zedcell

Aaron Bastani and Michael Walker are reactionary pseudo-leftists, cloaking their rhetoric in a Marxist garb while vying for social democracy at best. As the founders they have a strong say in the company's editorial line and output, colouring much of what is published by them. They are solidly on the Jacobin left and if there were a Platner style candidate in the UK I'm sure they would be right there in the same way the Jacobin left are there in the US. See their generally uncritical support of the Green Party of England and Wales.

Michael Walker did recently have a holiday in China that majorly softened their output on the country, but they still have that western left anti-Chinese anti-AES veil even when "Chinamaxxxing".

Most of their interviews are with soft-left darlings in the media sphere in the UK, and they happily signal boost their imperialist left positions with little to no pushback.

I'll watch and read their stuff as they're still probably one of the better outlets in the UK. Basically you have the transphobic CPB aligned Morningstar newspaper that is mostly good and not anti-AES (generally, but they do publish opinion pieces that will happily be anti-AES because they are so heavily aligned with the reactionary British trade union movement); and you have the pro-trans but reformist and imperialist left covered by Novara media.

China is still a developing nation, and its countryside is still being modernised and connected into the wider infrastructure framework of the urban centres. This requires constant expansion of the electricity grid and output. It is not a mature, developed nation with little need to expand energy production like vast chunks of Europe and the US.

US think tanks and Ukrainian estimates not really that reliable are they?

The magical completely aligned "Russia" made up of a psychically linked hivemind controlling all of the decisions made by Russians. Using their might and unending supply of capital for influencing right wingers in the west, they will destabilise all these nations to "win" (win what? Nobody knows). Putin and his cabal of totally not Judeo-bolshevik stand ins will then use their insidious mind control powers to take over all of the west for the benefit of a pathetically weak and withered set of Russian capitalists who all got their cheeks clapped when the war in Ukraine started.

Fucking re-heated antisemitism repackaged as anti-Russian propaganda all in order to launder the reputation of the ruling class at home. The capital owners who dwarf Russian capital by orders of magnitude, the political and economic system that easily and without a second thought was capable of severing the Russian access to the global financial markets and transaction systems.

If you believe this stupidity is somehow all being puppeteered by the Russian admin then you need your head checked.

Well said! An important application of the masses, elites and rebels analysis around why people have the beliefs they have, and how to change people's minds and beliefs. Might be worth plugging the essay too as it's a good one and regularly passed along here: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

Losurdo likes to bang on about aristocratic ideologies and aristocratic democracy too which is very much in this vein of critique. A good chunk of Liberalism: A Counter History covers it alongside the analysis of Herrenvolk Democracy. I haven't read it but he often footnotes his own work on Nietzsche when covering this stuff too.

The chickens are coming home to roost it seems. We've already had Ukrainians firebombing Kier Starmer's house, wonder what the next neo-nazi terror attack in the west is going to be.

How soon do we get the liberal regret of "how could we have known we were funding neonazis in Ukraine?"

Before or after 9/11 2 electric boogaloo because the nazis are pissed that they've been abandoned by the west?

And his being a billionaire is a systemic success I'm sure

Nature can't technically create, it can only re-arrange to make higher order creations out of smaller building blocks.

I don't think we're coming at things from the same lens at all and I don't think it's worth continuing this discussion.

But those things do have a precedent. We can't create things that don't have some basis in the reality we have processed with our sense organs. When we create a fictional character, they might be unlike any individual human we have met, but their traits are a composite of many different human experiences and traits that we have witnessed either externally to ourselves or internally.

I can tell you for certain that LLMs can also create fictional characters in the same way given a small amount of direction. They are not merely remix machines and to say they are betrays a deep misunderstanding of how the technology even functions.

Humans are constrained to the same shackles but we use our sense organs to obtain input information. We do need prior examples, we do not have a soul memory of how to create. Instantly a human is exposed to concept of themselves and the outside world, their body shape and form, the taste of their own saliva, the smell of the room. We are not magic, we use that input data to produce a reflection of some aspect of reality.

Humans need to have input to reflect through their brain processing to produce art work. You have just insinuated that humans have an inate ability to produce art with zero input data to work with. A completely inane metaphysical assertion.

Artists consume vast libraries of art in order to become good artists. Nobody is a savant with no access to input data.