☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

  • 8.66K Posts
  • 9.2K Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: January 18th, 2020
  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•Duty calls
    4·
    10 hours ago

    What actually happened in Germany was that capitalists funded the nazis, and social democrats sided with them against the communists.

    After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen­tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.

    To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy­cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

    To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

    In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi­ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.

    In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

    During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown­ shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con­cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener­ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

    In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour­geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.

    In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as “Moscow inspired.” Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million.

    True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.

    https://welshundergroundnetwork.cymru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoSocialism@lemmy.ml•The Ineffectiveness of Anarchism Under Capitalism and the Authoritarian Nature of Revolution
    2·
    1 day ago

    That’s what I find appealing about anarchism - focusing on organizing people and building the new world now, in your community, in whatever ways you can.

    I don’t see how that’s exclusive to anarchism, communists do the exact same thing and that’s a prerequisite for having any sort of a revolution. The difference is that communists organize with this greater goal in mind and they accept the necessary power structures from the start. That’s why communists have managed to achieve many successful revolutions around the world.

    We’re at a point where we need to get people organized at all, and the best way to do that is to start making their lives tangibly better.

    Sure, the west is no where close to a revolutionary moment right now, and any kind of organizing is ultimately better than no organizing. We can agree on that.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What do you guys use LLMs for, that is proven to work well with them?
    21·
    1 day ago

    I find they’re pretty good at some coding tasks. For example, it’s very easy to make a reasonable UI given a sample JSON payload you might get from an endpoint. They’re good at doing stuff like crafting farily complex SQL queries or making shell scripts. As long as the task is reasonably focused, they tend to get it right a lot of the time. I find they’re also useful for discovering language features working with languages I’m not as familiar with. I also find LLMs are great at translation and transcribing images. They’re also useful for summaries and finding information within documents, including codebases. I’ve found it makes it a lot easier to search through papers where you might want to find relationships between concepts or definitions for things. They’re also good at subtitle generation and well as doing text to speech tasks. Another task I find they’re great at is proofreading and providing suggestions for phrasing. They can also make a good sounding board. If there’s a topic you understand, and you just want to bounce ideas off, it’s great to be able to talk through that with a LLM. Often the output it produces can stimulate a new idea in my head. I also use LLM as a tutor when I practice Chinese, they’re great for doing free form conversational practice when learning a new language. These are a just a few areas I use LLMs in on nearly daily basis now.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•2D Chip Breakthrough: 6,000 Transistors, 3 Atoms Thick
    5·
    2 days ago

    Pretty much the only way a new computing substrate will be developed is through massive government funding. No company will spend billions of dollars and years of research on something that may or may not pan out in the end. It’s just too much risk coupled with lack of short term profit. Meanwhile, the US has convinced Chinese government that they need to start doing precisely this kind of long term investment into computing tech, and now we’re seeing a huge amount of innovation coming out of China in this domain.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•Efficiency
    2·
    2 days ago

    The LLM is what I use to build the specific UI using the components from these great UI libraries. There’s practically no logic involved here, it’s just handling layout for components and hooking up events. It’s fantastic to be able to take a JSON payload from an endpoint throw it at a model and get a reasonable UI in seconds.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•Capitalism is the root of evil
    321·
    2 days ago

    If we accepted the arguments that humans are selfish, then it’s an argument for communism and not against it. We should be creating social systems that encourage socially positive behavior and inhibit socially destructive behavior. Capitalism is like taking a drunk to a happy hour at the bar. The fact that people keep repeating this trope shows complete and utter lack of critical thinking on their part.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•Efficiency
    4·
    2 days ago

    Yeah, I find LLMs are really nice for learning a new language when you know what you want to do, but not the specific syntax or best patterns. I’ve also found LLMs are great for stuff like crafting SQL queries, one off shell scripts, and building UIs. They can write certain kinds of code fairly well nowadays, but you want to keep the problem scope clear and focused.

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