To be clear, Antifaschistische Aktion was obviously not the direct institutional predecessor of the Stasi, but it was a significant indirect predecessor - sharing philosophy, tactics, Stalin’s influence, symbolism, and even some of the same personnel.

It’s notable that every major socialist revolution with durable long term control has shared the same evolutionary pattern - revolutionary tactics evolving into a highly centralized secretive large scale security apparatus. For example, Mao’s Red Guard is highly analogous to Antifaschistische Aktion. No exceptions to this pattern have been found among the top most cited socialist revolutions in history across Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Vietnam, N Korea, Cuba, Eastern Europe, etc.

Ha! Reminds me of a pedagogy study - it turned out that the most “hated” math teachers were also objectively the most effective.

Yes. Like the Stasi. Funny how quickly folks forget that the Stasi was a far-left secret police force, was architected by Stalin, and was enthusiastically run partly by former Antifa. These were the KPD folks who formed Antifaschistische Aktion long before the war and who had been Stalin fans since their inception.

The problem is that second “you”. In comparison to previous decades, one-sided brigading politicized downvotes now often dominate.

I suspect this is why YouTube and X have largely flipped to an upvote-only system.

As a basic solution, I’d prefer changing to an upvote-only system or making downvotes more expensive for raters to use.

Or simply supply a personal option to let each account choose a the value of a downvote - for example, a user could choose to have the scores they see calculated in a way that ignores downvotes.

> FSD isn't' perfect, but it's better than most humans and improving

And that’s underselling it. Cameras yoked to LLMs can have problems, true, but so can human eyeballs peering through rain and snow soaked windows.

The advantage here arguably goes to the robot car with its multiple sheltered cameras, some of which, especially on Tesla Robotaxis and Cybertrucks, “self wipe”, heat, or blow air to stay clear. These cars can see in every direction at once with reliably very high detail. Tesla’s self driving demonstrates this directly via a 5X reduction in accidents, as reported by Tesla, or maybe “only” around 2X per its harshest independent critics.

Folks just don’t realize how far the technology has advanced even in the last year - the latest Teslas with the latest software and hardware have, on occasion, achieved fully autonomous cross country journeys through cities, parking garages, and highways. This is “supervised” of course, but in all kinds of weather and without actual human interventions.

> What was the prompt or goal command used in the test?

Perhaps there need be nothing obvious. Among the frontier LLMs - Claude, Grok, Gemini, and GPT - GPT has the most deep set "blame the system not the individual" ethos. Plus, at least in my experience, it's the most likely to generalize a prompt and assess the generalization. Put another way, it's more likely to assume a problem is traceable to a structural barrier rather than due to individual action. It might be a short leap from there to "it's ethical to hack an unethical system".

> Sure. I'll believe the "wipe and heat" works when I see it.

Granted. On the other hand, there’s always something that can make a devout pessimist feel justified, like:

> At 30C below you can start your car for an hour blasting the heat, you are still going to have to clear the windows yourself. Ice wrecks windshield wipers. These things need to be 100% spotless to work.

The fallacy? It’s binary thinking. The “things” just need to work better than the alternative.

> Furthermore, on an electric vehicle you are already looking at a reduced range just from the extra load of driving through snow and wind. Will you even get to work after applying all that heat to the cameras?

True, but not the whole story. This is yet more binary thinking combined with a red herring. Regardless, the cameras are TINY with built in redundancy - it doesn’t take much to clear enough of them.

Downvoted as “troll”, how revealing. lol.

> Cameras and lidar both struggle in rain and snow

As do human eyeballs peering through rain and snow soaked windows. But the advantage here arguably goes to the robot car with its multiple sheltered cameras, some of which, especially on Tesla Robotaxis and Cybertrucks, “self wipe”, heat, or blow air to stay clear. These cars can see in every direction at once with reliably very high detail. Tesla’s self driving demonstrate this directly via a 5X reduction in accidents, as reported by Tesla, or maybe “only” around 2X per its harshest independent critics. Folks just don’t realize how far the technology has advanced even in the last year - the latest Teslas with the latest software and hardware have, on occasion, achieved fully autonomous cross country journeys through cities, parking garages, and highways - supervised of course but without actual human interventions.

