#cooption

[potuzzz]

Western Communists, Psychopathy, and Love

Snark, smugness, and smarm are not revolutionary.

Pettiness, sadism and cruelty are not revolutionary.

The system of capitalism encourages narcissism. Psychopathy, sociopathy, megalomania and trance-like overconsumption are its core tenets. The cold and ruthless are rewarded while the warm and compassionate fall behind and suffer the whims of the cold.

It alienates us from not just our labor but from nature, our fellow humans. People are trained to be fake, to socialize only as a part of a grotesque game where dogs eat dogs and everybody has an ulterior motive, a vein of gold to mine, refine and exploit, and a limp leg, a disturbingly human flaw that renders them an imperfect asset in a world where only a string of uninterrupted perfection will win the race. A flaw which signals to a world of speculators that they are little more than a burden to be calculated around, or, preferably, removed altogether.

We learn to hate our neighbors. To distrust them, to make what use of them we can as quickly as possible and then to discard them—and that is only if we are forced to interact with them in the first place, as surely we would rather avoid all that is biological and social and only touch numbers on a screen or the stiff cardboard of an anonymously delivered box of fleeting dopamine. Everything is pornographic, but nothing is erotic; sex is a corrupted pantomime from the prude to the promiscuous. Passions are only useful insofar as a “side hustle” or a potential career. Friendships and family relationships are a chore to maintain. Community is dead in the West and we are all somewhat relieved to know this.

We have arrived at the conclusion we have neither the time, the emotional energy, nor the patience to deal with the human race which we now recognize as insufferable monsters.  We shorten the time required to build rapport in cyberspace by donning on iconography to signal our allegiance in a flash; those who fall short of meeting every checkmark are quickly and unceremoniously discarded. We have a very woke-sounding rationale we cite to ourselves and to the audience to excuse our lack of positive emotional effort and our overabundance of negative behaviors and worldviews. We have no patience to change, or for others to change; real change is fake (when has a Westerner ever felt real, positive change?), and we have come to internalize this. Even those of us who understand the scientific, incremental, and bloodily difficult process it is to change society, who see the positives in the East which are taking their turn with humanity’s steering wheel, even those comrades also see how real, positive change in the West is unprecedented, how deeply sick this society is. The question we ask ourselves is not how to heal it, but rather how to save one’s individual self, how to amputate from the host body that is overridden with cancer…if we allow ourselves to reflect on this grim scenario and its implications for our personal life in the first place. And in truth, as we have come to subconsciously accept the fascist creed “to live is to suffer,” many of us happily accept a future of death and destruction, smiling softly knowing that perhaps the Chinese, Russians, Africans or Latinos may be happy in the world a century for now, and that we can finally know peace in the finality of our deaths, buried underneath the rubble of the Empire as its roof caves in on top of us.

However, these are revolutionary, unprecedented times.

The Empire is waning, and they have used up all their tricks on the populace—they may be brainwashed, but there is no new bleach to pour into the mix. The realities are more in our favor to persuade than ever before. The CIA, FBI, and numerous American Deep State entities which have been curating Hell on Earth on this plot of stained land are losing their grip. They are running out of ways to transmute revolutionary potential into an anticommunist Compatible Left. They are overwhelmed with the sheer amount of surveilled citizens who casually and constantly talk about treason and violence against the oligarchy from every bastardized niche of the American political spectrum.

People—even people who still believe Stalin killed the entire population of the Baltics, even people who still are tricked into demanding escalation of the war in Ukraine, even people who still think the United States is a benevolent force of “liberal democracy” that just occasionally makes mistakes in the war against a far-worse “authoritarian” menace, even people who proudly voted for Bush Jr. and then Obama and then Trump and then Biden—are sick of being sick. Tired of being tired. People hunger for real, positive change.

