Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson @ simontherockjohnson @lemmy.ml Posts 6Comments 99Joined 3 wk. ago
Germany has put a significant number of Jews in jail on antisemitism charges for protecting the genocide since October 2023.
Germany was also famous for prosecuting pro Palestinian Jews prior to that.
https://www.972mag.com/german-jews-antizionism-censorship/
How the fuck do you think reform is going to help?
Tbh I literally could not figure out which one was supposed to be you in the preview pic. I don't know how autistic this makes me.
The days of Cash 4 Kids are over who needs to bribe judges to fill private jails when CCI can spin up an AI dept use their existing contacts to become court approved jurisdiction by jurisdiction and then generate AI testimony of the victims of crime to leverage longer prison sentences that they administer. It's the perfect vertical integration.
Victim impact statements are admissable in sentencing decisions.
They've finally done it, they've found a durable ROI mechanism for AI.
The thing that annoys me the most about star wars’ “deep lore” is that 99% of it is the most shallow and obvious shit imaginable.
My favorite things about the deep lore:
- Jedi are cops
- Jedi are cops who cannot stop slavery in the Prequels for some weird reason
- The horny bad guy who was supposedly killed in Episode 1, and then several times in Legends and disavowed by his religious extremist order actually succeeds in getting power over the Hutts, effectively proving that the Jedi Order with a prequel strength of 10,000 and quite literally the most magical space wizards ever at the time had the power to end chattel slavery all along, they just didn't want to because....
- Jedi are cops whose ranks are filled with blood tax child slaves, literal Jannisaries
- Jedi are cops who in the Old Republic (~1000 years prior to the prequels) waged a war against the "Zygerrian Slave Empire" because slavery was bad back then, but in the Republic Era slavery was good again, btw the canon is really funny that the Jedi population always seems to be capped between 10,000 and 15,000 but you know the Hutts were super powerful. Also obviously child blood tax slavery wasn't bad just the capitalist chattel kind
- Jedi are cops who are the good guys you cannot debate this, their light sabers are blue and green which means they're good and not red or orange which means evil (10000 retcons on what saber colors mean, one was invented for literally Samuel L Jackson's portrayal)
- Jedi are cops that everyone trusts to be negotiators even though they have mind control powers
- Jedi are cops that everyone trusts to be negotiators because they do not care about things like workers rights, slavery, white collar crime, corruption, etc
- Jedi are cops who have supernatural investigative skills which is why they constantly are bamboozled by the bad guy playing dress up in the building next door who they only suspected of being bad like 5 seconds before he put the final piece of his plan into motion also he kills the guy who figured it out and did nothing about it (Mace Windu) like immediately after he was set up by Anakin and Palatine
- Jedi are cops who are extreme religious fanatics and cannot tolerate apostasy or not subscribing to their religion order
- The entire plot line of the prequels to the original trilogy is:
- cops steal child to fulfill the cop prophecy of the cop who will unleash unlimited genocide on all of the cops enemies, they call this balance
- cop messiah whose options were slavery or religious slavery is too dang normal and loves his mom too much and is continually punished for it
- cops fail to police corrupt politicians and to police the cop messiah child leading to the destruction of their police station and unlimited genocide on cops as the ironic fulfillment of the cop prophecy
- son of cop messiah with no formal cop training teams up with the cop who mentored his dad
- son of cop messiah realizes the cop messiah was his father
- cop messiah fulfills the cop's POV of the cop prophecy (not in the original canon, retconned ~10 times in extended universe or "legends") by killing his boss because he loves son of cop messiah too much even though they met like 3 times
At least Frank Herbert had the balls to explicitly make Paul and Leto II Atraides bad guys to the reader.
Yeah OG trilogy is Kurosawa ripoffs for children in space.
While still a valid callout, these “new chips made out of non-silicon are BETTER in EVERY WAY!” experiments happen about once every 6 months.
China has been on the ball to curb publish or perish pop science bullshit for about 5 years now. They banned incentive and performance structures in universities that rely on publishing rankings.
