Lol when I got banned from a major comm for defending a trotskyist comrade, after two years of participation on the instance, I learned all about the wholesomeness of your “non-sectarian” instance.

I’m not sure what’s going on in this comment but I like it

You see real democracy is when you subvert the will of the people and call it “checks and balances”.

I looked it up, it appears in a lot of places though its origin is unknown. So you picked it up from somewhere. Definitely not your fault for mangling what is obviously a distorted Friere quote, though it remains mangled and now a part of public consciousness. I still have the same reservations about it and I wish you would consider reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed rather than dismiss what I’m saying and probably keep repeating this. But you’re right, it was a waste of time.

Just because you don’t know where it comes from doesnt mean it isn’t connected

Imma take issue with this.

You’ve rephrased, and essentially reformulated Paolo Friere’s famous and enlightening quote, “Equality feels like oppression to the oppressor.” Does having privilege make one an oppressor? In some cases, it most certainly does but I would disagree that coming from privilege makes one an oppressor: history is full of examples of people from the oppressive ruling classes risking or sacrificing everything to fight against oppression and restore equality. I am privileged but equality would not feel like oppression to me; or if it did I would have to self criticize harshly since I spend so much of my time and energy fighting against oppression and for equality. And this is what your rephrasing has done, it has eliminated the class aspect from Friere’s formulation; furthermore it isn’t connected to anything. So when you say this in isolation you create a privileged other. Friere on the other hand was fully aware of the dialectic between the oppressed and their oppressors, and scientifically worked out his thesis: through dehumanization of the oppressed, the oppressors lost their own humanity. While oppression had to be fought, first the oppressed had to restore their own humanity by restoring their own subjectivity. Once they had liberated their minds, and in fact through this process they would become organized in such a way to organize their bodies as well. This is the perceived nadir of the oppressors, the equality that feels like oppression. However, in its final stage this equality restores the humanity of the oppressor, in fact it is the ontological mission of the oppressed to restore the humanity of the oppressors. this final synthesis of the dialectic is not inevitable however, and the whole enterprise is based on education. “When education is not liberating,” he said, “it is the dream of the oppressed to become the oppressor.”

I don’t know what that deleted comment was, probably some hateful bs, but was your comment intended to educate, and set others on the path of education?

Its not a bad thing

The point of the meme isn’t about whether you personally would want to sleep with someone who is trans, and whether that makes you a good person or not, its about how the first, second, and last thing a lot of people think about wrt trans people is whether they are fuckable or not. Its not good to objectify people, if you do it is transphobic/sexist/racist/whatever dehumanizing. But if you see trans people as people, and respect their gender, their right to express themselves openly even if you aren’t sexually attracted to them, then this meme will never be a problem for you. And if you feel personally attacked by this meme, try and figure out why, because it’s probably not about you. Don’t be a creep isn’t that complicated, folks

Yeah I read WL&C after a failed attempt at reading Capital (I had never read much Marx other than the manifesto at that point) and realized I needed to understand his economics first, as I felt completely out of my depth. Turns out reading Capital v1, the first few chapters are just like that! But I’m glad I read WL&C, like you said its short and gave me something to chew on for a year or so before diving back into the big book.

I edited my comment above about CotGP. All solid recommendations, for exactly the reasons you state.

People should read Value Price and Profit because Marx proved that inflation is just companies raising prices, thoroughly debunks all the lies about causes of inflation that economists have been using to protect profits since before even his time.

All solid suggestions.

Wrt critique of the Gotha programme, it’s interesting to me that Marx was such a critic of Lassalle, so much so that Engels actually apologized for Marx’s harsh criticisms of the social democrat. Marx had called Lassalle a would be petty dictator or something like that. Except he was right, Lassalle was secretly plotting with von Bismarck on a plan to unify Germany under a bourgeois led social democracy, which von Bismarck could later seize absolute control over. Marx didn’t know about this conspiracy, he just reasoned it out.

I’m not a fan of Stalin, but his interview with H.G. Wells is hilarious.

