply barely hidden feudalism and even slavery.

      Where is the people's Government, exactly? All communist governments are only extreme charicatures of Feudalist Lords, free to engage in the worst excesses over people who they demand not only be slaves but give into psychological enslavement. Communism is psychological feudalism, in addition to physical. At least medieval Serfs were free to openly dream of something better.

      Communism is a Three-Card Monte psychological trick that creates Feudal Lords in the Upper Ranks of the State, and abuses the Serf into seeing Serfdom as the most virtuous lifestyle.

      It's not a deep mystery as to why many upper class psychopaths like communism. It seeks to neutralize a lot of feudalist inconveniences, mostly with an origin in the otherwise free mind of the Serf.

    • By “do something” are you referring to mob violence?

      If not, then what?

      If so, it proves the point that we could repeat the bloody collectivist purges of the past should we not learn from history.

    • Do not worry. They will soon enough do something about you too. That's the point.

I have read the Wikipedia article again, and I am pleasantly surprised how more balanced it is now compared to the older versions.

For example, only half a year after the memo, some brave anonymous soul added the information that the version in Gizmodo (which most people have read, because almost everyone referred to it) was actually not the original one, and had sources removed (which probably contributed to the impression of many readers that there was no scientific support for the ideas mentioned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google%27s_Ideolo...

I'd put blame on App Store policy and its highly effective enforcement through iOS. Apple did not even aimed to be a neutral third party but was always an opinionated censor. The world shouldn't have given it power, and these types of powers needs to be removed ASAP.

  • This is a very good point and prescient. Apple, Visa/MC/Amex/Discover, Google Play Store, and even internet backbones are extreme monopolies and now that corporate America has been seeded with social justice crusaders they are abusing their power. Most recently the people who own the pipes of the internet as a utility have been waging war on websites like kiwifarms and straight up banning it off of the clearnet for being "transphobic." This is dark stuff.

People roamed the streets killing undesirables during the cultural revolution. In a quick check death estimates range from 500k to 2 million. Never mind the forced oppression of the "old ways" that really doesn't have any comparison in modern Western culture.

Or in other words: your comparison is more than a little hysterical. Indeed, I would say that comparing some changes in cultural attitudes and taboos to a violent campaign in which a great many people died to be huge offensive and quite frankly disgusting.

Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution? Honestly, are you aware of literally anything about the cultural revolution besides that it happened?

The Wall Street Journal, Washington Enquirer, Fox News, etc. are all just as allowed to freely publish whatever they wish as they ever were, there is not mass brutalization or violence being done against you, most people I live and work around are openly conservative/libertarian and suffer no consequences because of it, there are no struggle sessions. There is no 'Cleansing of the Class Ranks.' There are no show trials, forced suicides, etc. etc. etc.

Engaging in dishonest and ahistorical histrionics is unhelpful for everyone.

  • >Are you aware that millions of people were murdered during the actual cultural revolution

    Are you aware that the cultural revolution didn't start with this? No successful movement starts with "let's go murder a bunch of our fellow countrymen"; it gradually builds up to it.

    • Are you aware that we don't live under a Maoist dictatorship or any system of government even slightly reminiscent of what the cultural revolution developed within?

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Nah, America is past "peak woke".

If it gets Trump 2.0 there might be a hyper-woke backlash though (or double backlash?).

But if there's another Biden term, things will be chill, culturally.

Also, Twitter is dead, and that's where the spirals got out of hand.

  • I agree with this. I don’t like new twitter but old twitter had a chokehold on society that did a lot of damage.

    And yeah this is a lot of why I really hope trump isn’t elected. It’s going to bolster a far left movement like it did last time, to a really scary degree. That and undoing environmental policy, I feel like it will unravel this country

  • In all seriousness, I don't think Biden can make it to another term. Even if we assume he gets voted in, he'll likely keel over walking up to the podium for the inauguration. Let the poor old man rest.

  • Biden is letting a whole ass army of military-age young men into the country and burning all our money in expensive wars that might turn nuclear. He has to be voted out. Besides that, he's so obviously incompetent and senile, it would be a sick joke to keep him in. I figure either way, we're getting trouble. At least if we get someone else, we might have a chance to get our affairs in order, even if there are a few people freaking out about "far right" candidates (aka anyone the uniparty hates).

  • Trump 1.0 triggered the initial woke wave in the first place (he was a catalyst, not a proponent). Trump 2.0 would rather trigger double woke, which will trigger its backlash like woke 1.0 triggered its own backlash.

    Biden as president is boring, which is how I like it. But if you want to rile liberals up, nominate or elect Trump president again, it will definitely drive voter turnout if anything else.

    • No, what triggered Woke 1.0 was a psyop around Occupy Wall Street, years before Trump was even a candidate. It was a diversion used to break up the protest. Since then, corporations have embraced it as a shield against future protests. They engineered this strife and they are likely to lose control eventually as all the hatred they planted boils over.

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You do know that the same time China was having its Cultural Revolution, America and the west were having one as well? With all those baby boomer kids coming of age, 1969 wasn't a calm year anywhere in the world. In China, it meant communism and down with the old culture/elites. In the USA, it meant free love, drugs, and protesting against the Vietnam war.

But this, I don't see any comparison to Google suppressing what images could be generated with AI to any of what happened 55+ years ago.

  • It's evidence of a systematic suppression of white people, with roots in racism and cultural Marxism. Of course you're right that it hasn't escalated out of control yet. Except that whole BLM thing where people burnt down businesses and terrorized cities for months. That's just a taste of what's coming if we don't promote actual tolerance instead of Division Exclusion and Indoctrination.

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  • Like the ones that would have prevented Google's racist, sexist, ahistorical, anti-West misadventure that this thread is all about?

    The strawman meme you cite is designed to keep people afraid and quiet, that's all.

  • This would be a soviet joke where the punch line is 10 years in the Gulag.