Despite this reform, China has maintained it's leadership in paper quality and quantity and is now leading in high-level SME's
It's more likely this is real than it was 5 years ago.
From my other comment about o1 and o3/o4 potential issues:
The other big difference between o1 and o3 and o4 that may explain the higher rate of hallucinations is that the o1’s reasoning is not user accessible, and it’s purposefully trained to not have safe guards on reasoning. Where o3 and o4 have public reasoning and reasoning safeguards. I think safeguards may be a significant source of hallucination because they change prompt intent, encoding and output. So on a non-o1 model that safeguard process is happening twice per turn once for reasoning and once for output, then being accumulated into the input. On an o1 model that's happening once per turn only for output and then being accumulated.
Another point of anecdata is that I've read that vibe coders say that non-reasoning models lead to better results for coding tasks because they are faster and they tend to hallucinate less because they don't pollute with automated CoT. I've seen people recommend Deepseek V3 03/2025 release (with deep think turned off) over R1 for that reason.
my money is on the higher hallucination rate being a result of the data being polluted with synthetic information. I think its model collapse
But that is effectively what happening with RLMs and refeed. LLMs have statistical weights between model and inputs. For example RAG models will add higher weights to the text retrieved from your source documents. RLM reasoning is a fully automated CoT prompting technique. You don't provide the chain, you don't ask the LLM to create the chain, it just does it all the time for everything. Meaning the inputs becomes more polluted with generated text which reinforces the existing biases in the model.
For example if we take the em dash issue, the idea is that LLMs already generate more em dashes than exist in human written text. Let's say turn 1 you get an output with em dashes. On Turn 2 this is fed back into the machine which reinforces that over indexing on em dashes in your prompt. This means turn 2's output is going to potentially have more em dashes, because the input on turn 2 contained output from turn 1 that had more em dashes than normal. Your input over time end up accumulating the model's biases through the history. The shorter your inputs on each turn and the longer the conversation the faster the conversation input converges on being mostly LLM generated text.
When you do this with an RLM, you have even more output being added to the input automatically with a CoT prompt. Meaning that any model biases accumulate in the input even faster.
Another reason I suspect the CoT refeed vs training data pollution is that GPT-4.5 which is the latest (Feb 2025) non-reasoning model seems to have a lower hallucination rate on SimpleQA than o1. If the training data were the issue we'd see rates closer to o3/o4.
The other big difference between o1 and o3 and o4 that may explain the higher rate of hallucinations is that the o1's reasoning is not user accessible, and it's purposefully trained to not have safe guards on reasoning. Where o3 and o4 have public reasoning and reasoning safeguards. I think safeguards may be a significant source of hallucination because they change prompt intent, encoding and output. So on a non-o1 model that safeguard process is happening twice per turn once for reasoning and once for output, then being accumulated into the next turn's input. On an o1 model that's happening once per turn only for output and then being accumulated.
AI alchemists discovered that the statistics machine will be in a better ball park if you give it multiple examples and clarifications as part of your asks. This is called Chain of Thought prompting. Example:
Then the AI Alchemists said, hey we can automate this by having the model eat more of it's own shit. So a reasoning model will ask it self "What does the user want when they say < Your prompt>?" This will generate text that it adds to your query, to generate the final answer. All models with "chat memory" effectively eat their own shit, the tech works by reprocessing the whole chat history (sometimes there's a cache) every time you reply. Reasoning models because of the emulation of chain of thought eat more of their own shit than non-reasoning models do.
Some reasoning models are worse than others because some refeed the entire history of the reasoning, and others only refeed the current prompt's reasoning.
Essentially it's a form of compound error.
This is a fatalistic argument and borders on a prophecy. The annihilation of humanity from nuclear war or climate collapse is also a possibility. At best, a few scattered survivors might practice a type of primitive communism in such a scenario.
Yeah but it's quite literally the ideology.
Marx
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Engels
The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.
Engels
The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not "abolished", it withers away.