As the past century has shown, even the most expertly, intricately, secretly crafted boot made with the finest leathers and laces imperialism can procure cannot stomp out communism from the human heart. Three decades of uncontested Western hegemony, following several centuries of world-faring propaganda and power, even this solidified not the throne of capitalism but its own failures. People are looking everywhere for communism, and capitalism is increasingly desperate, feeding them half-truths to buy just a little more time. But as the hyper-individualized solutions of McMindfulness, narcissistically-twisted astroturfed narratives of isolating self-love, for-profit therapy, aesthetics-based New Ageism and the wheezing, decrepit body of Christofascism fail to bring peace of mind, as rise-and-grind culture and Yang-esque “capitalism, but different this time—seriously!” fails to bring prosperity, as billionaire foundations and “charities” and media virtue signaling and tokenization fail to solve homelessness, climate change, or racism, the bewitching capitalism will run out of new, ever-the-more complicated spells to cast to maintain the illusion.

The truth is, simply, too simple. Americans will not be surprised to learn that within the next century America might be a dystopic wasteland…but what will utterly shock them is that the rest of the world not only isn’t suffering the same fate, but is even better than America ever was!

Now is the time to sow seeds. When people are finally ready for their moment of epiphany, it must be a matter of coming to terms with reality, not shutting down into despair, depression and psychosis. The easier this process can be made, the less pressure it will take to trigger it, and the less explosive the transition will be.

People cannot feel “in too deep.” It is far too often the guilt associated to coming to terms with what they have done that a wolf will opt to stay the same rather than venture on the path of positive change. Nor can people cannot think that the path to redemption is one that involves showing one’s belly and prostrating unconditionally—not for the sake of sheltering their pride, but because in this society, in this world, we have been taught that only the wolf ever wins.  A communist above all surely understands that we are all a product of our circumstances; every horror of capitalism is the predictable, logical conclusion of the core tenets it was built upon. People who are monsters today were not born that way, and, if shown the right path, there are many who can be saved from their seemingly terminal fate.

Just as the person is taught to either become a wolf or suffer as a sheep, we are unconsciously, expertly, and incessantly taught, as communists living in the West, to ultimately serve capitalism and thwart or own missions of socialism and intersectional harmony. The leftwardly curious are first sent on a marathon through a gauntlet of false-consciousness; many are plucked one-by-one, recruited towards social democracy, liberal Wokeism, anarchism, doomerism, and anticommunist, anti-AES socialist tendencies such as Trotskyism, Maoism, and the like. And then, if all else fails, and we cannot be hindered from reaching Marxist-Leninist conclusions, still there are diseases that capitalism will try to mix into our food: dogmatism, purity politics, social gamification, outrage loops. And, above all, core character traits we do not normally associate with our politics: fearfulness, grudgingness, arrogance, and the other aforementioned cancers outlined at the beginning of this.

The people need to see the alternative, to start conceiving in their mind of an alternative to this hellscape. They will not see it if we are bashing them for their current state—their natural, logical, predictable state per the path of least resistance in such a society which has been carefully manicured into a beast from the top down.

No matter how deserved it must seem, the communist must strive to avoid being snarky, cruel, or petty. We are only humans, our days are hard and we have our own toxic behaviors baked into us by our natural life in these United States. However, as communists, we are the pioneers, the moss and lichens that must make do on barren rock so that one day soil and then a forest may bloom.  Our job is not easy, and we must not beat ourselves up for failing to maintain perfect praxis in all our interactions. However, that does not mean that, when we have the spare energy, when we have a little bit of extra fight in us after making sure the bills are paid and our hens are in order, that we shouldn’t at least consciously strive towards it.

Kindness. Patience. Compassion. Empathy. Forgiveness. Conscientiousness. Acceptance  Proactive helpfulness. Unconditional love for all. These are some of the traits a communist should be striving towards, as often as they can, per the circumstances they occupy.  Avoiding starvation, maintaining a job and a good friend, battling demons, getting sleep, and necessary leisure to enjoy life for being life and to recharge the batteries are, of course, even more paramount. Us comrade have our own cancers that have been inflicted upon us. But it should be understood that if one is too tired, or their mood is too poor, they perhaps should avoid being cruel to the unenlightened—it is only through sheer luck of circumstance that we are communists and the vast majority of Westerners are not. It is only through the machinations of the ephemeral monster that we call “capitalism” that our neighbors are bigots, misers, painfully ignorant and excessively selfish, infantile and yet without the wholesome spark we wash out of children, delusional, rigid, and damaging bastards who have been tricked to worship devils. Sometimes walking away from these situations is better for both ourselves as individuals and for communism as a worldwide movement than staying and letting our enemies drag us down to their woeful state.

