Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

Haven’t used it yet, but venice.ai looks interesting; they have a good privacy policy. Right now, I just use ChatGPT with the “improve models” setting turned off, and use “temporary chat” mode. I don’t really trust OpenAI to be doing the right thing though. I’ve used 14B models locally, but they aren’t as good as 72B+ models.

Privacy policy changes are worrying. They also implemented Privacy Preserving Attribution, which sends anonymized data to advertisers, and enable it by default. I personally like LibreWolf.

Not sure if serious. Recession is almost certain, and the only fiscal “stimulus” that’s likely to come is tax cuts. Will probably turn into a depression. But even the Great Depression had a huge amount of fiscal stimulus and progressive reforms to help get out of it. Not to mention, the crashing of the economy appears to be purposeful:

Oligarchs replace most government functions with private entities that they have equity in and funnel tax dollars into their own companies. It looks like they’re trying to cause a depression too, so they can buy everything up for cheap (farms, homes, etc). I think they’re stupid, but not stupid enough to not realize an economic depression coupled with gutting social safety nets will lead to massive crime waves and riots; so I’m guessing they’re planning on a police state and work camps for people they arrest (think that’s what they’re going to do with many of the immigrants too).

I’ve heard it postulated they are realigning with Russia and other dictators because we’d lose our normal allies if we became such a society. And they probably have very lucrative deals with Russia as well.

I sucks we don’t have a good, inspiring opposition party or something to lead or rally around. Without that, anger will just manifest as unorganized, unproductive riots and violence. “Conservatives” are still pretty brainwashed too; believing whatever they’re told by media. They will support the government gunning down and enslaving “criminals,” at this point in time. I’d hope that changes when things get hard, but media will work hard to redirect the blame.

It appears they don’t exactly condone Russia, but blame NATO for it. Kinda disappointing. I think they’re the 2nd largest socialist org in the US.

PSL are Marxist-Leninists. AFAIK, they are legit, but I’m more of an anarchist.

I was wondering this is well. Took me a while to find this discussion: https://woem.men/notes/9ozhpn3l2n5v0b6c

He claims he only created an account to “investigate” if they were talking about him.

Another worrying thing I accidentally stumbled on a while back was he was in the streamer “Destiny” chat. Hmm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgF92Wi8J7o (said he used to listen to Jordan Peterson in 2015 too).

Yeah, IDK what to think about him now. I still like his consumer advocacy though, I guess.

Their primary aim is to mobilize labor toward socially beneficial objectives

Debatable, and certainly not necessarily true. Fascism can also feature state-owned industries, or at least all industry is considered subordinate to the state. Even if the leaders have good intentions, their priorities may not align with the general populace. The way I see it, the workers do not own the means of production; the state does. Having single-party rule, high levels of censorship, and being generally authoritarian makes things even more problematic, because it hurts the argument that, “the workers own the state, so it’s socialism.”