And also you're quite right as to what this means in the grand scheme of things. We might make our own Marxism, but not as we please. If I know anything about prophecy from reading the classics is that if it's right, it's ironically not right in the way you think it is.
Chinese industry and agriculture were too underdeveloped to maintain the material living standards for everybody that the socialists were aiming for. So there was an upper limit to how many people could truly be lifted out of poverty in China until relatively recently. The Chinese country side especially is vast and difficult to physically access. The number of people, thus the requirement of energy for a modern lifestyle is massive. There is also the need to earn money from the west so you can gain access to oil markets and crucial technology.
Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse
In so far as China is building “durable” socialism, they really are following this theory from Marx that they need to develop new technologies of the future that can surpass the capitalist countries.
There's often an irony in seeing this line of reasoning together that's a core irony in Marxist thought. You can sum it up as socialism or barbarism if you wish. But Marx is absolutely right that liberation is a historical act, however in your own evaluation liberation (in various material forms) was denied to one group and not the other an active political choice by an entity whose goal was total liberation. And again this isn't something I'm expecting you to "answer", but what I do not see a lot of people doing is sitting with that irony, evaluating it and it's consequences.
Liberation as a historical act comes in material stages, and as a factor of the economy making the deeper question is "Did China do everything it could for the people whose liberation they deferred?". If the answer is no that doesn't mean they're secretly evil or not socialists or whatever. Thinking out the answer to such questions merely gives movements that come later more data about possibilities which prevents them from over-indexing on security based concerns which has consistently been a defensive meme.
Historically speaking both the USSR and China over-indexed on security in these decisions. While China was making these decisions, the West was too busy carving up the USSR during a critical moment for Chinese development -- IMO they could have done both. I don't blame them for their decisions, but I'd personally rather accept the risks of more liberation.
In practice, despite Marxism being an ideology that understands exploitation and vulnerability, it's very peculiar that often liberation is often denied to the most vulnerable and exploited.
Part of the point of the DemCen system is to increase the prevalence of good-faith actors and decrease the prevalence of bad faith ones. It is not as if MLs have historically just ignored education of the youth or the cultivation of good faith actors.
This doesn't practically explain the how. You're talking about building patronage networks. That effectively means that those networks themselves can be evaluated as good or bad faith. This just moves the question to another area of the political structure typical of DemCen systems.
Then what are we even arguing about?
When reading theory I don't see us as being on "teams". What's the purpose of writing this stuff if we're evaluating this solely through the lens of "teams"? At that point any article might as well say "Right Marxist Leninism is the best". It's a bad argument it could be better. I'm not even settled on what the "ultimate system" here is, I don't think there is one, especially not as simple as just do "hierarchy". If we want to converse about this stuff in good faith we should generally have a complex conversation about it in reality, that often means there's a lot of grey areas and not a lot of practically right answers if we're being honest with ourselves.
Like I've said elsewhere in this thread: CPC's done a really good job, but they're not in the business of exporting socialist thought. I linked this
The CPC's own words are:
Second, while continuing to learn from and absorb ideas from other countries, we have made our own explorations and innovations to avoid blindly copying the system or democratic model of any other country
While leading the people through the periods of revolution, construction, and reform, the CPC always held fast to the belief that no two political systems in the world are the same and that no universal political model exists.
This is a very adult way of speaking about socialism compared to other sets of thinkers who argue implicitly about universal contexts, and universalize ML concepts without explaining their application to their context or even explaining what their context is. If you believe in whatever theory and whatever individual practices, the onus is on you to explain why those practices work in the contexts you're referring to. OP has not done this vis-a-vis hierarchy. They have created a very abstract rationale.
The reproduction of a system from generation to generation can be durable without getting rid of the human element. In fact, the attempt of getting rid of the human element itself is idealistic. Socialism will always be a movement (not system) composed of humans. And it is certainly the case that socialism is not simply a system, but rather the movement of those who aim to abolish the present state of affairs. There will necessarily be many types of systems produced by socialists, and many disagreements in the socialist camp, and even reactionary brain-worms stuck in the minds of socialists young or old. Thus a “durable” socialism of the type you seek cannot really exist, because just as “scientific racism” evolved, waned, and waxed over time, so will socialism. The durably socialist system you create today could also simply become obsolete tomorrow.
