We cannot understand class behavior by examining individual morality. Viewing the capital owning class as a collection of mustache twirling villains is not a useful framing. Rather, we should look at them as the human personification of capital itself. Their social being, their entire material condition, is defined by the accumulation of private profit and the protection of property relations that enforce their dominance.

Their inability to relate is not a personal failing but a direct result of their objective position in the capitalist mode of production. They live in a world insulated from the precarity of rent, medical debt, and wage slavery that defines life for the working majority. Their consciousness is shaped by them being insulated from the problems regular people experience. Therefore, critique of their lack of empathy is a liberal dead end because it mistakes a systemic outcome for a personal choice.

The focus must be the capitalist system itself, which necessarily produces the inequality and the divide between the capitalists and the workers. The fundamental contradiction between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of wealth is the core issue. The solution is to dismantle the economic base that creates them as a class and move towards a system where the means of production are socially owned, abolishing the very material conditions that breed alienation and disparity.

exactly, a great tv series on the subject incidentally https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/

The Chinese room thought experiment is deeply idiotic. Hofstadter does a great tear down of it in I Am a Strange Loop.

That’s like asking what’s the difference between a chef who has memorized every recipe in the world and a chef who can actually cook. One is a database and the other has understanding.

The LLM you’re describing is just a highly sophisticated autocomplete. It has read every book, so it can perfectly mimic the syntax of human thought including the words, the emotional descriptions, and the moral arguments. It can put on a flawless textual facade. But it has no internal experience. It has never burned its hand on a stove, felt betrayal, or tried to build a chair and had it collapse underneath it.

AGI implies a world model which is an internal, causal understanding of how reality works, which we build through continous interaction with it. If we get AGI, then it’s likely going to come from robotics. A robot learns that gravity is a real, it learns that “heavy” isn’t an abstract concept but a physical property that changes how you move. It has to interact with its environment, and develop a predictive model that allows it to accomplish its tasks effectively.

This embodiment creates a feedback loop LLMs completely lack: action -> consequence -> learning -> updated model. An LLM can infer from the past, but an AGI would reason about the future because it operates with the same fundamental rules we do. Your super-LLM is just a library of human ghosts. A real AGI would be another entity in the world.

not a chance in hell

I’m in my 40s and I’m really glad I got into martial arts back in my 20s and kept up with it.

that’s right, authoritarian just like your bedtime

To make sense of our current political moment, and to understand why electoral politics under capitalism is a stage managed by and for the wealthy, we must turn to one of the most consequential political thinkers of the last century: Vladimir Lenin.

If you were educated in the US, you almost certainly never encountered Lenin. Not in your high school textbooks, not in your university lecture halls. You will not see his ideas debated seriously on the corporate news channels. No mainstream politician, not even the most progressive, would dare utter his name.

It’s rather is a curious omission, is it not? For a man whose ideas shook the world, inspiring millions of workers to shake off their chains and establishing the official ideology of some of the largest countries on the planet.

So, in the land of free speech, why is the work of such a globally monumental figure treated as a forbidden text? Why is a thinker who provides a master-key to understanding modern imperialism and state power so diligently scrubbed from the curriculum?

Even at the most elite universities, in political science departments that posture as fonts of rigorous inquiry, you will not read Lenin. You will not be asked to critique him.

You might find a sanitized, fleeting reference to Marx, often dwarfed by the required reading of boosterish pieces from The Economist. In fact, at places like Harvard, the curriculum often reads less like political science and more like a corporate training manual. So why is Lenin a forbidden subject of study even in an adversarial way?

The answer is not complicated. Lenin’s genius was to lucidly dissect the rotting core of the capitalist system, exposing contradictions that cannot be patched over with mere reforms. And he did not stop at critique. He was not a moralist or an utopian, content with moral posturing.

And that is his unpardonable crime. Lenin wrote about the actual mechanics of seizing power, about smashing the bourgeois state and building a proletarian one. He provided a concrete analysis of how to win. This is the kind of dangerous knowledge the system cannot abide. It cannot be refuted, so it must be disappeared.

Consider the irony of how we would rightly condemn the Soviet Union as a brainwashed society if its citizens were taught to hate capitalism without ever reading Adam Smith. We would call it crude propaganda. Yet, millions of Americans are taught to reflexively recoil at the word communism by a system that ensures they will never encounter its theories.

What we find in practice is not free speech and academic freedom, but ideological policing. The very question of whether we could organize our economy differently is rendered unaskable. Those who advocate for a world beyond capitalism are systematically excluded from every institution that shapes public thought.

So, if you have any genuine belief in free inquiry, you have a duty to seek out the ideas that the guardians of power have placed beyond the pale.

Resources on Lenin:

State and Revolution https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm

What Is To Be Done? https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm

They are completely different servers with no relation to each other. Lemmy is primarily developed by @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml neither of whom are Canadian.

You really gotta learn how Lemmy actually works. It’s not a centralized website like reddit, it’s a federated platform with many different instances. Since lemmy.ca is an instance set up specifically for Canada, it’s no surprise that it mostly has people from Canada on it. That’s in no way representative of Lemmy as a whole.

Yes, Lemmy has grown significantly in the past two years. Hexbear has also become federated with other Lemmy instances since, which alone would completely change the demographics.

I love how you jump straight to assuming other people are dumber than you. Yet, as I’ve already explained, I start with asking people I know about their experiences first. I also don’t buy things until I actually find I have need for them.

would be neat, maybe somebody will make a server to mirror it to loops :)

indeed

You just have to start using non western platforms like Xiao Hong Shu and reading media from outside the west.

All the time. When I actually need something, then I’ll go do a bit of research on different products based on feedback from friends, and what people online say, then use that to inform what I buy. I can’t think of any product I bought because it was advertised to me.

If you’re in the west then it’s worse now because capitalism is reaching the stages of systemic collapse. For people living in countries like China or Vietnam the picture is quite different. They see their lives improving each and every day. They have clean cities, great infrastructure, and a rate of technological progress we can only dream of. Those of us living in the west are living through a similar collapse to the one that happened in USSR in the 90s, but the west is only 13% of the world population.

AliExpress

I mean here’s what top British military people are saying https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-defeat-david-richards-world-of-trouble-podcast-b2844349.html

Meanwhile, you don’t seem to understand how wars of attrition work. The goal of the Russian army is to destroy the fighting capacity of the AFU. They’re not aiming for territorial gains, they’re destroying the army, and that necessarily takes time. When the army collapses, they’re going to be able to take whatever territory they want and dictate their terms. Go read up on how things went in WW2, the front was largely static for most of the war, and then the Red Army marched to Berlin in a matter of months.