Choosing to be kind instead of cruel is rewarding in the long-term, much like how a healthy diet, exercise, passions, socialization, sleep and sun are. And, just like how doing those things are made incredibly, unnecessarily difficult in the world of capitalism, so too is being kind. Doing “the right thing” is often the opposite of doing “the easy thing,” as we all know. People will be cruel to you, inviting you to be cruel back. Tempers flare. Our lives are already awash with injustice, and this is only felt more sharply when one is going out of their way to be kind. People will taunt you. Men trying to be kind to other men, women, or children will be perceived as being gay, toxic, and pedophiles respectively. White people being kind to Black people is perceived as patronizing, fake, or conditional to their submission, whereas Black people being kind in reverse is seen as fearful, fake, or submissive. Even talking about “love and kindness” will be seen by many here as cultish and disingenuous. So many interactions that should be simple are made to be overly complicated and uncomfortable, across wealth, race, gender, sexuality, profession, interests, age, and certainly political label.

Yes, the social contract is completely fucked. As a communist, you should know this already. But unfortunately, while many revolutionary factors happen without our input required at all, many do require input—sweaty, infuriating, demeaning input at that. Just like how they ripped the idea of “peace” from the hands of revolutionaries such as Martin Luther King Jr. and turned him into a Walmart t-shirt, just as the notion of “One Love” and “world peace” of well-intentioned white suburbanite hippies was quickly distorted by the powers-that-be, they will try and co-opt any real, positive change and kill or corrupt those who birthed it. People will abuse a call to be kind and turn it into the equally gross smarm, to victimize themselves in the face of constructive criticism, to scold human emotions such as anger. We are swimming against the current, we are brushing against the grain, and we will shred our hands and cough up foul water in the process.

But also, in my personal experience, I can assure you that it is not always this agonizing. And, if we act as a healing force in society, if we help give these peoples a taste of what trust, love, acceptance and social harmony is like, we will find it slowly getting better, even faster than how slowly things got worse and worse. People are already hungering for a social dialogue to fix these issues, and the primary problem with their solutions is they are not anti-capitalist and they are certainly not pro-socialist. However, from the time of Christ, the ancient home of kindness on the political spectrum has always been in communism. If we take up our positions as the pioneers of a better society, we will naturally inhabit this niche; it will be like dusting off and oiling a machine that, while it has been neglected for quite some time, has always been waiting for us to reacquaint. The key to start this machine has always been in our possession, in the possession of the communists—we only need the willpower to fish it out of the refuse we have allowed to build up. Yes, we need to “clean our room,” as in we need to throw out all the poisonous garbage capitalism has instilled on the otherwise pure temples of our hearts and minds.

Capitalism is an anti-human system, and likewise it has instilled even its greatest detractors with anti-human tendencies. While socialist revolution will not break out in the imperial core through a mere few hugs, bummed cash, or kind explanations of Marxist theory, it will certainly accelerate the process of real, positive change. I ask my fellow communists to—especially when they are “on the clock”—catch themselves before they do “the easy thing.” To kindly assert kindness into our political spaces. To forgive and understand not only our comrades, not only our neighbors, but our enemies and ourselves as well.  And if you begin to doubt the efficacy of kindness, ask yourselves how much good this society of cruelty, artificially brought upon us by the agents of the most inhuman system on the planet, has done for us, and ask yourself what sort of things every person on this Earth, especially in such a sick and stunted society, crave above all else. Peace and prosperity, love and kindness.  Not from the cynical “doing what they must” to win a war, but the sincere sort that exists for its own sake with no ulterior motives or expectation of reciprocation.

The Soviets, the Chinese, and the other revolutions across time and space had their own battles to fight.  Their societies were destitute, overexploited, and undeveloped. We too may need guns and the courage to make physical battle before this is all said and done—not every fascist fanatic and American state agent will be persuaded to change their ways—but in the now, while this is still an invisible warm war in the Age of Information for hearts and minds, we will need solutions to the remarkably sick hearts and minds of Western society, who have been inoculated against the very medicine meant to liberate them. If they are taught to hate Marxist buzzwords, how do we start a dialogue? What is the pioneer species that will break into this barren rock? Love and kindness.

