least obvious AI written ragebait

I have a list of books I plan on buying physically, even if I have them in my digital library already. The most important criteria I use is whether I’d want to re-read them, whether I’d want friends and family read them, and whether I think I’d want my future kids to read them. There is just something about having a lot of books around when growing up, I always looked up at my parents bookshelves and pondered at the different covers, titles and authors. Some books I was “allowed” to read, some I was too young or inexperienced for, and it was always exciting after one or two years to finally hear “You are probably ready for this one now”, and so forth, until I started buying my own books.

I don’t think my love for reading would be what it is if my parents instead let me browse their digital repository of e-books on the laptop.

At the same time, there are a lot of books that I know I’m not gonna read again, like crime thrillers and such. A lot of fiction in general is entertaining when you read it but doesn’t necessarily hold the same long term value imo. There are many non-fiction books that I come back to time and time again, this is rarely true for the works of fiction I do keep. Purely subjective of course, but lets just say there is more Lenin than Tom Clancy in my bookshelves.

Effect is worse in junior high than high school, suggesting uninformed (over)use makes things worse;

I was always under the impression that the cognitive outsourcing is worse the earlier it starts. I am in academia, and a lot of really bright researchers, professors etc are using generative AI tools, but they have spent a good 20-30 years already reading, researching and producing high-quality output already, they are not using it to get away from thinking about hard problems, simply to speed up the process of tackling them.

It is way worse for students. I can only speak for mathematics, but the field is trying to come to gripes with what this whole ordeal will mean, and even then we are at least quite shielded from some of the problems with education (quite easy to expand and assess in-person exams, for instance).

You generally NEED a minimum of 10-20k hours working and thinking about this stuff to understand it at a high level, there are no shortcuts. Now the barrier to be able to put some slop together and pretend you’ve come up with a result is a lot lower, which is the shortcut many students are going for sadly.

If anyone is interested in the discussion I’ll just put some good starters:

https://nitter.net/aaswaminathan01/status/2025418710198960388

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy

Honestly, I am bewildered. This is absolutely awesome!

I suspect this is just a thinly veiled way transfer of supplies from one US imperialist outpost (South Korea) to a more active zone.

That seems very plausible, but if this goes through it is a proper material win for DPRK. What a time to be alive!

Maybe they can team up with the exiled “Tibetan government” lol

mildly

is doing a heavy lifting in that sentence

Oh yes, but they originated from Morocco no? My understanding was that Spain pays Morocco to deter migrants with (sometimes lethal) repressive force to ensure they have a hard time getting into Spain. Then Morocco stop adhering to this and let people through when they want to exert political pressure on Spain (I believe the last time this happened was in 2019), something they seem to do in coordination with NATO this time.

I don’t know… Moroccan repression of the Sahrawi in West Sahara makes me reluctant to give them any benefit of the doubt. Just being global south does not give them any extra leeway to expand, kill and settle in other peoples lands. The Polisario Front have waged armed struggle against Morocco since the 80s I think.

Not that I hold any good feelings about Spain that is, just that there is a lot of things going on.

As someone who have spent quite some time in the upper echelons of society I can confidently say MOST are very high on liberalism, i.e. ignorant, uninformed, idealist. It is not that they think there is another point or are scheming for some kind of endgame (yea obv, the Palantir CEO might be, but if we are talking everyday elites), it is simply VERY easy to go through your whole life as a liberal if you never are exposed to the contradictions and contrasts of global capitalism (and when you do get exposed, it is nicely wrapped by your media)

If you are born with relative privilege and work hard, make good money, etc and just go about with your life, it is very easy to just…not think about these things. And whenever you might stray away and think a bit more deeply you have a plethora of “political analyists” or other media telling you how you should think about it to feel good about yourself (and superior to many others).

These are the kind of people we need to reach, educate and get on our side. And since October 2023 a less “lib-rotted” conscious has started to form in this group, even if it is tiny, tiny, tiny.

I think I’ve read that the Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia) historically was the most lucrative (i.e. highest net-profit) colony by a large margin. I cannot remember the numbers though.

It seems like the US is increasingly trying to isolate southern Iran from the rest of the country. Several bridges have been hit, in addition to railways, tunnels, airports, roads, and hospitals are evacuated. They seem to focus on the destruction of civilian infrastructure trying to limit the movement of people, goods and logistical supplies.

I imagine this is to keep their options open with regards to putting troops on the ground or “taking” southern Iran.

There is a “clear shift in strategic thinking” in Tehran, especially after the killing of the former surpreme leader who had been “cautious about directly confronting” the US, Ali Fathollah-Nejad, director of the Centre for Middle East and Global Order, told Al Jazeera.

“Now we see escalating regional factional infighting within the regime in Iran between the hardline pragmatists on one hand and the ultra hardliners on the other hand,” he said. The latter seem to be “dictating the dynamic”, he said, adding that “this new Iranian strategy of escalation is formed from new strategic considerations of deterrence against a new full-fledged attack” on Iran that could “destabilise the regime”.

