I mean, not my home.

Yes, almost like that’s why there’s a bubble despite the obvious disparity between both states’ ability to maintain an adequate infrastructure for this technology. US companies are looting with the full expectation that the cost of the economic fallout will be shifted to taxpayers. They’re getting as much value out of this before China inevitably becomes dominant even in the US sphere of influence as the US simply will never be able to compete after decades of neoliberal politics and the erosion of public works.

Guaranteed this is going to receive less outrage from libs.

Yes, I don’t get why so many of you appear to not understand that these problems coexist with the reality that people have been using it anyway. As I alluded to above when I said that a psychotherapist would be required to actually learn to practice those strategies and expressed my disagreement with AI therapists on a treatment basis in multiple instances, there is no replacing a human therapist or any reasonable basis to even call AI therapists “therapists.”

As I said, again multiple times, since people use it anyway and prefer it to nothing or a bad therapist, we have to take its merits seriously and identify why. Reality does not care that you find it dumb and icky, I would love it if everything I know is dumb and icky was simply not a problem because I found it dumb and icky.

All of these people are clearly not just stupid, which is what you and the person I responded to seem to think, which is just foolish. No, everyone else is not just dumber than you. There is clearly a material reason why people use these things and why some even say they want to. How many people do you know who do not go to therapy because they can’t afford it, or because they’ve been traumatized by it, or because they could get fucking institutionalized for it. Have you thought about, perhaps, the people as people?

I swear to god, some of you see a long comment from someone you don’t like the sound of and you just make up whatever it says based on the shit you imagine people who disagree with you say. And they say reading levels are down, pshaw.

Well, I’m sure someone who uses “clanker” wouldn’t need therapy anyway.

Seriously though, I doubt the health implications or claims about the efficacy of AI therapists, but we can’t just ignore the fact that there are people who use it, which means there’s something about it that makes it accessible or preferable to a human therapist.

If you’ve ever had to get a psychotherapist, you know that it is prohibitively expensive for a large number of people, and that a human therapist may not actually be capable of treating you because of personal incompatibility; which often results in retraumatization in patients who are seeking therapy for particularly traumatic or sensitive issues. Since much of the value in therapy is learning management strategies that, while not standard, are often consistent across different practitioners, they do not necessarily need to come from a therapist to learn what they are (even if the practice of them does need one).

I think if there is a need for it, that need is a consequence of the deeply dysfunctional, exploitative, and isolating system we live under, and I don’t think I’d ever accept it as a genuine alternative to human therapists. But, we can’t dismiss it out of hand if there are people who say it is useful for them and when we can’t maintain a system that can guarantee them access to treatment.

You’re telling me that you believe you are not vulnerable to validation? Right before using the word “corrupted” uncritically in a way that suggests there is a universal and normative “real life?”

What if someone who you respected the authority of, like a prominent scholar or filmmaker, said your obviously incorrect stance on things was correct? You’d trust me, Online Internet Bastard, when I tell you that you are wrong?

AI has been sold as something exceptionally capable of mimicking human knowledge, and its existence is compatible with liberal notions of “objectivity” in that it is quite literally not a human being. Most men subscribe to this authority, and are also statistically bereft of emotional intelligence or management skills. You ever try telling a man what they want to hear? I’ve never ever met one who doesn’t just eat it up.

OK lib.

If had a nickel for every time I had a person with a passing interest in Marxism mansplain the world to me. This is a starting point, materialism is not exclusively how socialists and anarchists criticize or understand capitalism.

You seem to think this is contradictory, which should spur you to question something more fundamental instead of assuming others are just dumber than you. “Coordination” would require a conspiratorial level of organizing between groups that, while maintaining common interests, distorts the reality of this system to the point of incomprehensibility. If your way of thinking finds it impossible to analyze the interaction between people – individual actors – and the system they are positioned in – as in their class interests – then you will find this system incomprehensible. This is so because, guess what, there are individual actors who are not powerlessly making decisions in accordance with their positionality.

In order to do that, you must start understanding these things as relational. There are class interests motivating these policies, those class interests are not the sole mover of these actions. To suggest as much would do what you are trying to do right now, which is universalise human action. I wonder if you’ve thought about power dynamics in indigenous nations under settler-colonialism, and what it would mean to only interpret their navigation of this system with the frameworks that originate from Europe with the goal of understanding European ways of organizing. How do you understand conflicting interests within shared classes even under the same material conditions?