This is not a Marxist viewpoint. Marxism is a modernist philosophy based on the dialectic of historical materialism. That means that Marxism states that the development of communism is inevitable and represents an ultimate state of human social organization that is classless and stateless. IMO a durable socialism is ultimately required for the modernist communist apotheosis because modernist communism would need to be systemic as well. The inherent nature of the transition between socialism and communism requires socialism to become durable so the state can wither away. A socialist state's main goal under such an ideology is to replace itself with a social organization that supplants the need for itself.
Because conditions in China were different at the time.
This is a hindsight apologetic argument that doesn't explain it's own claims. Plenty of critics inside and outside China noted that China made the choice to develop cities at the expense of the country-side. We've seen similar choices in the prioritization of distribution play out in other socialist countries to worse effect such as the USSR. This doesn't actually answer the question of what made it work or if it was necessary or if it could be improved by future states.
I'm not asking you to answer this question in full mind you. I'm merely saying that this answer is defensive and reflexive rather than explanatory. "The conditions were different at the time and we had no other choice" is always used to explain away and shut down criticism even in good faith. Yet that same argument isn't made when someone seriously proposes to follow a historical example -- which is quite literally entirely appropriate because the successes of those examples were based in historical material conditions that do not match our current reality.
In context the whole point is that OP's post feels simplistic and incomplete and obviously favors their favorite flavor of leftism and even Marxism.
Through educating the future generations and continuing development and reforms. Through adapting the existing system to changing geopolitical and technological conditions.
This is a similar kind of thing where we can talk about these kind of "no duh" vagaries, but the moment we look at what this practically means everyone gets knives out sectarian.
Although, I should also clarify that we were not exactly discussing big O complexity to begin with, and the use of the word “complexity” was a bit more colloquial.
Which is why my original post offered the term efficiency that OP rejected and insisted on using complexity.
I am not talking about programming humans, but the schemes they use to coordinate with each other. Those are 2 entirely different things.
These are not "simply" coordination schemes since they are created entirely to administer the distribution of resources in the real world. They are social meta programming. You are arguing beyond aspects of coordination/communication you are arguing about real world stakes.
This is a given, however, nowhere in my example was the internal nature of the nodes themselves assumed to be uniform. The messaging schemes I have described, for instance, could be used with actual humans, with some modifications, namely that some of the “messages” would likely be more like “meetings”, and the workers would have to periodically meet with the project planner and discuss things.
Again you are abstracting away the purpose of such a system in order to prove its specifications in a vacuum rather than using the actual intent. What are the meetings about? Production? Great we're back at node fungibility due to distribution of labor and individual human ability.
Democratic centralist systems always stress accountability for people in powerful positions. This is the reason why ML states often get slandered as being “corrupt”, because in ML countries, such corruption is constantly being exposed by design whereas in capitalist countries, corruption is simply the norm and goes unnoticed.
Sure. I agree. However:
- Your argument here is based on a hypothetical demcen system full of good faith actors.
- The reason that in capitalist countries corruption becomes legalized and normalized is because "corruption" in the general case boils down to perception. We're back at interpreting good faith vs bad faith. Capitalist propaganda works overtime to manage the perception of the legalized corruption in capitalist countries to at best normal expressions of rights and at worst good faith mistakes.
A horizontal system could also harm you. The free market is a relatively horizontal system, and it keeps harming us. The very decentralized nature of the free market makes it so that you often have no recourse or no one to hold accountable when things go wrong, because the actions of the entire group/ dynamic of the system is the problem.
It's entirely arguable if the market is in practice horizontal or hierarchical. Regardless my arguments here aren't about proving horrizontalism as "better than", it's about the complex trade offs happen socially when choosing these broad structural archetypes to organize around. I never said horrizontal systems cannot be harmful. My point is that the difficulty of horizontal systems can be a form protection.