#marxism leninism #one love #capitalism #sick sad world #political dialogue #political discourse #American Politics #communism #socialism #333 #137 #political essay #cooption #peace and prosperity #praxis #good praxis #revolutionary #rise above our circumstances #leftism #communist critique

[hkjdx9ter]

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[doykeitdyke]

trying to find more jewish music is fascinating (and frustrating) wrt language. what im looking for specifically is a broader variety of yiddish music, but it’s rly hard to find. genre-wise, it’s very limited. what i have found instead, rather annoyingly, is a plethora of genres in hebrew. it’s kind of crazy to me that i can find more stuff from post punk to pop in a historically liturgical language than its vernacular companion. the shift from sacred tongue to secular nation-glue has done a disservice to both hebrew and yiddish imo. the former has lost its focus and the latter has been pushed to the fringes, holding on to itself tightly in folk and punk spaces. that does give it a sharpness, as a small and stateless speech, that seems lacking in the soulless identity of national language. but it makes me angry how a language that once narrated millions of lives now seems to have so little to talk about. for many reasons.

#this is of course not meant to say that these are the only two jewish languages #there are others #im just talking abt this as someone looking for yiddish specifically and repeatedly running up against hebrew instead #i dont mean to be harsh to hebrew here #my issue is not with the language but with its cooption by nationalist forces #but i hope at least im not being inaccurate in my criticisms #rambling #yiddishkeit

[lelwasdduo]

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[brightgnosis]

I wanted to experiment with my next batch of Pine Oil by turning it into a cold cream- but I wanted to do something nicer than my last batch by doing something woodsy and wintery by using Juniper, Rosemary, and Frankincense (the only one I can't forage) this time- as opposed to the Rose, Oregano, Rosemary, Pine, and Orange of the last batch (which I wasn't too happy with the final scent of) ... But I'm almost out of my current batch of Pine Oil now and I just ... Don't have the $100 I'd need to drop right now, after pricing everything, in order to try it ... Because I have to do stupid things like celebrate a holiday that's not even a part of my religion, and (in doing so) buy a bunch of gifts that aren't even a part of the point of the holiday.

#I Literally Loath the Capitalist Cooption and Commodification of Holidays and the Social Obligations That Come With It As A Result So Much #Reblog #Face and Body #2022

[iberiancadre]

Cannot stand seeing people on my dash celebrating the Pope's statement that "marxists and catholics have the same mission" because those people clearly have no idea about the historical cooption of class politics by the church.

this kind of bullshit goes back to 1891, when Pope Leo XIII published the Rerum Novarum encyclical, addressing the situation of the working class and what the church's stand should be on it. It is, essentially, a socialdemocratic text that defends unionization while denouncing socialists and "capitalism". It still defends private property and the right of capitalists to their profits. This encyclical really made the figure of a worker priest relevant, a low-level priest that's aware of workers' issues and "defends" them. What this figure accomplished was the promotion of class conciliation and therefore a rejection of workers' liberation.

And this is no different. The pope might not outright reject marxism, but in practice, by bringing it down to the level of the catholic church he dilutes marxism into nothing more than "can we pretty please raise the minimum wage according to inflation". The church is, at its core, nothing more than another institution used by capital to appease workers into non-violence and peaceful activism. The very same institution that coexisted with fascism in the 30s and later became a rabid anticommunist tool is now talking about marxists, give me a fucking break.

This is what I'm talking about. How anti-church can you really be if some "good opinions" makes you partial to them. It doesn't matter what the headlines say the pope thinks about trans or gay people if in their actual theology it's just forgiveness for who they think are astray. The church's compassion for any oppressed group does not come from principle, it comes from pity at people who reject the church's teachings. It's no better than the "as long as it's in private" kind of homophobia and transphobia.

#real marxist hours

[shamebate]

It's really strange to see people on here talking about the police repression across american university campuses and how serious they are in such a spectacular-by-way-of-Bonnano manner - these liberals talking of voting whilst everyone around them with senses to know are rattling the bars, saying, hey, do you trust your water provider? are you safe from the borders? Do you have masks and medication and things to make art with, how much can the state fuck with you? Have you seen the brownshirts? (They were there before, already; this violent wave isn't exceptional, just a steady descent thru oft trodden roads.)