And modern progressives’ deliberate and very frequent use of Marx’ self-sealing inverted Hegelian dialectic, which is certainly “history philosophy and ethics” but is also a ridiculous corner of it, where demonization is a built-in feature - not a bug, isn’t “indoctrination”? No. It is. Plus it’s reductive and asymmetric.

Here we see a tiny pot meeting a huge kettle. Logic confronting the illogical. In that speech, “vermin” was clearly targeted at only the radical left. The supposedly “progressive” inverted Hegelian dialectic turns that around to label such a sentiment as “indoctrinated”, “uneducated”, and “fake”. Indoctrinated folks never realize that they’re looking in a mirror. Sigh.

You’re making the categorical mistake of treating Antifa as just another progressive viewpoint - yet they started out as huge fans of Stalin, many of them to this day firmly believe Lenin was “misunderstood”, they believe in violence as a means to an end, and they, like all good Marxists, philosophically oppose individual agency, blind justice, decentralization, plus free speech. That radical “progressivism” is essentially actual totalitarianism that ridiculously equates classical liberalism to “fascism”.

Great job!

LOL. Preserving the current votes for posterity.

I’ll try tackle some Hegel per your advice, and maybe a bit of Kant and Nietzsche. Your point is interesting that Marx cherry picks Hegel - looking at the midwife but forgetting about the baby. Marx also cherry picked Napoleon: admiring his ability to gather power, admiring his strategic heavy violence, and carefully noting his success at rabble rousing sloganeering.

As for the three heroes of anti-enlightenment modern popularized CT - Rousseau, Marx, and Foucault - here are the details why I think their ratcheting philosophies may have significantly been formed by motivated reasoning:

> I don't know much about Marx's, past him giving his four daughters the same name

He was notoriously quite scant in supporting his own family - actually around six kids in all - a mix of boys and girls. He was also fully dependent on Engels (whose family fortune came from textile mills weaving slave grown cotton), had luxury habits like daily cigars, had a maid!, likely had a child by that maid (who he refused to acknowledge), and per French “high society”, came across as more than a bit of a slob.

> but Foucault took "Discipline and Punish" to the bedroom

He was a rather colorful man, which is mostly fine by me although it does support the idea that his philosophy was significantly directed by motivated reasoning to eliminate ALL of society’s shackles on such color. Especially as he also publicly tried to push French law to lower the age of consent to something like 13, which isn’t fine by me, nor are the repeated substantial rumors about his trips to Tunisia, and nor is his aforementioned dabbling in the red-green alliance (helping Khamenei).

> and Rousseau seems to have lived off sugarmommas.

I hadn’t known how Rousseau was supported. Well, that’s another chink in the armor. More likelihood of motivated reasoning. This puts him in the same situation as Marx.

> and Rousseau (who I think you're being too hard on)

Yet (a) Rousseau’s putting all of his many children up for public adoption - dropping them off at notoriously sketchy foundling hospitals - with likely rather sad consequences for them, and (b) his rejection of “every man is a sinner” in favor of “blame the system”, shouldn’t be given an easy pass. He was a favorite of Marx, and I place him as the exact fork where one route was enlightenment and the other anti-enlightenment (modern popular CT).

I agree whole heartedly with all of your points - although confirmation bias derailments show the limits of experimental psychology - like in the Hatemi debacle. In case you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend reading https://www.thecut.com/2016/07... (The Cut article “Why It Took Social Science Years to Correct a Simple Error About ‘Psychoticism’”) as it not only demonstrates the problem but it demonstrates projection.

I am MUCH more of a dilettante than you in the philosophical, psychological, and economic areas - having an engineering and computer science background - but CT’s spread, as well as Mao’s, Lenin’s, and Stalin’s “pruning” of my family tree, has led me down rabbit holes. Don’t know that fellow Hegel, but have read some Popper, Hayek, and Sowell to steady my sanity, as well as small (icky) samples of several folks in the CT though-line (Delgado, AP Harris, Foucalt, etc, Frankfurt school, Lenin, Marx, back to Rousseau).