But this is not research, this is simply an internet forum. I appreciate the things you are telling me, but I did not come here knowing these things. I am also not saying that the communications overhead problem is a problem that needs to be solved on the theoretical level.
My point is based on OPs original submission and my understanding that your position was a defense of it. OP submitted OP's own essay from OP's own substack with a pro-heirarchy case. I criticized the essay as generally lacking depth on the subject. OP got mad at me and started berating me based on OP's socialist bona fides.
I could have been gentler with my criticism because I did not understand that OP posted OP's own substack because the names don't match. I understand that not everybody knows these things, my line of criticism while admittedly harsh and teetering on unproductive, is honestly meant to raise the conversation from simplistic defenses of hierarchy using typical bromides of the immortal science to a more holistic evaluation of these systems and their implementation and conception of socialism.
I generally agree with the scenario you've set up but there are some misunderstandings here.
This is a total of 2N + M + 1 messages for a single job, which can be serious processing overhead depending on the nature of the task.
This is a measure of difficulty not complexity. You're right that with a large network size this makes a lot of data that is more difficult to process, but it's actually simple not complex. The complexity of this is still fairly simple a linear O(n) because your messages grow linearly relative to the amount of jobs your process.
A more complex scenario is that if your design had a flaw that generated 2N2 + M + 1 messages by adding a superfluous for loop somewhere, then your complexity would be O(n2) relative to the amount of your jobs your process.
If you're digging a hole difficulty is based on how mechanized/big your shovel is relative to the size of the hole. If you're digging a 2x2 hole 6 feet down with a gardening trowel it's hard, it's easier with a full size shovel, it's incredibly easy with a backhoe.
If you're digging a hole, complexity on the other hand is what you must do to prevent all the ways that the earth can collapse on you based on the dimensions of your hole, the type of soil you dig in, etc. A 2x2 6 foot hole straight down is a less complex than digging a 2x2 hole 6 feet horizontally into a mountain, because your hole can collapse not only based on the sides but from the cave-in above. Despite removing the same volume of earth you have a more complex task because you must scaffold to remove the risk of cave-in. There's also dimensions of soil composition etc.
Complexity typically affects difficulty but difficulty never affects complexity. Sometimes complexity can also be fully detached from difficulty it depends on the actual problem.
You are making the same mistake OP made.
The controller sends a job to some worker. The controller knows which workers have spare capacity because it has memory of how many jobs it gave to which worker and how many jobs have been returned.
This is where you hide the actual complexity in controller based designs. The complexity of offloading the state management from the individual node to a controller node is not simple in the general case. Hierarchical organization here only reduces the difficulty of processing by reducing the amount of data overhead. Reducing complexity here comes through standardization of nodes in the system not through hierarchical organization.
You can make really simple assumptions about capacity if your network is made of nodes that are all the same (and your workload domain is well bounded and understood), however as soon as you vary the specifications of the nodes and the workload requirements this becomes an incredibly complex calculation to figure out where a job can go based on available memory, compute, storage and other needs.
This becomes even more complex if you need to handle specialized functions that exist only on certain nodes and not others, such as availability of NPUs for AI tasks, availability of hardware enabled transcoding for media management tasks, availability of randomization hardware for crytpographic tasks, etc.
Ultimately this is why horizontal job runners based on messaging middle-ware patterns (0mq, rabbitmq, Kafka) still exist and are used in highly complex environments.
Moving on to the social implications of this approach, reducing complexity this way is quite literally not applicable to human systems. You cannot ensure fungible nodes for humans where each node has the human equivalent of 32 GB RAM, 4 VCPUs at 3.2 GHZ and 100 GB storage. If we did that to humans that would be called eugenics.
You cannot make the complexity from non-uniformity in human systems superfluous like you can in computer systems. It's immoral. Humans are not computers.
I can program a system to work any way that I want sure. If I want local durability I can make a mesh. If I want to lower the communications overhead I can centralize decision making in a controller structure.
