Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️

Mia San Mia

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

Let's meet at Upscrolled https://t.co/oZF2RUS60V

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

@andrenit @Inhumansoflate1 Says the person who couldn't recognize communism even if it kicks him in the groin

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

@sockpuppet80 @pawelwargan Both the Iranians and Cubans are resisting and won't subjugate. There's also that.

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

Liberals also love to misuse Gramsci’s "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” to justify their despair.

Gramsci was not advocating despair. He was being Leninist. The "pessimism of the intellect" is a call to develop a clear-eyed view of the actual balance of forces — a concrete analysis of the concrete situation. The “optimism of the will” is a call for political organization grounded in that analysis. If our forces are weak, then we need to act accordingly and build them up rather than engaging in fanciful debates about politics that are beyond our reach.

In the hands of liberals, the quote is detached from its strategic content and turned into a mood. Or, worse, its politics are inverted. If Gramsci’s pessimism concerned the strength of bourgeois hegemony and the disorganization of the labor movement, his optimism reflected a deep confidence in the capacity of workers to organize and win.

For liberals, the passage does the opposite work. The pessimism counsels acceptance of bourgeois political constraints, while the optimism truncates politics to the horizon of reform or to rootless, spontaneous action. “Nothing is possible, but we have to do something.” As a Marxist, it is difficult to imagine Gramsci offering such counsel.

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

I often think of this passage from Lenin’s text on Tolstoy and the labor movement: "Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle."

We rarely see the other parts of that paragraph. "Despair is typical of the classes which are perishing,” Lenin writes. "The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes."

Lenin was writing about the labor movement, and the objective historical process that saw it rise and replace the peasantry as the dominant force in Russia. The peasantry was gripped by despair because its class no longer had a future. The proletariat, by contrast, was growing in strength and number.

Today, Lenin’s insight also holds true of the streets of Iran, where people mobilize by the millions under bombardment. It is true of the communes in Venezuela, whose militants continue the task of building socialism and are prepared to take up arms to defend it. It is true of the people of Cuba, who remain defiant under a crushing blockade that has turned their cities dark.

Those who despair now — as a new world is being born — are really just mourning the death of liberalism. They are mourning the death of a world that never existed: a world of supposed lawfulness and “rules-based” governance. Anyone who has ever earnestly tried to bring a new world into being quickly learned that these were fictions created to secure impunity for the colonizer and oppressor.

That is why we find that people on the vanguard of the systemic transition underway — as with the labor movement in Lenin’s time — “have plenty to protest against but nothing to despair about.”

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

@TimRior3711 @caitoz @JustMark65

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

@JohnnySobieski8 @caitoz Challenge accepted

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

@caitoz @Jommayo2323 Couldn't agree more

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I hope the US/Israeli efforts to topple the Iranian government continue to fail. I hope Iran gets stronger so that it can hammer Israel whenever Israel does evil things. I hope the US war machine implodes, the US empire ends, and Palestine is freed from the scourge of Zionism.

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

We keep looking for a technological escape hatch from problems that are actually systemic. AI won't save us from capitalism—it will just be capitalism, but faster. The real solution isn't a smarter machine. It's a wiser species.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

One reason AI is being pushed so hard is because it's the last "humanity can capitalism its way out of all its problems" narrative that has yet to be fully discredited. The idea is that if we can just create AI gods and let them come up with the effective-yet-profitable innovative technological solutions to our various existential crises that our own fleshy brains have so far failed to produce, then we don't need to dismantle the socioeconomic system we built that is destroying our biosphere and driving us to our doom.

Embedded in this logic is the same baseless assumption that has been plaguing us this entire time: that there are effective-yet-profitable solutions to be found. That we can simply let the free market deliver us desirable products that will both (A) cause us to stop cannibalizing our ecosystem and (B) create billionaires and trillionaires. Capitalism hasn't provided any innovations that have allowed us to consume our way out of our problems thus far, but because we've got these complex new AI technologies now, we can allow ourselves to move this entirely faith-based assumption into the purview of our new gods.

But that's just it: it's an assumption based on blind faith. There is no reason to believe we'll ever come up with technologies that are conducive to human and environmental thriving which also generate shareholder profits. Generally profits are generated by producing and consuming more products, which is exactly what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.

What this means is that capitalism has no ability to solve the problems we're coming up against as a species. There is no way to compete and consume our way out of the hole we dug through competition and consuming.

We need new systems. Human behavior cannot continue to be driven by competition and the pursuit of profit. We need to move into collaboration with each other and with our biosphere if we are to survive into the future as a species, and we will be unable to do this if we are excluding all possible solutions that don't generate revenue for the capitalist class.

AI is for many people just a psychological box that allows us to avoid facing this uncomfortable truth, because as Mark Fisher said, “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It's easier to imagine billionaire tech companies creating AI gods who will serve us up magical solutions to our urgent existential dilemmas which also facilitate continued economic growth than it is to imagine moving into collaboration-based systems where human behavior isn't driven by the pursuit of profit.

But that's just a sign of how insane our species has become. It's a symptom of our collective madness.

We need to wake up. We need to get real. It's adaptation or extinction time for us as a species, and that fork in the road is approaching very quickly.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

AI Won't Save Us From The Need To End Capitalism

https://t.co/ywCYXmcZWd

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

One reason AI is being pushed so hard is because it's the last "humanity can capitalism its way out of all its problems" narrative that has yet to be fully discredited. The idea is that if we can just create AI gods and let them come up with the effective-yet-profitable innovative technological solutions to our various existential crises that our own fleshy brains have so far failed to produce, then we don't need to dismantle the socioeconomic system we built that is destroying our biosphere and driving us to our doom.