There's footage of a violent arrest on an american campus demo: a student is tazed and restrained. It seems like people filming are everywhere in shot - as journalists have shown where their interests lie, as ai is used to further mechanised slaughter and genocide across the globe, facial recog and data doppelgangers and all the rest - the camera flashes sting. Body cams and documentation have shown their place in societys prison industrial complex. dearrest work and legal observers take nothing away from the cameras if they must be there. Not to backseat analyse, but if i can soapbox about any issue it is about many cameras being cops. This is not to blame any of the brave demonstrators for state violence; it's just something that hurts to see happen again and again; many black and brown and racialised people have spoken about how turning state brutality into media for consumption by white supremacist media is further violence many times already, better than me. German arrests against conferences and other academic organising nodes are subject to legal, border, arrest and other violence; blood literally flies across the world.

I have seen reports of tear gas and rubber bullets (ar Emory) used (update: pepper bullet and spray seems to have been used instead of earlier reported munitions, but the violence at that campus is without question.) I have also seen two sniper's nests at Indiana and Ohio - the sheer brutality being wielded against many campus (here's Boston) demonstrators are not those of earlier in the campus demonstration wave; the escalation people like @ 3liza, @ intactics (and others) are noting as not unlike the ladder used in the escalation of violence that led to the Kent State state murders. american and german (as well as most of anglosphere and 'west europe') states continue to victimise jewish dissenters disproportionately (just as in the KS murders) thanks to the post IHRA-style zionist revisionist legalist shit definitions of anti semitism being used to repress huge numbers of brave people.

Here is an update on palestinian campus and school violence/repression, too. Update 28th April (28.04):

Join the American Campus Arrest Amnesty Phone Blast here! Calls are needed!

UT Austin Jail Call Support needed!

and to add to the spectacle of it all - hurry to attack capital before a new ideology makes it sacred to you! How does that old song go? - AOC is doing the old cooption enforcing, PR for cops, flashing her maskless face around a swarm of those Damn Cameras. May all journos politicians and bosses fuck off!

Guide to emory encampment.

reportback from emory arrestee

#free palestine #Escalate4Gaza

[mariacallous]

It’s really frustrating that people are acting like the Democrats “just aren’t doing anything” and that there’s all kinds of options and end-runs and cheat codes to deal with this and that you can just whip out an executive order or ignore things and barrel through.

People have been warning about this for years and warning about the cooption of state governments and the judiciary, and state capture, and how much power is given to disparate groups and why we need to have actual majorities and votes and the reaction is to brush that off or criticize it for being too moderate or insufficiently radical and therefore the ability to counter or block these actions is weakened until we get to this point and suddenly there’s the shock and horror and now we need to be even more radical and “activist” but not in a way that will actually add to the arsenal or be productive.

[indexcard]

i think a big part of why i can't get on board with the heterosexual romance genre as it exists right now is because the men are so flat. like sincerely: what happened to all the male lovers? it used to be a staple of fiction that men could be outrageous in their passion: casanova, cyrano de bergerac, werther. and the 20th century evolution of straight male passion was often objectifying but you also can't deny that there were people like leonard cohen writing poetry about yearning and jealousy and now it seems male songwriters can't get much more specific than uhhh i love your body. i would do anything for you. the kind of hallmarkification/marvel catchphrasification of straight male desire, a place where meaning goes to die. obviously in part it comes from a desire for men to be sanitised, and it comes from the conservative/mainstream cooption of feminism, this like reactionary overcorrection for the very real problem of gendered violence. but where are the men under the window with a boombox? what happened to the last-minute rush to the airport? in the past idk 20 years i feel like the straight romcom has really pushed hard for female agency but in a way that actually ended up stripping both parties of agency. because we never actually get stories that allow women to woo men. like that's the crux of it: this could've been a radical reversal in the genre where suddenly women are allowed to be cast in the role of the pursuer. but now nobody's pursuing anyone and the whole genre is just a series of coincidences and misunderstandings. straight romance narratives have become passive. and, from the feminist perspective, what this actually does is alienate straight women (the primary target demographic of the genre) from the opportunity to read themselves as the object of desire. respect as a fantasy is nice, but it HAS to go hand in hand with actual complex, layered, nuanced desire, or it becomes passionless and unromantic. jane austen understood this but somewhere along the line a cultural amnesia seems to have set in, and adaptations of austen have become about how sassy the heroine gets to be. i've no doubt that there are female authors working in this paradigm still but they are not the dominant voice in shaping the cultural archetype of straight romance, which has become perfunctory, an aesthetic of blandness and traditional gender roles, yes even in "dark romance." what i'm saying is maybe we need to start letting men write slightly messy romance novels and real love songs (i'm talking alex turner and jarvis cocker, no ed sheeran bullshit) again