There is also a “sense of hubris, as well, from this ultra hardline camp, that … Iran has emerged victorious, plus the costs of confrontation are absorbable, and deep scepticism vis-a-vis the hardline pragmatist camp that has been leading Iranian negotiations”.

Don’t worry guys, previously it was this very real infighting between moderates and hardliners, we have now upgraded to hardliners vs. ultra hardliners. In a few months we will hear that there is a lot of infighting between the super-duper ultra hardliners vs. the ultimato-mega-giga-hardliners. What would we do without these analysts…

memorandums of understanding

The US has a really good history of abiding by these, great job Iraq!

Yea people started becoming suspicious when the Gulf states + Israel started throwing people into prison when they filmed even 1 second of any impact.

After they had put the lid on the reports suddenly became – “Interceptor impacts” instead of “missile impacts”.

Bro they are already bombing the bridges and railways. I guess they explicitly mean eletricity and oil…

In general the type of people from Europe who are A. Willing to travel to the US and attend this WC and B. Can afford to do so, are not generally gonna be the same people who hold animosity towards the US. For most it is probably the opposite and they are thrilled to go there.

Now we’re really putting all the cards on the table – interesting to see if they mean close it for everyone or for a select few.

Yea, it is just frustrating. I really threw myself out there during the entry-into-NATO phase, and there was just…nothing; no public discourse, no pushback from “leftists” to liberals alike, everyone just agreed that it was somehow a good thing and that you were stupid if you were against it. They didn’t even need to do a referendum because the political class united so quickly and attenuated every contrary opinion – none of the politically adjacent organizations I was/am involved in wanted to talk about it. It somewhat broke me to be honest.

Now, I am generally optimistic that globally the marxist position will continue to be strengthened and prevail, but I don’t think we will see changes in this

opportunities for the left to provide an alternative vision and narrative if it can manage to finally set aside its Western chauvinism, embrace real anti-imperialism and internationalism, and stop falling for the liberal-imperialist “anti-authoritarian” psyop.

in Europe for a long time. We have generational brain rot, and I am starting to think that wont change until a few generations just die off (either by age or heatwaves). This is not that I think people can’t change and more that I haven’t seen populations capable of this unless there’s a popular revolution, and I don’t think that will ever happen in Europe (at least not in a way similar to previous ones).

That doesn’t mean I disagree with trying though, and I’ll keep doing that. I’m just venting here because IRL I am the one who takes the vehemently optimistic position, so as to not discourage the baby leftists around me.

decaying material conditions will sharpen the contradictions between the chauvinistic outlook and the lived reality to a point where some kind of reckoning must happen.

My skepticism here is that for Europe this usually means Fascism and we see no signs of it being different this time – on the contrary – I think socially the case for socialism is much weaker than it was in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc during the 1900s. At least the labor movement was organized, we had a strong Soviet Union and people were not so entrenched into the narratives of the capital class. The political class itself was much more fragmented than today and if we couldn’t succeed with a socialisation of our institutions during those conditions, I am relatively restrictive in holding out hope for it happening under our current conditions, which I feel are much worse.

The coming decade of post-Ukraine policy will dictate a lot of what happens. As the material conditions continue to degrade, it almost feels like the most optimistic scenario is implosion and a further weakening of european standing in the world, increasingly forcing us to make amends and respect Africa and Asia. As long as we have a strong Russia, China, Iran, Sahel states, etc, there is at least hope that the EU by necessity is forced to acknowledge multipolarity – which in the long run will birth a new political consciousness that isn’t as chauvinist as the current one.

*(By the way, they also briefly address Sweden and its racism toward the end of that linked video discussion, you can check it out if you’re interested.)

Yea the point was spot on. And I don’t even know how this course should be reversed, one of the most pressing issues is that is the same (class of) people still running the countries (in both Germany and Sweden). Denazification in West Germany was a joke, and in Sweden there never was anything of the sort – which just leads to unconditional chauvinism. You start to understand why Lenin just shot people, and why the cultural revolution was necessary.

Ah, I am so done with all of it.

But when it comes to general racism my experience has been that Scandinavian countries are actually the worst and where it’s most insidious, precisely because they pretend to be all progressive but in really they have a massive superiority complex.

Sigh, I’d say that you’re generally right sadly. It is hard to argue against it when around 20% of people vote for a party that is a whitewashed literal Nazi party (and the current leader joined when it was branded as such).

massive superiority complex.

Yes, and I’d also claim that we are among the most propagandized people on the planet. I have a hard time actually thinking of a people more propagandized, possibly the Germans – but I feel like even for them there’ll always be a tiny tiny hint of doubt since they actually DID do the Holocaust once. For swedes there is zero guilt, zero introspection and total belief that your outlook on the world is correct.

The population is also just…ignorant. Our current prime minister literally wrote a book about his ideology a couple years ago where he equaled the Swedish wellfare state to apartheid and stated his life’s purpose to be the destroying of it – but people still vote for this guy and then are chocked when he does just that. Don’t worry, 44% of adults have a university degree, surely this means they can read one book.

I could write a lot about my people but it’ll probably amount to a book (and I fear it’ll be even harder to make them read two books).