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What have you read of Engels? Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is one of my favorites. Other than some of his letters, forewords, and some essays, I’ve been really wanting to read The Conditions of the Working Class in England, since it’s referenced in Capital; and I think I have something else saved by him on my Kobo, can’t think of it ATM. I think Engels is really easy to grasp; Marx is a phenomenal writer but unless you’re in the mood to read about 1. Economics 2. Dense academic history or 3. A blistering criticism of some “Young Hegelian” scholar like Feuerbach or Bruno Bauer its hard to find something of his to just easy-read. The Manifesto is pretty accessible but it was mostly written by Engels, the two men were really one author most of the time, and I’ve read the manifesto several times and while its good its not my favorite work.

Sorry for coming off confrontational, but you picked two very good and influential thinkers to target. You could have said “don’t just read Malcolm Gladwell and Sam Harris” or “Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro,” who are all hacks, but very popular authors; whereas Marx and Engels have fallen out of fashion. It’s conspicuous, is all.

Geez the downvote brigade is out in full force

How does one make a point using an example they know nothing about? To be clear, I agree with you, but as someone who has read a fair amount of M&E and know a ton of people who have read M&E, they are among the top 1% of readers in terms of sheer volume, but also curiosity and intellectual honesty.

Combined with the fact that the vast majority of Marx and Engels was social science, not ideological polemic, I get the impression that you are giving advice that you haven’t actually taken. Which would be fine, we are all contradictory beings to some extent. But it does beg the question.

And if you had read them, then I would want to know your insights on what you had read

Have you read Marx or Engels? What have you read?

Sorry to be a soulsborne weeb but I have something like 1500 hours in bloodborne and I still pick it up from time to time

I don’t use my phone for that, I swear!

The difference between gpt-3 and gpt-4 is number of parameters, I.e. processing power. I don’t know what the difference between 2 and 4 is, maybe there were some algorithmic improvements. At this point, I don’t know what algorithmic improvements are going to net efficiencies in the “orders of magnitude” that would be necessary to yield the kind of results to see noticeable improvement in the technology. Like the difference between 3 and 4 is millions of parameters vs billions of parameters. Is a chatgpt 5 going to have trillions of parameters? No.

Tech literate people are apparently just as susceptible to this grift, maybe more susceptible from what little I understand about behavioral economics. You can poke holes in my argument all you want, this isn’t a research paper.

I wasn’t debating you. I have debates all day with people who actually know what they’re talking about, I don’t come to the internet for that. I was just looking out for you, and anyone else who might fall for this. There is a hard physical limit. I’m not saying the things you’re describing are technically impossible, I’m saying they are technically impossible with this version of the tech. Slapping a predictive text generator on a giant database , its too expensive, and it doesn’t work. Its not a debate, its science. And not the fake shit run by corporate interests, the real thing based on math.

There’s gonna be a heatwave this week in the Western US, and there are almost constant deadly heatwaves in many parts of the world from burning fossil fuels. But we can’t stop producing electricity to run these scam machines because someone might lose money.

Ai doesn’t get better. Its completely dependent on computing power. They are dumping all the power into it they can, and it sucks ass. The larger the dataset the more power it takes to search it all. Your imagination is infinite, computing power is not. you can’t keep throwing electricity at a problem. It was pushed out because there was a bunch of excess computing power after crypto crashed, or semi stabilized. Its an excuse to lay off a bunch of workers after covid who were gonna get laid off anyway. Managers were like sweet I’ll trim some excess employees and replace them with ai! Wrong. Its a grift. It might hang on for a while but policy experts are already looking at the amount of resources being thrown at it and getting weary. The technological ignorance you are responding to, that’s you. You don’t know how the economy works and you don’t know how ai works so you’re just believing all this roku’s basilisk nonsense out of an overactive imagination. Its not an insult lots of people are falling for it, ai companies are straight up lying, the media is stretching the truth of it to the point of breaking. But I’m telling you, don’t be a sucker. Until there’s a breakthrough that fixes the resource consumption issue by like orders of magnitude, I wouldn’t worry too much about Ellison’s AM becoming a reality