#i've been thinking very academically about straightness lately #this is a take

[metamatar]

listening to jules gilles peterson and its so deeply frustrating that the modern thrust of lgbtq organising is this ahistorical thrust to manufacture consensus not merely in the present but at some kind of ontological level. of course this is unable to address the socioeconomic complexity of our lives, it is unable to mount a sustained challenge to neoliberal capital's cooption because of a commitment to an unstrategic and infantilising framework. like how can we ever imagine anything revolutionary, how can we ever learn if we're pretending the past doesn't actually differ from the totalising reality we live in.

#kvetching

[very-sleepy-bees]

greetings and salutations you are now my little sister do not resist the cooption lest the paperwork gets shuffled i am now your older brother and i care deeply about you being happy and swag.

Yay I have a big brother now!

[transsexual-homunculus]

i know this is probably mean-spirited and inaccurate percentagwise (bc most people who 'destransition' are trans ppl who are recloseted because *gestures* society and harassment and having hordes of people interpret your short scifi story about the cooption of identity by the imperial state in bad faith as an attack on trans people that couldn't possibly have been authored by a trans woman) but like. gd 80% of the time i hear about detransitioners having something to say about transition and trans ppl i'm just like "oh you mean you're cis? why should i care what you have to say?"

[deanmarywinchester]

the most painful thing about succession so far isn’t the suicide attempts or the abuse or the capital’s cooption of society it’s that Greg is making $200k

#succession tag #my posts

[proustian-dream]

Capitalism: a system that generates artificial scarcity in order to produce real scarcity; a system that produces real scarcity in order to generate artificial scarcity. Actual scarcity — scarcity of natural resources — now haunts capital, as the Real that its fantasy of infinite expansion must work overtime to repress. The artificial scarcity — which is fundamentally a scarcity of time — is necessary, as Marcuse says, in order to distract us from the immanent possibility of freedom. (Neoliberalism’s victory, of course, depended upon a cooption of the concept of freedom. Neoliberal freedom, evidently, is not a freedom from work, but freedom through work.)

Mark Fisher, Acid communism (unfinished introduction)

#mark fisher #acid communism #k-punk #apuntes de lectura

[orchres]

evil things are done every single day in the name of religion and it would do everyone some good not to think that any faith is above cooption by fascists

[outoftheforestshow]

AI and CHAT GPT thoughts and evolution of humanity

More of my thoughts about AI.

I have actually questioned the fight for $15 movement, which aims to raise the wages of fast food jobs like McDonald's to $15 an hour. I believe many of these jobs are already close to that in many ways.

While I have had major reservations about technology and relying on it, especially considering the potential threat of an EMP wiping us out, I also understand that comprehending this technology is crucial.

I used to be afraid of AI because we have all been conditioned to fear it. However, I now realize that we need to understand it, learn how to use it, and teach our kids to do the same. Additionally, we need to establish a moral foundation based on a universal/karmic understanding, so humans become more ethical (not necessarily strictly religious morals, but simply knowing right from wrong).

The danger with AI lies not in AI itself, but in what humans may do with it. We have the potential to create a great world that could ironically provide us with more leisure time, allowing us to care for nature and be more efficient. People fear humans becoming idle, but that would only be a problem if we succumb to massive greed and ignorance.

I fought against taking Ritalin for a long time because I didn't want to rely on pharmaceutical drugs (I consider antidepressants to be negative). However, life became too challenging, and I couldn't manage without it anymore.