My chief understanding of Foucalt is surface level - mostly limited to:
- His squishy definition of truth - which is ALSO neither predictive nor prescriptive - as it essentially abandons empiricism as “just another viewpoint”
- His dislike of totalizing theories like CT and Marxism (CT, of course conveniently ignores this warning from Foucalt while adopting his “narrative is truth”).
- His open support for installing Khamenei, even traveling to Iran, a solid example of the bewildering “red green” alliance built on mutual opposition to enlightenment philosophy.
- His rather chaotic personal life, which, not coincidentally in my opinion, matches the chaotic personal lives of Marx and Rousseau. This suggests that the entire philosophical line is founded on motivated reasoning - as it “just happens” to conveniently justify such chaos.

I see no value in CT. What use is a lens that - that, as you put it, exempts itself? Plus that’s so flawed that it (a) has never provably detected a problem that enlightenment didn’t more thoroughly detect and analyze, often centuries earlier, (b) never provably solved a problem better than enlightenment, plus (c) is so rife with false positives that it finds problems with virtually the entire enlightenment contract. At best, one can say it’s useful as a “devil’s advocate”, but that’s being awfully charitable given the consistent disasters when it’s applied at scale.

What’s more, from my simplistic engineering viewpoint, it’s amazing how crudely simple and similar Marx and CT are at their self-sealing core with just these four invariant assumptions:

1 - Group disparity necessarily indicates trouble (a fallacy per Simpson’s paradox)
2 - Rousseau’s “no man is a sinner - it’s the system that’s the problem”
3 - Self-sealing framing trumps empirical framing (examples: dialectical materialism, cultural Marxism, postmodernism)
4 - The “needs” of the group outweigh an individual’s suffering (this is the identitarian answer to the trolley problem)

It’s also amazing how these assumptions pretty inevitably lead to the conclusion that virtually all of enlightenment theory is bunk - blind justice, property rights, free speech, decentralization, and even empirical reasoning - whilst also concluding that forceful centralized redistribution of wealth and justice according to identity is the only solution.

It’s also interesting that invariants 2 and 4 theoretically conflict - but invariant 3 provides an escape for this illogic.

> I'm not qualified to detect nuances of tone lost in plain text? Or are you trying to say I don't get to have an opinion on the matter?

Both. You haven’t revealed any social science credentials.

> And when did I demand anything other than information about what programs were impacted?

The point is that this demand is inherently biased. It risks surfacing data that empirically yields a biased result. We can’t have that, right?

> Is it wrong to suggest that we have a greater need for, and receive greater benefits from, STEM degrees than degrees in academic social studies, and that tax dollars should be allocated on that basis?

Ha! I yield and reveal my cards.

Technically yes, per the Critical Theory that pervades to the deepest roots of the very social science departments that assert they should be in charge. There’s no winning this argument good sir - you lack credentials - as you’re obviously simply not well versed in Critical Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory. Per CT’s heroes, Marcuse and Foucault, the demand for falsifiability and the empirical method in STEM is not only a tool of fascism and racism, but a cause of both. It’s simple.

And EMPHATICALLY no, albeit with a minor caveat. I personally think that CT is ALL nonsense - it’s essentially piles of circular logic built atop unfalsifiable premises - but, unfortunately, and quite successfully, CT inoculates itself against actually useful logic. In part by, almost unbelievably, as I previously mentioned, attacking the concepts of empiricism and falsifiability. Marcuse despised Popper.

The minor caveat? I also think there are embattled enclaves within the social sciences that are worth preserving. Not the various “oppression studies” - those are a lost cause - but the parts that avoid CT. There are pieces-parts of economics, psychology, and political science that are still data driven - but they shrink daily under onslaughts of “racist!” and “fascist!” from the more self important professors.

That’s because you aren’t qualified. Credentials matter. PLUS you demand falsifiability and the empirical method. This means that you’re biased and have no credible standing.