Getting fuckin tired of people on here presuming they’re all-knowing; many of these interactions happen to occur in discussions on Europe, go figure. Won’t be responding to anything else from you unless it is actually serious.

Strange, I didn’t realize there was any non-liberal, anti-capitalist states within the EU.

I think you’ve misunderstood the point, what I’m saying is that these sorts of policies are an inevitable consequence of liberalism because it requires an oppressive level of population control to function. The internet is a threat to that control, and therefore liberal states have responded predictably and consistently by moving to create as many vectors of restriction and punishment as they can. The UK is not part of the EU, Canada (which has been pushing for this for half a decade now) isn’t, Australia isn’t, but they are all capitalist and imperialist liberal states.

I don’t know how contrived the mechanisms have to be before people just accept that these ideological forces do not need specific mechanisms to exist. Tech firms did not produce liberalism and capitalism, as they did not exist when these ways of organizing emerged. Everything you described here are consequences of this system and the means by which it reproduces itself, they are not the system itself. Yeah, they organize, they do so because they have a common interest which is capital, and the imperatives of profit and infinite growth historically manifest consistently in formal and informal mechanisms of control like this.

Class warfare doesn’t apply here any better than it does to the informal consequences of neoliberal individualism which is both intentionally reinforced in media and culturally through its subscription by middle-class property owners. It may look coordinated, but that term distorts how these systems of power function and reproduce by creating the narrative that there is a select group of people responsible for this outcome, even while individual actions are taken to realise it.

It’s not “coordinated” any more than every action in service of capital is. These policies and values coincide because all of these liberal states share common imperatives. The internet is a problem for liberals; it is impossible to fully control without diminishing its use for industry, anti-capitalism has flourished online even with the overwhelming corporate promotion of fascism and liberalism, and the international nature of the medium has made imperialism more visible to the metropole than ever.

They correctly identify that the internet is a threat to their security, and they are moving to secure it and punish as many people as they can to discourage its use for disruptive purposes.

Liberals. It’s systemic like it has always been. As cathartic as it is to remember the French Revolution, it’s not like it worked and ended stratification and imperialism. Liberalism will always seek as much control as possible, and the internet has proven to be a huge fucking problem exactly because it is so impossible to control.

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I think it is unironically very funny to assert something is real just because it’s normalized in medicine. As we all know, medsci is historically very conscious of social and material conditions and is not subject to the distortions of the classes of people who have access to that authority, and no new research is relevant ever. I guess that means black women really do feel less pain, trans people only started existing forty years ago, and skulls can actually teach us about racial intelligence (people were arguing for phrenology until the late twentieth century). That you’re arguing this during a period where eating disorders are very visible in popular culture is also just too perfect. Could you then, cite any articles or studies you’ve engaged with to build your oh-so-well-informed-and-underthought worldview? I have just a few off the top of my list:

The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to your Health, Campos, 2004.

Yamawaki, Niwako, Christina Riley, Claudia Rasmussen, and Mary Cook, “The Effects of Obesity Myths on Perceptions of Sexual Assault Victims and Perpetrators’ Credibility,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 33 (4): 662-85, 2018.

Ramos, Salas, X, M Forhan, and A. M Sharma, “Diffusing Obesity Myths,” Clinical Obesity, 4(3), 2014.

Pollack, Catherine C, “Characterizing the Prevalence of Obesity Misinformation, Factual Content, Stigma, and Positivity on the Social Media Platform Reddit Between 2011 and 2019: Infodemiology Study,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24 (12), 2022.

Lindeman, Tracey, Bleed: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care, 2024.

https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/a23-refcomm-d-annotated.pdf (2023 American Medical Association House of Delegates statement against the use of BMI).

There’s some social and medical criticisms of the concept of obesity as well as how it is measured and medicalized.

This is all of course besides the fact that, regardless of whether obesity is understood properly, its presence in this original joke is in fact still fascist and still functions to normalize the fundamental values of fatphobia as they intersect with transphobia, racism, misogyny, and ableism. “I think you’re over thinking this,” is a staple phrase of fascism. Maybe you should fucking think a bit.

Yes, I know better than you, get the fuck over it. You can’t even grasp how these forms of oppression are intersectional and you have the vibes of a socialist boyfriend who doesn’t do the dishes. I’m sure you’re very satisfied identifying every problem you have with the system from your limited perspective, knowledge, and empathy.