Even now, at the age of 55, I am still struggling. I should learn how to code. I have always emphasized the importance of acquiring skills, being informed, and cultivating intelligence. I wish I had learned how to preserve food, grow my own crops, and make my own clothes, so I could be self-reliant. But now, I find myself in a state of limbo because the previous generation deemed all that worthless, and that is concerning. It is one reason why I often fear the future, but I also see its potential.

If we learn about AI, we must instill curiosity, creativity, and self-reliance in our children. AI should be viewed as just another tool in the toolbox, not the ultimate solution. Does that make sense?

Thinking that AI will write your law exams or medical papers is foolish. We will need to evolve our methods of assessing knowledge, and that is achievable. AI can be used for basic editing and even teach better grammar and spelling. In fact, AI could be employed to teach anything.

However, this could lead to a loss of teachers, which is not desirable. That's why we need to actively participate in raising children with a love for learning and teach others how to instill that same passion. This is the weak link in AI, and I fear we will fail. I believe we are going to surrender all our power to AI, and that is not the intended purpose. AI should only be used for more menial and routine tasks, while we focus on advanced tasks that would take us a year to accomplish but only an hour for AI. This could free up a significant amount of time in our lives. But as long as money and greed are in the picture, or if we allow fundamentalist Christian nationalists with a puritanical worldview to control, we are in trouble. We must quickly embrace AI and figure out how to navigate this situation because it's not going away.

I think the key word is "adaptation." Furthermore, understanding the principles of universal natural law and karmic law is crucial. I know I keep repeating this, but it's true. It's not about solipsism or relative "morality" (a term I dislike due to its cooption by religion, implying that morality can only be found within their dogmatic beliefs). Instead, it's about understanding basic principles of right and wrong morality: kindness, empathy, compassion, self-defense, and avoiding harm. If we don't have these as the foundation of our civilization, we are doomed.

AI is dangerous and should not be taken lightly or seen as a mere novelty. It is a serious matter, and we need to quickly catch up and educate ourselves. Unfortunately, I fear that we won't.

The current powers that be have a strong hold on our civilization. There are too many individuals who see AI as a means to advance their own agendas and accumulate power, rather than helping humanity as a whole. This is the core problem. Apathy, greed, and ignorance are widespread in our society. Fear is another significant factor driving these issues. Fear drives greed, hate, and ignorance. We must overcome fear!

I can see the astounding possibilities for AI in our civilization, but we must proceed with caution and deliberation. However, I am concerned because many individuals lack control over their anger and exhibit road rage. Additionally, our government's nonchalant attitude towards guns troubles me (although I lean towards anarchy and believe that it is critical for us to become sovereign human beings who understand universal law, so we don't surrender control of our lives to government, religion, corporate elites, oligarchy, or corporatocracies). The right often surrenders their power to fundamentalist religions, while the left, particularly as of late, hands their power over to government "authority" figures.

Also, keep in mind that humans should still develop and can develop original ideas.

I often struggle with stream-of-consciousness writing (which isn't inherently bad) as my morning pages tend to be like this. Even NANOWRIMO advises to forget about editing while doing NANOWRIMO; editing can come later. The primary focus is to get your ideas down on paper, and this is where AI can play a role.

While I still believe it is crucial to teach kids grammar, writing skills, and how to structure cohesive arguments (including spelling), AI can handle much of the tedious editing work. Will this put editors out of jobs? It's possible, but before handing things over to editors, don't we perform basic spell checks and grammar checks ourselves? Yes, tools like Grammarly provide basic AI assistance.

I find typing to be a challenge at times. Although I know how to type, some days it becomes difficult. Is typing important? Yes. Is it essential to know how to write and even use cursive? I argue yes! However, is typing flawlessly at a speed of 500 words per minute a critical skill? No, because we can always edit our work.

It's worth noting that even when using AI, it's essential to read what it writes. AI can make mistakes, take things out of context, and more. So, being specific with AI systems and reviewing our work is crucial. It's something I'm learning myself, making it more of a collaborative process.

Survival Strategies in the Era of AI Taught by Stanford | Stanford AIRE Director https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA9K0JMrbWg&ab_channel=EO

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