Putin doesn't plaster Europe with propaganda because he thinks the Russian system is good. He does it for power. And if your system is that good, propaganda is effective.
When it comes to traditional spycraft, I'm of the opinion that everyone does it and everyone has to. Everyone does it. It's of tremendous value. And it doesn't particularly hurt us when we get caught.
But the First Amendment is a cultural touchstone for America. Even if everyone else does this nonsense, it's not of demonstrable value and it does hurt us when we get caught like this. Unilateral disarmament isn't usually an option. But it is, I think, when it comes to this.
I think we should pass a law banning undisclosed social media, psyop and other unattributed propaganda campaigns among (a) allies and (b) other democracies (as judged by a neutral source).
Lots to criticize in the Cold War, but I think you can at least make the argument that this was emblematic of an American cultural power that was self-assured of its own value and legitimacy.
In comparison, now we have...LLMs creating personal finance tips?
Well, yes, obviously. Did you notice there is also one (rather, a whole ecosystem) targeting Russia, one for Iran, one for China, one for EU, one for Japan, etc?
This is odd. They have the budget to run with real journalists and outlets. Is this some reverse-psychology move? Where they want people to see that its AI and thus not take it seriously? What aim does that achieve?
It's not necessarily easy to find people who will want to work with that, especially when you were the Trump administration.
I mean there used to be a fair amount of government loyalists remaining, working for outlets like Voice of America who, probably, sincerely thought they were doing a good thing. But they butted head with the Trump administration hard.
For all loyalists there is a grifter to true believer ratio, and for the current admin it's bad. Why pay a hard-to-find true believer to make actually convincing propaganda, when you're a grifter yourself and have the opportunity to take the budget for yourself and let an LLM half-ass it?
Have they ever stopped? CIA and SOCOM have been dangling themselves into Latin American lives since they were invented. Assassinating presidents, spewing propaganda, assisting in coups.
It would be a surprise, it they weren't using AI to add to the mix.
It's strange that people look at the millions dead from starvation from communism, and the quite recent destruction of Venezuela, and still think communism can somehow work this time.
Pretty much every remotely developed country is capitalist. The wealthiest country with a non-capitalist economy is Cuba or Turkmenistan, depending on where you draw the line.
You can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.
> definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians
The US has generous social assistance, just less of it than some European countries. It has unions more powerful than many European countries. Meanwhile the most popular Dem-aligned politician in the US has recently introduced a bill to partly nationalise AI companies.
> You can’t have it both ways
You’re responding to my first comment in this thread
For some people, even the government interventions by those specific rich market-capitalist European countries are "too socialist" and get the exact same "didn't you realise Stalin killed millions?" kinds of responses.
PRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy.
Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
Smells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh?
This basically sums it up:
> According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...)
(To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)
But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which.
To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it
Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy.
That's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.
Nordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.
Meanwhile, in Europe (I don't know Latin America well enough, although I know a few well-known right-wing leaders that didn't have stellar records) socialist governments consistently have a better record on basically everything from press freedom to economy to public health compared to economically liberal ("centrist") governments. But they're socialist so it doesn't count.
Is this supposed to be an example of propaganda? The line that socialism killed millions uses the unfair standard of attributing wide categories of end-of-life to socialism but not to capitalism or Tsarism.
millions died due to exploitative labor practices by colonialist invaders exploiting the resources and cheap labor potential of the people in it yet I don't see you aknowledge that.
communism wasn't behind american slavery or the Belgian occupation of the congo.
Not a fan of communism but I dont' think unfettered capitalism is much better. both systems benefit a minority of people at the expense of the majority largely because they allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
At this point, anyone spouting vitriole about communism and socialism like they are the same thing just come off as lacking basic capacity to understand nuance at best and mentally ill at worst.
Deliberate starvation is more of a capitalist thing. It's not like China or communist parts of India have a big famine problem, while the US and their partners are causing famines in e.g. West Asia right now.
Left wing policies actually work pretty well, this is why the US has spent so much resources undermining movements and states trying to implement them, and this is why the Soviet needed nuclear weapons to survive for as long as it did.