I cannot program humans in the same way and nor should I think about it as such because:
- Humans are not computational machines, they have their own motivations, biases and needs
- Programming humans this way is not just impossible but at best is just paternalism by another name warts and all.
To apply system design to humans a system has conceive at minimum of the dimensions of power and faith to be durable against:
- Humans with powerful roles in the system who are acting in bad faith causing harm for personal benefit
- Humans with weak roles in the system that are acting in good faith against a resilient system that is effectively harming them
- Humans with powerful roles in the system who are acting in good faith but are making mistakes that lead to harm that they do not recognize/dismiss
- Humans with weak roles in the system that are acting in bad faith against the system
- Humans with powerful roles in the system that are acting in bad faith against the system.
This is a level of complexity that is much harder than designing a job runner with specific properties for your use-case.
Socialist theory-crafting in 2025 at the level of typical systems design maps is not helpful or insightful. It's the equivalent of physics research in 2025 using the Bohr model. In tech terms, your base of concern should start at things like durable consensus algorithms and Byzantine faults. If you start there you are ensuring that the technology you apply to your social organization explicitly protects in priority order the values or outcomes you specify. I think this is a viable method for human organization especially because it encodes the typical outcomes and injustices that are part of the system's function explicitly. Everything is a trade off.
However concerning yourself with communications overhead is a 20th century problem. We have technological solutions that minimize those concerns, we simply haven't developed political systems matching our level of technology. Building durable cybernetic systems like Project Cybersyn or OGAS are the pathways to ensuring a systemic socialism when these systems are open, transparent to average citizens and developed in partnership with their needs.
TL;DR, my criticism here is that we are talking about aspects of systems design that are only important historically and the conversations focus ultimately misleads us in how we build these systems, leading to worse outcomes. We are mainly talking about the difficulty of human communication between horizontal and vertical structure, but not about the complexity of human relations those systems apply to.
Isn’t this the boutique shop ideology created literally for some video game whose name I cannot remember?
??? This is literally the observation that hard line Leninists make about syndicalism, that it fractures the proletariat around shop lines creating sectarianism based on labor function.
I’m glad you understand. After all, it would be embarrassing to start talking about “philosopher kings” after having placed so much effort into developing the mass line and democratic centralisation precisely to give the people more power.
Mass-lines and dem cen never actually transcended the supremacy of vanguard power when the original vanguard was alive. Dem cen specifically entrenched vanguardists and political opportunists.
https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/
You don't get the point. You know how "systemic racism" describes a system that is durably racist that does not need to be occupied by good faith racist operators to make racist outcomes? Socialists need systemic socialism, a system that is durably socialist that does not need to be occupied by good faith socialist operators for socialist outcomes.
You're not answering the question of how do we move from a system that is based primarily on elite choice. Xi Jinping explicitly set the agenda to prioritize poverty alleviation more than Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin. Fifth generation thought places an emphasis on this via the 8th Commitment and the 1st Must:
- "Improving people's livelihood and well-being is the primary goal of development".
- Must put the people first
This begs the questions:
- Why was this not centered in Third or Fourth Generation thought?
- How do we ensure that 6th generation thought does even better with these types of commitments?
Your article is focused on poverty alleviation that has mainly happened within the last 10-15 years, and the elimination of "extreme poverty". The reality is that "extreme poverty" is not a static measure, it's a relative economic measure. China has eliminated extreme poverty which is an amazing feat in it's own right. But the extermination of extreme poverty is a point in time redistribution.
The more salient question for building socialism is: How to keep the system of redistribution up to date and politically durable over time such that extreme poverty is not recreated in another name? How do we push this system to eliminate poverty? How do we keep this system up to date and politically durable to ensure that poverty is not recreated in another name?
The CPC itself does not believe that its system can be copied and applied in other places, it is not interested in that. It's interested in building socialism with Chinese characteristics. There is much to learn from the CPC, but there is an explicit disclaimer here that it works for China at the current point in time.
I’m not misrepresenting anything you’re saying. What Freeman shows is that power structures form in ad hoc fashion within flat organization, and it’s often narcissists, psychopaths, and other types of manipulators who end up in charge of these structures. I’m directly addressing your points, and pointing out the fallacy of your argument.
