Engage a liberal on Marxism and witness pure ideological autocomplete when they start flawlessly regurgitating anti-communist talking points with zero cognitive friction. No material analysis, no historical engagement, just the frictionless recall of a language model trained on Cold War tropes.

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[–] BeamBrain@hexbear.net 32 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

[–] RedSailsFan@hexbear.net 14 points 2 days ago

seeing this get posted always pleases me greatly.