Lenin was a bad man

 But a Marxist

https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41864

We must learn from Lenin. His polished intensity. His concrete clarity.

Gross point blank

 

• Treating the AI sector as a coherent economic entity yields preliminary estimates of nominal AI GDP at approximately $250 billion in 2025, growing at roughly 2,600 percent per year in quality-adjusted real terms. 
• National economic statistics accounts were not designed to track this kind of activity.
• $250 billion is actually quite small. Since US NGDP is around $32 trillion, this makes AI 0.7% of NGDP. That makes AI's contribution to aggregate output slightly larger than the airline industry, but smaller than the auto industry.

• 2500% growth of $250B means that, next year, AI will be $6.5T, which is about equivalent to all consumer purchases of goods in the USA. Two years, at that rate, implies $170T, which is 133% larger than all *global* GDP. This is all quite exciting for CYPHERPUNK 2027 to bring forward the singularity and boost the first uploads, presumably elderly volunteers.

Suit yourself Clarence

 Southwestern Ontario - Wikipedia

The Detroit–Windsor urban area is North America's most populous trans-border conurbation. Linking the Great Lakes Megalopolis, the Ambassador Bridge border crossing is the busiest commercial crossing on the Canada–United States border, carrying about one-quarter of the two countries' trade volume.

Windsor is a major contributor to Canada's automotive industry and is culturally diverse. Known as the "Automotive Capital of Canada", Windsor's industrial and manufacturing heritage is responsible for how the city has developed through the years.

Windsor, Ontario - Wikipedia

Islamisbad

 

From Anarchist Front

Here, in the 17th district of Kabul, two girls' bodies are wrapped in white cloth. The whiteness of the shroud, this time not of ritual, but the signature of a predatory regime on bodies that had been plundered many times before their deaths. They were not killed to punish; they were killed to register ownership, to mark the boundaries of property. In the Taliban's logic, a woman who does not submit to forced marriage, a woman who was previously in the clutches of a willing or unwilling spouse and now the armed Taliban wants her for themselves, a woman whose existence, in the eyes of this armed group, is an ownerless land, is to be eliminated.

A crashing Boer

 Andreessen isn’t alone in dreaming of transcending humanity through technology. Nick Bostrom, founder of the Oxford University “Future of Humanity Institute,” has argued that posthuman life is not only “possible” and “desirable,” through the use of nanobots, AI or other technologies, but that “it could be very good for us to become posthuman.” Yuval Noah Harari, popular medieval-historian-turned-prophet-of-doom, predicts with some trepidation that in this century “the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s bewilderingly optimistic “AI visionary,” recently predicted that by 2045 we will have achieved “singularity,” where human and artificial intelligence will be so integrated that “we will … become superhuman.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the modern technological superman is most often associated with the archetype of the Silicon Valley mogul. On a podcast in 2022, Andreessen described Elon Musk as the closest thing we have to a Nietzschean Übermensch today. (Other candidates floated on the episode include Trump and Kanye.) What Andreessen admires about Musk is his dictatorial approach to running his companies, which he likens favorably to Nietzsche’s conception of “master morality.”

Superhuman Fantasies | The Point Magazine

Tufnel into Poland

 Russian populism, the belief that the peasantry embodied authentic Russian identity and once liberated from their poverty would lead the country to a brighter future, has animated Russian thought across the political spectrum and inspired much of Russia's world-historical literature, music and art in the 19th century. This book offers the fullest and most authoritative account of the rise, proliferation and influence of populist values and ideology in modern Russia to date.

Christopher Ely explores the complete story of Russian populism. Starting from the cursed question of how to reconnect the popular masses with the Europeanized elite, he examines the populist obsession with the peasant commune as a model for a future socialist Russia. He shows how the desire for revolution led Russian radicals to flood into the countryside and later to pioneer terrorism as a form of political action. He delves into those artists influenced by populist ideals, and he tells the story of the collapse of populist optimism and its rebirth among the Socialist Revolutionary neo-populists. The book demonstrates that populism existed in forms ranging from radical socialist to religious conservative. Blending lively theoretical analysis with a wealth of primary sources and illustrations, Russian Populism provides a highly engaging overview of this complex phenomenon; it is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the momentous final decades of the Russian Empire.

Russian Populism: A History (The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia Series): Ely, Christopher, Melancon, Michael S., Thatcher, Ian D., Smele, Jonathan: 9781350095540: Amazon.com: Books

As reviewed by Leader of the Polish Sexist Party, Nigel Tufnel

Herd shot around the world

 LRB -  " . . . Instead of a shared historical trajectory, then, history is portrayed as unfolding through multiple independent paths of development in which civilisations compete for dominance. The Russian ideological lexicon describes this as ‘multipolarity’, an alternative to the arrogant ‘unipolarity’ of the US-led international order of the 1990s.

Russia did not pioneer these ideas, which were first sketched out by Johann Herder in the 18th century and developed by writers as diverse as François Guizot in the 19th century and Oswald Spengler in the early 20th century . . ."

Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century. An Historical Introduction. By John Bowle. (Cape; 25s.) | Blackfriars | Cambridge Core

Unbridled nationalism