A better example of capitalism doing actual famine would be the Irish Potato Famine, which was concurrent with the writing of the actual Communist Manifesto.
Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China.
The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
Oh boy, no it does not. Supporting low-intervention markets (i.e. brutal competition among corporations) alongside high taxation of gains (and strong services for individuals) is absolutely coherent and both capitalist and not right wing. (It's a decent description of my politics.)
Wouldn't say that. I like wealth redistribution and taxation as a tool of both economic empowerment and political equalisation.
I do have friends whom I'd consider left wing. I agree with them on many issues, from unionising bars to raising the minimum wage. I disagree with them on others, e.g. regulating everything for the sake of it.
I’d be shocked if the Pentagon isn’t running an AI propaganda mill targeting <insert any region of the world>.
If the American system is so good, why does it always need to be promoted in such strange ways? LA people should be so eager to be pro-America
> If the American system is so good
Putin doesn't plaster Europe with propaganda because he thinks the Russian system is good. He does it for power. And if your system is that good, propaganda is effective.
When it comes to traditional spycraft, I'm of the opinion that everyone does it and everyone has to. Everyone does it. It's of tremendous value. And it doesn't particularly hurt us when we get caught.
But the First Amendment is a cultural touchstone for America. Even if everyone else does this nonsense, it's not of demonstrable value and it does hurt us when we get caught like this. Unilateral disarmament isn't usually an option. But it is, I think, when it comes to this.
I think we should pass a law banning undisclosed social media, psyop and other unattributed propaganda campaigns among (a) allies and (b) other democracies (as judged by a neutral source).
What I think many of the jaded comments about how "it was ever thus" miss is what it means that American soft power is reduced to AI slop.
During the Cold War, the CIA famously funded all sorts of cultural endeavors, but much of the output (if not directly CIA-created, then at least bolstered by the Agency) is still held to have been culturally relevant: abstract expressionism (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...), the Kenyon Review (https://www.thecollegianmagazine.com/the-kenyon-review-and-t...), etc.
Lots to criticize in the Cold War, but I think you can at least make the argument that this was emblematic of an American cultural power that was self-assured of its own value and legitimacy.
In comparison, now we have...LLMs creating personal finance tips?
Genuine question, were we ever great at this?
Well, yes, obviously. Did you notice there is also one (rather, a whole ecosystem) targeting Russia, one for Iran, one for China, one for EU, one for Japan, etc?
> one (rather, a whole ecosystem) targeting Russia, one for Iran, one for China
I'm fine with this.
> one for EU, one for Japan, etc?
I'm not okay with this. Wouldn't lump the two together.
This is odd. They have the budget to run with real journalists and outlets. Is this some reverse-psychology move? Where they want people to see that its AI and thus not take it seriously? What aim does that achieve?
Real journalists / content writers have pesky morals and tend to become whistleblowers when they've had enough.
It's not necessarily easy to find people who will want to work with that, especially when you were the Trump administration.
I mean there used to be a fair amount of government loyalists remaining, working for outlets like Voice of America who, probably, sincerely thought they were doing a good thing. But they butted head with the Trump administration hard.
For all loyalists there is a grifter to true believer ratio, and for the current admin it's bad. Why pay a hard-to-find true believer to make actually convincing propaganda, when you're a grifter yourself and have the opportunity to take the budget for yourself and let an LLM half-ass it?
Have they ever stopped? CIA and SOCOM have been dangling themselves into Latin American lives since they were invented. Assassinating presidents, spewing propaganda, assisting in coups.
It would be a surprise, it they weren't using AI to add to the mix.
yep, with brazil at the center...
Brazil did a hecking bad thing. PIX can't be allowed, let alone expand
Hollywood is not just targeting Latin America. Marvel and DC are everybody fascists dreams.
Latam already has enough problems with socialism we hardly need more of it.
It seems some AI propaganda has already worked on you.
It seems you're not from LatAm.
