EthicalAI

I’ve just finished a Marxist book club reading series, including Lenin and Marx and Rosa and several others.

My original studies were on anarchism. Graeber, Chomsky, lots of Anarchist Library articles.

My new studies are Postmodernists. Foucoult, Derrida, Marcusa, etc.

First things first:

1. I think Marxists are way too proud of themselves and what they call science. I find Marxism useful but little more than a nice to discuss academic theory. I find serious flaws with it, and am annoyed that so many people seem to identify so strongly with it. In that way im very much in agreement with anarchists and postmodernists. The other thing is that Marxist-Leninism was infiltrated and defeated by capitalism many many times now, and sometimes even without its defeat it led to dystopia. I’m just not excited about this ideology at all, and I think it’s become a bit cringe to continue down this path. Capitalism and state is stronger today than it’s ever been. I think this has lived past its valid era.

2. I think anarchism has a lot more truth and wisdom, but is not very powerful. I am unsure how to bring about this kind of society, which is true communism. It seems it will always devolve into a retelling of Marxist stages of history, feudalism, monarchism, capitalism. However I do think there are ways to prevent this if people are mass educated and localities are armed to prevent domination. But also, we live in a day of nukes, and I’ve never read an anarchist treaties on how to manage the nuclear arsenal anarchically. The more you organize anarchism though, the less it’s anarchism. I also worry about how much this turns into vigilantism and mob violence.

3. I agree a lot with postmodernists, the concept of truth and morality since learning all the atheist rhetoric in my 20s are very vague to me. Understanding cultural truth, media power, the disparity of grand narratives, the collusion of the Everyman with the system (rather than it being purely a class duality) is “true” to me. However, even more so than #1 or #2 this very much lacks a revolutionary theory.

Then there’s the infighting. When you read the literature everyone “proves” each other wrong and shows how their “revolutionary vision” is impossible and not worth doing. People in socialist theory argue so strongly about such vague ideas. People really think that they are looking to achieve a thing called socialism, but I don’t think they will ever be satisfied with any system they find themselves in. They set impossible goals and then yell at the clouds that it hasn’t been obtained.

Sorry that’s my rant, I also am yelling at the clouds at my own intellectual defeat. I kinda feel like the best we can do is a kind of nihilism and intentional community.

I've tried a lot of diets, and I have a lot of trouble committing and maintaining structure. I eat out every day. I don't exercise much. I'm having trouble with willpower fasting. Still I think the most "ADHD friendly" way of dieting is likely fasting. It requires little practical restructuring of ones life, just commitment and willpower. Do you all have anything better? Any advice?

I’m a socialist now, but I’d say I came to a lot of my conclusions through economics and science as well as labor. I believe in abolishing landlords, and I think that would be a boon to housing. However, I think half measures like rent control actually might hurt instead of help. It’s basically applying the philosophy of landlord abolition within a capitalist system, and without government housing assistance or at least better homeownership funding programs. The whole idea of landlord abolition is to make the price of housing go down because it’s no longer an investment medium for those who have lots of money to hoard it, and then to make the barriers to acquiring a mortgage, more similar to those of what it used to be to acquire a rental agreement. Under this system builders get paid, owner occupants get paid, landlords do not.

Under rent control, we simply make landlord’s lives a little more inconvenient in a system that still expects them to exist. Unless we rent control all the way down to the price of a mortgage payment, which should eliminate landlords, and which I would support, simply inconveniencing landlords is just going to lower housing supply, because currently the housing development chain depends on landlords as middleman. Currently a bank will not give kids with no credit a mortgage, even if they can afford rent. So builders will not get paid without landlords.

Also, unfortunately, what I’m proposing would cause a major economic recession. Housing is currently an investment medium. Owner occupants pay mortgage based on what their house was worth when they bought it. If we tank the housing market, we need government to step in and make it OK on average working people. Also people fear subprime mortgages because of 2008, but again that was really caused by housing being used as an investment medium rather than a human need.

Anyway, I think housing under the current system is way too complex for simple solutions like rent control. The data does not look good on rent control, it reduces housing. I think the best near term solution without true housing socialism is increasing funding to section 8 by a ton. I also think we should eliminate property taxes completely on occupied primary single-family homes, and raise property taxes on second-homes by a lot. Lastly, we should have the federal reserve issue subprime mortgages, and fund the risk directly with taxpayer money, so it doesn’t impact the markets, just like we subsidize farms and medical research. THEN we can rent control landlords out of the market.

I think that the biggest issue with Reddit, Lemmy, link aggregators in general is someone has to post the links. I want people to determine the sorting of the links, I want the system to facilitate commenting and engagement, but if I have to use an RSS reader AND Lemmy to get news, I’ll just use the RSS reader.

So my idea is, an instance which has communities which themselves subscribe to RSS feeds which auto populate the community. People then can subscribe to this from their lemmy instances, cross post, upvote, etc. idk how rss feeds would be voted on or added, but it’s just a concept.

Any ideas? Interest?

This is crazy

This could replace langchain for me.

I remember this being a kinda niche alternative to activity pub, and I always liked it because it had the ability to be local and P2P, with federated instances really just being repeaters. I didn’t like that it was immutable, but that was just the cost. Also you had to install something, which made it not as simple as just browser stuff. I see on Google there are SS to ActivityPub adapters too.