It was the same way with the Vietnam war. It didn’t stop because people were upset about the humanitarian crisis it was causing, it stopped because of how fiscally ridiculous it was, especially near the end.

This is how it’s always been.

It’s come to my attention that you’re someone who genuinely believes Russia is not an imperialist nation (where you ironically also attempt to hand-wave the definition of imperialism as forceful authority over another nation and imply that the only right one is that it’s a direct and unique result of capitalism—as if a word can’t have more than one definition), so I doubt you’re someone I can have a rational discussion about authoritarianism with regardless.

And again, you’re fixing the term based on your own perception to make it support your point, which doesn’t really have any merit when it comes to using these words as they are by academics essentially ubiquitously. Until we can both accept that authoritarianism has a set definition independent of many ideologies and therefore cannot be universally applied to them, this will remain a purely rhetorical argument.

Poe’s law binds us all

When is being mislead not a bad thing? In a perfect world, there would be none of that. Of course we don’t live in a utopia, but I’d prefer if we avoid spreading skewed understandings of anything at all as much as possible. It’s a matter of principle.

This is assuming that the average person has a solid grasp of the inner workings of an LLM, which unfortunately isn’t the case. Regardless, it would only be a semantic argument if they were shifting the meanings of the relevant words to support their argument, which they evidently weren’t doing here.

LLMs don’t think, they predict patterns in language mathematically, making them functionally incapable of human capacities like compassion and intelligence, both of which require a conscious mind to be displayed. To use words that go against that without being precise is to imply the opposite. It’s simply a matter of describing it accurately.

If anything, considering it ‘AI’ is a semantic argument because it implies there’s some form of higher thinking occurring under the surface, which there clearly isn’t. It would be like if I said my PC was intelligent because it has a CPU. Obviously we’ve passed the point of using a better term, but it’s still unfortunate we’ve decided on that because it’s inherently misleading.

It’d be very cumbersome and add no value to any conversation.

I think you’re using cumbersome in an unnecessarily negative way since it’s very much an inevitable feature of the concept at hand. Yes, it’s cumbersome, like all controversial fields of study. Things like that work themselves out over time. Until then we’ll just have to deal with it without misleading anyone.

How is it a semantic argument? They’re talking about how LLMs work on a functional level, not arguing the meaning of compassion itself. It’s not hard to say that they emulate compassion and intelligence relatively well, applying human adjectives without any nuance just opens it up to being misinterpreted by people who don’t know any better.

This is a semantic argument so it’s pretty much a nothingburger. I’m just gonna go ahead and apply Alder’s razor and call it here

Notice I wrote ‘as you’ve described it’. I shouldn’t have to explain that the criticism the term tankie is calling attention to in theory is authoritarianism, not communism or socialism as a whole (as the term was literally created by communists). Unless you’re arguing that authoritarianism is a good thing. I guess I wouldn’t be all that surprised.

Agreed! Sorry for giving you that “nuance” you craved, in any case.

I can already tell this isn’t a good faith response based on the first paragraph lol, you clearly didn’t read the article nor do you know the history of the term Tankie. Again, Wikipedia:

The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

As you can see (if you care to be sincere here) it’s a pejorative term created by leftists to describe other leftists. Neither are acts of oppression defined by any of the groups you listed in this context. Be serious, please.

It’s ignorant and combative because it hand waves away all successful socialist states (China, Cuba, etc) without any nuance.

Inherently biased counter-point. You can’t just pose a government as having a successful ideology, at that point we might as well say there exists such a thing as utopia. It’s entirely rhetorical and has nothing solid to stand on.

Socialism and Communism are one in the in the same according to Marx. As we use the terms today, from actual Socialists, is that Socialism is a beginning, transitory state before full Communism.

Sure, but hopefully we can agree that contemporary socialists as a whole certainly do not agree on that definition. The ideology is far too diversified at this point for that to be the case. You can’t say “they aren’t socialists then” because again, that’s entirely rhetorical. In that case Protestants aren’t Christians, and Shia Muslims aren’t Islamic. Sure that’s religion, and you can say that’s different, but at the end of the day both religion and politics encompass ideological systems. They cover different niches, but what they fundamentally are stays the same.

This is the general agreed upon consensus at a high level.

This part really gets me. What are we defining as high level? Lemmy.ml mods? Even experts on the matter wouldn’t unanimously agree, they’re not a hivemind.

the term “tankie” insults Socialists and Communists alike, as we’re all working towards the same goal.

See my third point. Generalizations out the wazoo in this statement.

Where was I supposed to find a succinct rebuttal to this other than the people against whom the term is used? Wikipedia? Fox News?

Oh, I dunno… Academic sources would be a good place to start. I wouldn’t say a lemmy community is very close to that.

False equivalence and you know it.

Fair, though I edited it right after from Jew to National Socialism as I realized the error right away. You can’t say that’s a false equivalence, so ha!

This is framing the term “tankie” disingenuously if not intentionally. According to the Wikipedia article:

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.

It’s only ‘ignorant and combative’ in the same way that people call right-wing authoritarianism fascism, which is perfectly reasonable if not sympathetically misguided. Not to mention socialism isn’t apart of the meaning at all as you’ve described it.

I also find it funny that your source for the meaning of tankie is from lemmy.ml, as if that isn’t the exact instance this post is criticizing. It would be like if I corrected someone on the meaning of the term “National Socialism” by sourcing Mein Kampf.

Grass lawns started off as a way for pretentious rich people to flaunt how much of their land they could waste on nothing important, so it’s really not worse at all. Just another dumb trend that caught on.

That’s ignoring the point. Retributive justice is inherently reactive. It doesn’t improve upon any of the circumstances or motivations leading to someone committing a crime, thereby limiting it to a response only after it happens. Criminals don’t commit crimes simply because they were “born that way”. They do it because their life experiences led them to either a) believing they had to commit the crime to improve their situation, b) believing it’s justifiable in their own warped sense of right and wrong, or c) severe mental illness. There’s nothing in those causes that can’t be accounted for or treated beforehand to prevent the act from occurring at all. All jail time is doing is putting them in a pressure cooker that will inevitably lead to the people sentenced being even further handicapped in their ability to function in society.

Mind you I’m not against separating criminals from society for an appropriate amount of time entirely. It’s just that if the primary motivation with their sentence is punishment, you shouldn’t expect anything greater than a neutral outcome.

Jail isn’t what’s doing that, revoking his license does. The jail time is just an added slap on the wrist to make the people close to Perry feel better (which is absurd considering a guy literally died, retribution doesn’t change that.) It doesn’t actually solve anything.

Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.

The humble Monotropa uniflora:

This is what the paradox of tolerance is all about. Extending tolerance to those who are intolerant of others only serves to enable the rise and eventual dominance of intolerance, thus undermining the original principle. The only way to combat this is (ironically) to be intolerant of such behaviour on both a cultural and systemic level.

You got me, I’m actually Walt Disney’s frozen head on a burner account

Let them eat beans on toast