Comment by slg
11 hours ago
I made a substantive point and you immediately dismissed it like this. If we're judging people's "technique" here, your reply to me is much more questionable than my reply to you.
11 hours ago
I made a substantive point and you immediately dismissed it like this. If we're judging people's "technique" here, your reply to me is much more questionable than my reply to you.
Sure: yes, the true leftist answer is to abjure any and everything used by the enemy and sequester ourselves in glorious seclusion, but so long as we’re stuck in the machine, it’s nice to be able to carve parts of it out for ourselves.
It’s also nice, when and where available, to create the conditions to allow people to discover the way to our glorious commune on their own without giving them a purity test ahead of time, and for that kind of thing, I find uncensored information access and defanging corporate tools to be both laudable acts of praxis.
> it’s nice to be able to carve parts of it out for ourselves.
My original point is that you lying to yourself if you actually believe you're carving part of it out for yourself. But either way, it's clear from the tone of your comment that you don't actually want to engage with what I said so I'm leaving this conversation.
I think there’s a fine line between systems thinking and cynicism. Whether or not a revolution is required, it hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t seem imminent, and so my tendency is to take incremental wins where I can - to engage with the world I find myself a part of today, as opposed to the one I might prefer to be in, wherever I see the possibility to bring this world more in alignment with the one I want. I don’t find the arguments against doing so to be particularly compelling, and that’s not for lack of exposure - I think a lot of the failures to bring about the utopias implicit in grand philosophies is owed to standing too far away from the crowd to see the individuals.
What are you talking about, substantive point? You elided the body of their comment, imputed to them a straw man belief in “unbiased AIs,” and then knocked down your straw man.
So who doesn’t want to engage with whom?