It's strange that people look at the millions dead from starvation from communism, and the quite recent destruction of Venezuela, and still think communism can somehow work this time.
Haiti pulls that off under capitalism too. Wider context is a bigger part of that than who owns the means of production.
There are lots of socialist countries in the world that are doing fine.
Pretty much every remotely developed country is capitalist. The wealthiest country with a non-capitalist economy is Cuba or Turkmenistan, depending on where you draw the line.
Uhh, China...
Is this where we pretend a bunch of rich market-capitalist European countries are “socialist” or are you talking about China and Vietnam?
You can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.
> definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians
The US has generous social assistance, just less of it than some European countries. It has unions more powerful than many European countries. Meanwhile the most popular Dem-aligned politician in the US has recently introduced a bill to partly nationalise AI companies.
> You can’t have it both ways
You’re responding to my first comment in this thread
For some people, even the government interventions by those specific rich market-capitalist European countries are "too socialist" and get the exact same "didn't you realise Stalin killed millions?" kinds of responses.
PRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy.
Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
There is a significant difference between socialism and communism, Americans seem to purposely conflate the two, they are not the same.
Smells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh?
This basically sums it up:
> According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...)
(To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)
But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which.
To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it
Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy.
Maybe we need better terminology
That's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.
Nordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.
It's strange that someone mentions socialism and then another person replies saying communism doesn't work. Are these two the same for you?
For Americans it is.
Meanwhile, in Europe (I don't know Latin America well enough, although I know a few well-known right-wing leaders that didn't have stellar records) socialist governments consistently have a better record on basically everything from press freedom to economy to public health compared to economically liberal ("centrist") governments. But they're socialist so it doesn't count.
I would call them market economies instead of socialist governments
Well, they share the same core componnent of disregard for property rights and freedom of contract.
> disregard for property rights and freedom of contract
Are you complaining about taxation and regulation? Both are cornerstones of every successful state in human history.
Any form of centralized power is bad for the vast majority of civilization. always has been
I'm curious: what civilizations can you point to in which there has been no centralized power?
Your own network of friends and family.
That doesn't answer my question.
Is this supposed to be an example of propaganda? The line that socialism killed millions uses the unfair standard of attributing wide categories of end-of-life to socialism but not to capitalism or Tsarism.
millions died due to exploitative labor practices by colonialist invaders exploiting the resources and cheap labor potential of the people in it yet I don't see you aknowledge that.
communism wasn't behind american slavery or the Belgian occupation of the congo.
Not a fan of communism but I dont' think unfettered capitalism is much better. both systems benefit a minority of people at the expense of the majority largely because they allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
At this point, anyone spouting vitriole about communism and socialism like they are the same thing just come off as lacking basic capacity to understand nuance at best and mentally ill at worst.
Deliberate starvation is more of a capitalist thing. It's not like China or communist parts of India have a big famine problem, while the US and their partners are causing famines in e.g. West Asia right now.
Left wing policies actually work pretty well, this is why the US has spent so much resources undermining movements and states trying to implement them, and this is why the Soviet needed nuclear weapons to survive for as long as it did.
A better example of capitalism doing actual famine would be the Irish Potato Famine, which was concurrent with the writing of the actual Communist Manifesto.
Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China.
The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
You can be capitalist without being right wing in this administration cares more about the latter
Being capitalist (edit: the ideology) implies being right wing.
> Being capitalist implies being right wing
Oh boy, no it does not. Supporting low-intervention markets (i.e. brutal competition among corporations) alongside high taxation of gains (and strong services for individuals) is absolutely coherent and both capitalist and not right wing. (It's a decent description of my politics.)
Aren't you a venture capitalist? A left wing one?
> Aren't you a venture capitalist?
Pretty much.
> A left wing one?
Wouldn't say that. I like wealth redistribution and taxation as a tool of both economic empowerment and political equalisation.
I do have friends whom I'd consider left wing. I agree with them on many issues, from unionising bars to raising the minimum wage. I disagree with them on others, e.g. regulating everything for the sake of it.