The reality is that power structures organically form within flat organization, and the reason this happens are explained in detail in my original article. The difference is that when these structures form in ad hoc fashion, there is far less accountability than when they’re created with intention.
You're doing the exact same thing. Again.
You're axiomatically saying flat systems allow bad actors but hierarchies are resistant to bad actors because hierarchies are created by good guys with good intentions. You offer no proof, there are glaring contradictions. This is going nowhere.
This is incredibly tiring because you seem to be willfully misrepresenting what I'm saying. By linking Freeman you link a writer that actually explains their point with examples and systems rather than cribbing a Lenin style of writing and using thought terminating cliches like reactionary, you seem to be willfully talking past my points.
You're also misreading Freeman because the Tyranny of Sturcturlessness isn't anti-horrizontalist it actually explains via contrapostiives and trade offs issues inherent to horizontal organization, how to overcome them, and the effects of bad horizontal organization. You are stanning hierarchy, but you do not explain it's difficulties. Sturcturelesness is quite literally a standard in anarchist libraries because it talks about practical issues and how to overcome them. You do not do this in your piece. You make snide comments about other "lesser" systems while shallowly describing your preference.
You also do not account for the fact that the issues explained in the Tyranny of Structurelessness quite literally apply to hierarchical systems. Hierarchical systems become star systems as well, except the hierarchies tend to reinforce the selection of the stardom. In fact stardom is much more dangerous in hierarchical systems because it often leads to explicit schisms and outright warfare between the party leadership. Stardom in hierarchical systems allows stars to wield explicit top down power which leads to extreme infighting that has been common in almost every ML* government and between ML* governments when the USSR didn't like things. That's why the USSR had succession crises.
You don't even talk about how Dengist reforms allowed China to overcome the typical succession crisis issues found in ML* governments. Quite literally China has had 3 successful peaceful and stable transitions of paramount leaders after Deng. You never ask why or how, despite this being a crucial development compared to other socialist countries and their succession crises.
This is exactly why I am criticizing your piece as shallow and thought terminating.
I'm pretty tired of being misrepresented especially with lulzy things like:
That’s right, that’s what class dictatorship is. The system is explicitly set up to prevent a bourgeoisie counter revolution. You’re so close to getting it!
Because you're willfully misinterpreting me in bad faith, because the whole problem I'm trying to explain is that you're not actually providing a systemic explanation for this. I've said this many times and using many examples.
China is a DOTP until it isn't, that's the problem. You don't even explain how China's structure has maintained the DOTP, because if you did you'd sound too lib for your own liking. In reality the Dengist reforms that allowed China to stabilize and keep itself on the rails were in large part term limits.
Deng also did some fucking magic, but it's because he was magic just like Mao was magic and Lenin was magic. Cat theory analogues have literally wrecked plenty of socialist countries. If you care about the DOTP so much you'd be asking why cat theory was successful under Deng, but Kadars' NEM which was ideologically the same process put HPR under the heel of foreign investment debt leading to outright liberalism.
I don't subscribe to great man theories. Durable socialism isn't going to be built by cribbing the "hard times" cliche but making it red and saying "good men create good times who create good men who create good times let the good times roll". That's what liberals think, quite literally, that all everyone has to do is just "be good". I'm interested in talking about building durable socialist systems because I understand that revolutions are betrayed over time piece by piece.
Nobody should buy this on faith. The Marxist tradition isn't supposed to be scripture, this is supposed to be scientific. You are proselytizing, you are not analyzing or building systems.
China has managed to pull this off in a very unique way, and that's great for them. That doesn't mean it's a replicable example, nor do they actually present their system as such.
I am to blame for some of this because I set the tone. I am sorry for that. I didn't know you were linking your own writing, I thought you were linking some guy, so I could have been nicer with my criticisms. It was not obvious to me that you were actually the writer.
Are the people too insignificant to care about or so powerful they cost the election, which is it??