Correspondence with my co-blogger

I am too busy to write fiction - the success of NUPES has opened up all kinds of possibilities for the French Left. But my co-blogger's recent thoughts are perhaps of some interest below.

Adam Carlton.

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A wave of A.I. experts left Google, DeepMind, and Meta—and the race is on to build a new, more useful generation of digital assistant

This is probably worth keeping an eye on. If they can make the concept work it's rather transformational.

At last, you get to speak to a human-level agent rather than navigating endless menu trees and then waiting 30 minutes to speak to an incompetent…

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How the Left fell for capitalism - Progressives were always part of the corporate elite

I liked this article - a goodish critical framework - although as a wannabe-leftist the author still cleaves to the 'Standard Social Science Model'. The heavily-ideological SSSM delivers the utility of progressive leftism to the interests of the most advanced, technocratic and global forces of contemporary capitalism.

An ideology is a set of ideas which appear objective and coherent but which justify and legitimate the existing order of society by occluding essential aspects of the truth. Progressive Leftism is such an ideology.

The correct starting point for a science of human affairs is rooted in the biology of our particular hyper-social primate species. But sociobiology is so subversive in its implications that it was sadly cancelled decades ago.

Interesting that sociobiology is as lethal to political Marxism (Leninism, Trotskyism etc) as it is to elite-friendly progressivism!

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My own view of Marxism, Adam, is that Marx's economic analysis of capitalism (generalised commodity production, labour power not labour, capital - and economic categories in general - as social relationships not 'things') is spot on.

His rather diffuse political ideas about future communism were methodologically unsound (see Popper's critique of historicism) and fatally undermined by Marx's essentially blank slate view of human nature. That's why I agree with E. O. Wilson's classic epitaph for Marxism: "Great theory; wrong species".

He meant that communism works for ants and bees as they are genetic clones. Humans are not.

At least not till the Draka engineer the rest of humanity in that direction 😨🤔… or perhaps the Chinese…