I won’t claim to be an expert on the history of soviet science, but learning about it through a project definitely was a contributing factor in my radicalization.

The soviet union also had issues with marxist philosophers criticizing relativity. chief among them was Aleksandr Maksimov, but unlike in biology, where charlatans like Lysenko managed to lead a vast majority of soviet scientists against genetics, soviet physicist Vladimir Fock who was also keenly interested in Marxism tied the two together and defended it from critics who tried to exploit anti-idealism to attack real science.

I learned about this through the book Stalin’s Great Science. It’s written by someone who does admittedly fill the book with libshit(the word “Stalinist” is a must in any Western book about the USSR between 1924 and 1953) but also lived in the USSR and learned physics there, and does seem to have a vague nostalgia for it. It casts a relatively positive view of the role of the USSR in promoting science and provides examples of scientists very contrary to the usual western view of “scientist that didn’t like socialism >:(” which is what happens when the only soviet scientist they know is sakharov(which is exactly who my history teacher told me to write more about - I refused). There are a good number of books by relatively western historians like this(for example, this book was published by “Imperial College Press”) that actually at least partially serve to disprove many Western myths about the USSR. Another example is Mark Tauger on the topic of the so-called “Holodomor”. I really think these are good ways to ease libs into radicalization - just looking at history from a less biased perspective worked wonders for me.

Agree with the sentiment, but I do have to echo Sankara here, that we must never stop explaining. We can’t give up on all libs - our movement can’t succeed without the support of the people.

But yea, honestly, the only place I feel like I can genuinely criticize revolutionaries is here - I am genuinely willing to defend Khrushchev in front of libs, and I really don’t like ceding even a little bit of ground whenever possible.

The only exception is in the case of actually reactionary regimes that I happen to critically support. I am not going to pretend that women’s rights and especially LGBTQ+ rights are respected in Iran to the degree that they should be - that doesn’t mean that I don’t critically support them, but it does mean that my discourse around them is critical because i don’t want to seem like a patsoc/strasserist

In particular, I think the problem is not the technology itself(it rarely is; in my opinion, it is always the application of the technology), in the same sense that advances in automation of production are. The problem is capitalism - under capitalism, automation causes people to lose their jobs and thus their livelihoods, and under socialism, automation decreases the amount of work humans must do and instead leaves them able to explore other hobbies that are not tied to their livelihoods.

There are certainly actual applications of AI art technology that are interesting and/or could be useful, and I think turning it into just a question of “AI art good/bad” is not a particularly insightful question and one that does not really get to the root of the problems with AI art.

…I don’t actually think he particularly cares about that - might as well move aside for the next generation of fascists while making extra money off of his worshippers