Except for this whole part

If you actually took the time to read my comment, you would’ve understood the context right away. I was very clearly talking from the perspective of the general public. Go to your average American, not even, go to your average politically active young left wing American and ask them about the ICE out strike, and I guarantee you that they wouldn’t know a damn thing about it. Ask them if they knew if the strike was even a thing, ask them if they knew the leaders, ask them if they knew the goals, ask them if they knew how they could get involved in the organization efforts, ask them if they knew what organizations sponsored the event, ask them literally anything about it, would they know any of it? The answer is a resounding no.

You can sit here and try to double, triple, and quadruple down on me being wrong here, but again, the results speak for themselves. You’re literally arguing against reality here. Actually now that I think about it, what in the fuck are you even arguing for? At least I’m providing criticism for improvement. I’m seeing something that’s clearly not working, and I’m providing what I think would produce better results. What are you doing? You’re trying to shut down my criticism without a second thought, actually no, without ANY thought. You’re going out of your way to defend an event that was objectively a failure. What for? This is precisely the time for internal discussion and criticisms, because that’s how movements grow… and you’re saying my criticisms carry water for fascists? Man, shut the hell up. You’re literally standing in the way of progress. If you’re not actually planning to help refine or expand the efforts here then just get out of the way.

Look, I gave it a pass with your snarky restatements. But this is just gaslighting.

You know it’s ironic because you’ve been providing nothing but snarky statements

Good. Hopefully you’re not busy being snide and gaslighting with them.

Do you seriously not see the irony here?

I’m not wrong, the results speak for themselves. Are you going to honestly sit and here and actually argue that this was a great success? It’s disingenuous. There was no impact whatsoever.

And repeating this the futility of it all is exactly how you support the current tyranny facing us.

No, you’re supporting this fascist administration by naively and arrogantly doubling down on something that’s clearly not working. We’re not going for participation awards here. We want real, tangible results. The reality is that this sort of shit is just performative and it does nothing as you clearly see, but it doesn’t have to be like this. These efforts could be so much more effective if they worked to apply pressure locally first before attempting to go nationwide.

You seem so frustrated that people are patting themselves on the back for sharing jpegs, yet you sit here doing significantly less than the bare minimum. You are working against it.

Quite the assumption, wouldn’t you say? I wouldn’t waste my time arguing with you if I didn’t believe in what I said. I’m actually active in my the efforts of my local community, which is why I can see things clear as day. Democratic movements have to be built from the bottom up to produce real change. A simple 1 day strike from any profession, like teachers or nurses, in a single city like Boston would have more impact both in the short and long term than faux “national” strikes like this. Why? Because that concentrated pressure will actually cause the people to notice and the people in power to panic. That’s real pressure, it actually disrupting the local economy in a serious way.

Me: “These hollow performative stunts have no impact and resulted in zero results. We need to work establishing a real opposition with true roots to get actual results in the most effective way possible!”

You: “iS tHiS fAsCiSm?”

Like come on, you gotta be a troll. There’s no way anybody is dim enough to think a small collection of individuals posting random “national strike” pics on Reddit and Lemmy is going to actually produce anything substantial nationwide. It’s Jan 31st, we literally saw this fail because it wasn’t a real attempt to begin with. Nobody knew about it, nobody is backing it, nobody is leading it, there’s no goals, there’s organization, there’s no coordination, there’s literally nothing… and what do you know? Nobody fucking participated. How much further into tyranny do we have to slip before you mouthbreathers understand that you can’t virtue signal your way out of authoritarianism.

I’m not giving steps, I’m merely stating a very basic fact. Movements need substance, that’s just reality. They need foundations to stand on to do anything meaningful. That’s the most basic of observations.

Like do you seriously think that the civil rights movement happened overnight because MLK decided one day to do a big march and everybody decided to randomly join? No the civil rights movement and all the other movements in history took decades of independent grassroots movements organizing, mobilizing, and coordinating with each other. That’s how they eventually consolidated to form unstoppable national political force.

You can be butthurt at what I said or deny it all you want, but reality isn’t going to change because what I said is a simple truth. If I was wrong then something would’ve happened today, but nothing did. January 30th is already over, and there was absolutely no impact or buzz surrounding this “strike”, not even on social media.

I realized years ago that the progressives in this country a complete joke. They constantly put their own careers ahead of the greater good, they talk big but their actions never match, when push comes to shove they cower, and the most infuriating thing is that they always choose to uphold the status quo.

If they were the real deal then they would’ve worked day and night to build a coalition to stop Trump in 2016, but they didn’t. They would’ve build a strong opposition during his first term and stopped him from passing anything, but they didn’t. They would’ve use their opportunity under Biden to prosecute Trump and his gang of criminals after Jan 6th, but they didn’t. They would’ve at least fielded real candidates to stop Trump from returning, but they didn’t. Now that Trump has been in office again and literally dismantling the country, they’re still not doing shit. I lost all faith in them. If change were to happen it has to come from the people.