Won’t be responding to anything else other than your reading list on anti-fascist scholarship or writing related to these topics.

Oh look, another Lemmy “leftist,” who thinks systemic oppression is just when people are mean about how you look. We all know you’re a lib dude, nobody else is so self-righteous about aggrieved entitlement to bigotry. You want to feel like a good person without actually understanding what that means and putting the work into changing.

If you can’t tell the difference between anti-fascism and pacifism, you better stay the fuck on your couch, we don’t want you out here. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a story about some smug fuck lib man showing up to events and saying some edgelord power-fantasy shit before saying some bigoted shit. You aren’t a fucking socialist if you subscribe to liberal constructions of human value, you dense chud.

Okay chud. Let’s see your audience’s reaction:

(See how you can make fun of them without making fun of vulnerable groups? its so easy when you aren’t a bigot)

This one is way more zealous than the other one, refer to the other comment for an explanation of the connection.

It isn’t that it’s mean, you dummy, it’s that the underlying values of this joke are in fact fascist in their orientation and, because people like you exist, it is an effective way to promote those values. If you need an example, think of the jokes about these people that reference inbreeding with the presumption that it is correlated with poor intellectual and cognitive ability, and therefore validates the idea that these moral qualities are related to genetic qualities (there is also a classist element in this joke given where they are oriented in the US geographically). Even if there is science to suggest that this is potentially a real consequence of inbreeding, I hope I don’t have to explain even more clearly to you why it is problematic to naturalize the correlation between genetics and the danger one group poses to society at large.

You’ve tried to lecture me on language, but you don’t seem to know what any of these words mean, which is why you are so vulnerable to the manipulation that they promote. You think every fascist is just what, dumber than you? You don’t think that maybe there’s a way to “trick” you into subscribing to the same values they do, especially if you already subscribe to liberalism wholeheartedly as what appears to be the case here? You don’t get to choose the consequences of your actions, you can only inform yourself so that you can make better decisions in the future. If the effect of this joke is that it reproduces the idea that there are physical markers for moral depravity, then you either have to admit that you want it to have that function or change the way you understand these terms and the context they exist in. Some fascists choose to be fascists, most of them just don’t think about it.

I do find it concerning just how many people talk about things like this without ever challenging their fundamental understanding of social norms. A lot of you do just assume you’re smarter than me, which is funny, and I wonder if you’ve ever actually read anything on fatphobia and the arguments for its recognition.

Bigotry is difficult for liberals to understand because they typically want to recognize it as individualized actions of aggression like calling someone a slur or being mean about someone’s weight. Have you considered for a moment that you are vulnerable to the laundering of values that promote dehumanization and genocide through vectors of “bigotry” which you don’t take seriously, such as fatness? You used the word “curable,” which is very convenient for me as it is a good demonstration of how this topic is medicalized (we can ignore the well-documented discrimination against fat people in medical settings for now), and specifically how it is pathologized. When something is pathologized, that means that whatever is seen as wrong with it is always relative to an idealized, “positive” thing; a fat body is bad (unhealthy) because it is not good like a thin body (healthy). Regardless of the medical science behind this construction (of which I’m sure you also have not read as it is well established by this point that fatness is not necessarily unhealthy relative to other factors), this has manifested socially as a vector of discrimination exactly because of the perception that this is an illness that is cured by willpower. Conveniently in an neoliberal culture, an illness that materializes laziness, poor self-control, and general moral degeneracy reinforces an individualism where individual people are responsible for the effects of their material conditions; i.e. you can choose to be fat the same way you can choose to be poor.

Because fatness is not a recognized vector for discrimination in the same way that racism and sexism is, it is an important site of scholarly discourses exactly because of how effective it is at laundering ableism and classism; along with the fact that it is a measurably oppressed and vulnerable group based on the research I allude to above. Liberals like you don’t question any of this, and then readily engage in the fascist rhetoric I am criticizing in this comment with the assumption that you are doing the righteous thing by promoting bodily health and dissuading any claim that a person’s fatness is not related to their moral quality of character. It is not about, “body-positivity” any more than anti-racism and anti-queerphobia is even though those forms of oppression similarly relate to the subordination of particular bodily attributes to others. That oppressive ideal of thinness is inextricably linked to ideas of whiteness, and “fitness” in a very fascist understanding of the natural world and human evolution.

Hope that explains some of it to you.