Embedded in this logic is the same baseless assumption that has been plaguing us this entire time: that there are effective-yet-profitable solutions to be found. That we can simply let the free market deliver us desirable products that will both (A) cause us to stop cannibalizing our ecosystem and (B) create billionaires and trillionaires. Capitalism hasn't provided any innovations that have allowed us to consume our way out of our problems thus far, but because we've got these complex new AI technologies now, we can allow ourselves to move this entirely faith-based assumption into the purview of our new gods.

But that's just it: it's an assumption based on blind faith. There is no reason to believe we'll ever come up with technologies that are conducive to human and environmental thriving which also generate shareholder profits. Generally profits are generated by producing and consuming more products, which is exactly what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.

What this means is that capitalism has no ability to solve the problems we're coming up against as a species. There is no way to compete and consume our way out of the hole we dug through competition and consuming.

We need new systems. Human behavior cannot continue to be driven by competition and the pursuit of profit. We need to move into collaboration with each other and with our biosphere if we are to survive into the future as a species, and we will be unable to do this if we are excluding all possible solutions that don't generate revenue for the capitalist class.

AI is for many people just a psychological box that allows us to avoid facing this uncomfortable truth, because as Mark Fisher said, “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It's easier to imagine billionaire tech companies creating AI gods who will serve us up magical solutions to our urgent existential dilemmas which also facilitate continued economic growth than it is to imagine moving into collaboration-based systems where human behavior isn't driven by the pursuit of profit.

But that's just a sign of how insane our species has become. It's a symptom of our collective madness.

We need to wake up. We need to get real. It's adaptation or extinction time for us as a species, and that fork in the road is approaching very quickly.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is extraordinarily rare.

In fact, according to a key figure in the German business community (who is a dear friend of mine), it's unprecedented.

An op-ed, two pages, centerpiece, in Germany’s most important economic newspaper (the Handelsblatt) that begs the German establishment to stop looking at China via the prism of propaganda. And it's by their Shanghai bureau chief - not some outside contributor.

The title is "The China debate cannot continue like this!" and the article makes the case that it's suicidal, from a German and European standpoint, to keep reducing China to false caricatures rather than facts.

In effect it's rubbish in, rubbish out: if you tell people lies about China - whichever direction they go (anti or pro) - then obviously the policies that come out will be rubbish, designed for a mirage of a country that exists only in people's imagination.

Needless to say, this is absolutely music to my ears because it's literally the main point I've been making in my advocacy around China for now almost 10 years. Some are finally seeing the light...

I also believe, as I argued in my article "Are Western media turning China-friendly?" last year (https://t.co/Xg1hoSRtNy) that this type of coverage was bound to happen, and there will be more and more of it.

Why? For a very simple structural reason: China is now too powerful to coerce. The West, and Europe in particular, just don't have the leverage anymore. Which means that if you tell China to do something and they don't want to, they just won't do it. Period.

In this situation, incapable of coercing, your only remaining choice is... convincing. And what do you need if you want to convince someone? Well, you need to understand them: understand how they think, how they behave, what drives them, what they actually want.

In other words: the moment coercion stops being an option, not only does propaganda stop being useful, it begins to be actively harmful as genuine understand becomes a strategic necessity. Reality is finally becoming profitable again.

Which means, if you're a journalist reading this and you're peddling some of your usual lies, describing China as some sort of cartoonish dictatorial dystopia that's simultaneously on the verge of collapse yet a "threat" to the whole world (in short, if you write on China for The Economist or the FT), be on notice: the real threat to your country isn't China. It's you.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The US Starts Wars On The Other Side Of The Planet And Then Claims "Self-Defense"

These freaks really do operate from the premise that the entire planet is their property, and that any failure to respect their property rights shall therefore be viewed as an act of aggression.

Reading by Tim Foley.

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

We actually moved past this way too quick as a society

[Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo]

🇳🇱 Ladies and gentlemen, NATO's Mark Rutte!

This is the man who wants to see Russia on its knees

[Andreas Augenthaler ⏳️ @DFBbear]

@MOSSADil

[Ikkyu Sojun @ConciousLabRat]

No.

Russia has shared a 195.7 km remote Arctic land border with Norway (a 1949 NATO founder) since the alliance’s founding.

It was a stable, peripheral line of tundra and rivers, with Norway’s self-imposed limits of no permanent foreign bases, no nuclear weapons on its soil in peacetime, and minimal forces.

For nearly a decade after 1991 it remained Russia’s only NATO land frontier.

Then Washington orchestrated NATO’s eastward march with absorbing former Warsaw Pact states and the Baltics, planting missiles and bases on Russia’s historic approaches all despite explicit verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”

That’s the raw hypocrisy of USA and West.

America has enforced its Monroe Doctrine sphere across the entire Western Hemisphere for two centuries, toppling governments at will, yet shrieks when Russia insists on the same minimal buffer in its own backyard.

I guess US empire never practices reciprocity.

[Belly of the Beast @bellybeastcuba]

Norma Goicochea, President of the Cuban United Nations Association, warned about the human consequences of further hostility from Washington. “Cubans have the right to live in peace.”

[Seyed Mohammad Marandi @s_m_marandi]

Watch the genocidal Zionist regime carpet bomb towns and villages across Southern Lebanon.

[WelBeast @WelBeast]

Qatar said it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, you can come to the World Cup, just don’t drink alcohol at the stadium.

USA said you can’t come. Who you are or where you come from matters. We’ll decide who can and can’t participate. This isn’t a sport for everyone.