You can’t go from 0 to a 100 and expect results. The national strike that the post is talking about is going to result in absolutely nothing. Barely anybody is going to participate if at all.

Why? Because most people aren’t even aware this is a thing, and to the small minority that is, they still won’t participate because they’re going to be the only people doing it. If one or two people from your workplace participate, they’re going to be penalized for not showing up. Same goes with boycotting or whatever else is planned.

My point is that there is currently no foundation to support such a strike. You can’t scale up if the people aren’t mobilized and onboard. How about instead of calling for a national strike, you work to convince your local unions to buy in? Two people participating at a workplace will do nothing, but if 70% of workers don’t show up at then that means something. It will send a message to the local community and might even make it to the local news. Then from there you coordinate the unions and other orgs (churches, schools, universities, nonprofits, etc) to organize a city wide strike, then a statewide strike, and then a regional strike, and if that succeeds then you can think about doing something on a national scale. However, trying to skip all the steps usually doesn’t result in real change, which is what’s going to happen here.

This won’t actually do anything.

In order for a strike to be a strike, it need to be organized and it needs to achieve a specific goal. If there’s no demands then it’s not a strike, it’s a boycott or a walkout.

Currently there is no movement, just a national level reaction. A movement requires leadership, a significant level of coordination and mobilization, very specific set of demands and goals, and an underlying message/philosophy that is backed by the general public. We currently have non of this.

In order to get to the point of a national level general strike, there needs to be a series of much smaller strikes that do all of the above, and have those localized strikes merge with each other to eventually have the size to pull of a national strike.

You know you can still make your point but use the correct terminology

That’s not what a civil war is by definition

It doesn’t matter what style of Marxist ideology is attempted, they will all lead down to the same path of authoritarianism, mismanagement, and corruption. The ideologies and underlying framework are fundamentally flawed.

That being said, I don’t appreciate the false dichotomy. There’s clearly more, and way better options than a corrupt tyrannical leftist state or a corrupt tyrannical right wing state put in by the US. There’s no reason anyone should support either because they’re lesser of evils when there are paths to pick something that’s not evil at all.

Go right ahead

I don’t hate AI, LLMs are incredibly powerful tools that have an incredibly wide range of uses. The technology itself is something that’s very exciting and promising.

What I do hate is how they’re being used by large corporations. A small handful of big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, etc) decided to take this technology and pursue it in the greediest ways possible:

1. They took open source code, built on top of it, and closed it off so they could sell it

2. They scrapped all the data on the internet without consent and used it to train their models

3. They made their models generate stuff based on copyrighted works without permission or giving credit, thus basically stealing the content

4. But that wasn’t enough for them so they decided to train their models on every interaction you have with their LLM services, so all your private conversations are stored and recycled even if you don’t want that to happen

5. They use the data from the conversations that you’ve had with the chatbots to build customer profiles about you that they sell to advertisers so they could send you hoards of personalized ads

6. They started integrating their LLMs into their other products as much as they could so they could artificially increase their stock prices

7. They aggressively campaign for other companies to buy and integrate their models so both parties could artificially increase their stock prices

8. In order to meet their artificially induced demand, they’re sucking the life out of the electricity grid, which is screwing over everybody else

9. They’re also taking over the hardware industry and killing off consumer electronics since its more profitable for manufacturers to sell to AI companies than to consumers

10. They’re openly bribing, lobbying, and campaigning governments to give them grants, tax breaks, and keep regulations at a minimum so they could do whatever they want and have society pay for the privilege

11. They’re using these LLMs to cut as many jobs as possible so they could penny pinch just a little more, hence the massive waves of recent layoffs recently. This is being done even if the LLM replacements perform far worse than humans.

12. All of this is being done with zero regard to the environmental damage caused by them with their monstrous data centers and electricity consumption

13. All of this is being done with zero regard to the harmful impacts caused to people and society. These LLMs frequently lie and spread misinformation, they feed into delusions and bad habits of mentally unwell people, and they’re causing great damage to schools since students could use these models to easily cheat and nothing can be done about it

When you put all of this together, then it’s easy to understand why people hate AI. This is what people oppose, and rightfully so. These corporations created a massive bubble and put our economy at risk of a major recession, they’re destabilizing our infrastructure, destroying our environment, they’re corrupting our government, they’re forcing tens of thousands of people into dire financial situations by laying them off, they’re eroding our privacy and rights, and they’re harming our mental health… and for what? I’ll tell you, all of this is done so a few greedy billionaires could squeeze a few more dollars out of everything so they could buy their 5th yacht, 9th private jet, or 7th McMansion. Fuck them all.

Turn it on them. Ask them to give up something private in front of you like their phone or wallet. Hey, if they have nothing to hide then they shouldn’t worry… But they will.