General Discussion

That you still own books H20 man. I could never get a digital reader. I have missed reading more than any other thing in the past 14+ years.

I don’t post Current Affairs here very often as they do bash democrats. But Robinson is pretty savvy. He kinda represents the left zeitgeist I fit into where I find contemporary society so ill-fitting and have forever outside of things like this interaction (which does require technology). But I don’t think that the ugly implementation of anything you see these days is the only possible one.

It is a common tactic to make a type of left I belong to (though formerly less vocally) seem impractical or childish at a time when so many things the sensible or something sell are such a constant disaster. The worst would be calling me “overprivileged” or “lazy” etc for merely understanding some things people who only work and think in crowds fail to get.

I am privileged, but I don’t think sending me to the poorhouse (psychologjcally if not materially) is going to fix society’s woes. On the whole if I can work and play, but meeting some minimal standards that were common just 15 years ago, it is better for most everyone but Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tata, Reliance and small creepy ai companies one cannot even catch as easily.

There is a type of information the powers that be are trying to force as “inevitable” as they back a permacrisis and want to be forgiven for errors that aren’t going to be forgiven unless you are so myopic and hopeless that you can’t remember life from 15 years ago and have bought into a hustle culture worldview that is imposed using how much strain all populations are under.

I was looking at one of Rhiannon’s posts about a group of women fighting Texas’s insane abortion laws and thinking that it is so hard to take things on legally once they are codified into law.
While it is still Google declarations and things these guys do illicitly bts that one doesn’t recognize as a part of civil society, it is legally more potent in the long run to refuse to acknowledge stuff tech and private equity etc try to force, while engaging normally with the rare things one does engage with.

We don’t know how ai and tech regulation will proceed but Lina Khan was a move in the right direction.

A state of ignorance (feigned or real) that allows you to reject things before they are legitimized is essential. Its feigned in my case as I don’t actually talk honestly like this to most people or all the time. I find it hard to be honest outside the most serious type of left.

Even if it has nothing to do with any election or any formally defined thing. Tech has essentially turned tge clock back to the law of the jungle and now they want to force all sorts of compromises and that is NEVER going to happen, but constantly misrepresenting protesters is easy.

My “common ground” with the right is only when some stopped clock thing happens destroying something that is popular on both sides but I think is garbage destroying society like TikTok or celebrity culture. I consider those things such a cancer that anything that derails them has pluses in the long run imo. But that is just randomness and chaos.

We are where we are today because a lot of people made unconscionable choices when they were completely unstressed (no pregnancy or job insecurity) and that cannot be forgiven.

And communication has become harder as we do live in “The Society of the Spectacle”. A concept I found via Yasha Levine, which was brilliant. Till then I was really struggling to understand why I find even the concept of resolution insulting in the context of the reality we are all in.

For instance women operate in areas where it may just take too long to explain things that should be obvious about stuff that isn’t a nuisance for fhe male half of the species as much. But an endless and lame conversation about solidarity and all sorts of overobvious banalities (but which will doubtless be exploited by the creepy powers that be) would be fuel for the worst kinds of cottage industries.
Though the sheer stupidity of technocrats, the fact that not even hostages can give up information to them may be a “growth opportunity” for the type of sane lefty intelligence that cannot be gamed as lefties I trust don’t try to get away with stuff and it is innate and adapts to surveillance. But it would be nice if the personal cost was lower.


The ability to read other human minds adequately to communicate honestly.. I can read some minds well enough for a type of “telepathy” that is not Epstein funded (a reference to a creepy UCSD guy V.S.Ramachandran). And sometimes like-minded enough people reveal things without realizing it that can be interpreted by friendly forces adequately to buffer against machinic malice (e.g.: this creepy guy Eliezer Kudkowsky’s creepy “friendly ai”).

I was reading this just yesterday. I like Troy Farah (he is sweet..like a lot of these much younger people who are really not even doing anything so much as representing signs that everything may not just go belly up):

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/23/is-war-central-to-human-nature-chimps-cant-tell-us-everything/

It is always the specific humans.

Anyway I digress. But you would understand.
Your work must have been really hard. I can appreciate that now. I was never a people person except superficially as far as socializing goes. But I am not tuned out so much as taken aback that these creepy people in tech and entertainment and gaming continually refuse to get the magnitude of their offenses against society because fewer people increasingly will even remember a world that was nothing like this.

And it is not work that can be performed by a machine.

Because nothing worthwhile can. We already have calculators and scripts and such. They are just tools. I can say that the press may just have to suck up eventually being hated by most honest humans as they really are soulless shirkers.

Anyway this is Stephen Pinker fwiw. I thought it was altogether too flattering a profile, but that aside I agree:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoying-man

Thanks H20 man. I hope the work you did comes back in society in new forms hut it takes effort and time. I am not even that opposed to technology in its domain. I buy vegan sweets and some clean food bars from people operating within the normal constraints of the modern economy.

Of all people Tim Cook of Apple had this one stopped clock insight for his ilk that tech should stop trying to get away with stuff. My resources are meaningless if they are just grabbed and redistributed by tech creeps claiming “but that’s what marxists do and you said you are on the left and like Spock so this logically consistent!” I am on the left but rethinking my opinion of Spock if he would consider all this logically consistent. South Park probably got it better with it’s episode “cancelled”.

But my mom and I did like to see small pieces of greenery sort of defiantly poke their heads out even in concrete jungles. Mom used to say “nature finds a way”. And if human life cannot survive except in the degraded form the brainless powers that be force with entertainment modules, actvism the module from Apple! How sensible people do it!

I couldn’t interact with you all without tech. But that is not excuse to throw in more and more bilge.

It’s mostly EarlG and elad. They are the admins, but I would not be here if it was some generic board administered by some Apple democrat. Still better than a Republican. Activism, socializing and engagement cannot be forced.

Importantly, I do not think gig work or ai can replace the kind of work you used to do. What its new form is remains to be seen.

I really should save and organize the information that I respond to. Otoh this may not be that type of information.

Have you heard of Andy Nikiforuk? I think you would like him H20 man.