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/edu/ - Education

'The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.' - Karl Marx
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So did the Thermidorian reactionaries make up all the crazy shit about Robespierre, or is it mostly true? I find stuff like the festival of the supreme being where he descended from a mountain to give a speech particularly batshit and theatrical and farfetched.

I regularly hear from people on here that stories of revolutionary atrocities are outlandish lies or exaggerations fabricated by reactionaries to make themselves seem better in comparison. Why wouldn't that be true of the French Revolution? Was Robespierre really a megalomaniac, or did the Thermidorians make all that shit up after they won, and that's what got passed down to us through counter-revolutionary academia?
31 posts and 6 image replies omitted.

>>18406
if they were trying to shoot his jaw off, instead of him failing to kill himself, why did they bother arresting and executing him? instead of to load the gun with another bullet and shoot him again? He was mostly unconscious for an entire day after the failed suicide. There was plenty of opportunity to kill him as intended, right? Unless you concede that a show trial was their aim all along and Robespierre was trying to deprive them of this by killing himself.

>>18391
hebertists were ultras

>>21699
they know you were right which is why they never replied

>>21699
We will never know. However, there is one interesting clue that can also go either way, which is his signature was incomplete on the order to summon the national guard. Suggesting he was interrupted during the process. It's less likely they literally shot him, and more likely a struggled occurred resulting in a misfire.

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>>22287
I forgot some details. There is a stain on the document that historians continue to debate being blood or smudged ink. Some think it is blood due to position, supporting the idea Robespierre was shot as he signed it. The signature is interesting as well, as its one of two documents that Robespierre's signature is different. The other being the order of arrest for Danton. In that case it is very small, and I've read pure speculation this might have been an expression of discomfort on his part with being responsible for Danton's death.

His last speeches also were directly referential to that he would not kill himself and the Cult of the Supreme being's coronation reads like a eulogy. Robespierre seeing himself as already dead would fit with his guiding philosophy regarding revolution.

There is supporting evidence for attempted suicide as well. Besides the fact the little pygmy couldn't use a gun, Robespierre did not want to sign the order. It is documented when asked to call in the National Guard to save the Jacobins, he hesitated because putting his name on the document would be a betrayal of his own revolution. Specifically when asked who should sign, Robespierre replied: "The People."

But then it's also worth taking into account the state of the headquarters. Couthon was thrown down the stairs in the Jacobin Headquarters. Only Saint-Just avoided being physically injured during their arrest. Pic related is worth a read for a play by play unless you know French.



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ITT: resources and tips about navigating the Internet and researching topics

Feel free to post your own resources and tips too.

I'm going to post a lot of my own that I have gathered over the years.
I ask that random chit-chat in this thread is kept to a minimum except regarding technical questions & answers on the topic matter.
This is so that resources are kept as compact as possible, and so, readable.

First I'll dump resources and tips for researching various topics.
Note: I don't even have access to or use some of these myself (e.g. LexisNexis which seems to be pay-to-use), but I figure they could be helpful in some narrow cases. I use most of these myself. If the initial things I post don't interest you, keep reading anyway. I'm going to be dumping a lot of content.

PressReader
https://www.pressreader.com/
Find key terms in newspapers and magazines.
I would say this is more helpful for finding sources that do exist rather than for reading them, per se. You can try to read the articles elsewhere than PressReader if you know their titles or part of their body text. The site appears to brand itself as pay-to-use, however you can use the search tool anyway and even read some resulting articles.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.
119 posts and 17 image replies omitted.

>>21640
Currently reading this. This book is terrifying, amazing and probably the most important thing you can currently read.

Guide To English Pornstars: The Intermediate Guide To English Pornstars
English Pornstars

Looking for Michael Hudson's book, "Privatization and the Ancient Near East". Not on Anna's, anyone have it? Tysm

Does anyone got the book "Anarchism, Organization and Management: Critical Perspectives for Students" pdf?

>>22276 (me)
Found a book that is quite close to that, did someone already read it? It looks exactly like what i was looking for:
"ephemera: theory & politics in organization management business anarchism"

https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/14-4ephemera-nov14.pdf



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What decent books are there about the Dhofar War, and southern Arabian (Yemeni & Omani) socialist experiments? All I can find are articles.

It's a shame that such fascinating historical movements that brought Arab and Iranian leftists together against their reactionary regimes, are virtually unknown.

Socialism in Arab countries was always a branding thing. A lot of Arab socialists were borderline fascists especially Nasserists and Ba'athists. At one time, the Shah of Iran portrayed himself as a socialist implementing a revolution in his country. There was always a fringe within right wing Arabist movements that had an interest in Marxism and that's how you get groups like the PFLP which split off right wing Arabist groups to pursue a Marxist line but kept ethnonationalist Arabist ideals and pro-Nasser or pro-Syria/Iraq stance and anti-monarchist bent. Some of the Omani groups were the same and effectively became proxies of regional powers.

>>22225
post a book rec on this tho, I'm not OP but I've had exactly the same interest ever since reading Red Star Over Iraq by Johann Franzen.

>>22225
That's cool except South Yemen was actually socialist not just nominally and it clashed with Arab nationalists as well.



 

Was the Meiji restoration and "restoring power to the emperor" a good or bad thing in 18th century Japan for the peasants? It marked the upper class revolution that caused the samurai feudal system to transition into a capitalist system. (Which ultimately turned into a racist imperialist empire that tried to invade and oppress all of its neighbors in Asia in a sort of fascist system, and as Japan lost the war the people starved and suffered greatly.)

I just found this photograph btw. Samurai didn't look nearly as impressive as I thought they would, and that hairdo is "objectively ugly."

There were a lot of peasant revolutions/movements that tried to go against the samurai but they all ultimately failed so no one except historians talk about them. Unfortunately too, the people who study Japanese history appear to be mostly weebs who romanticize the samurai so much that you never get to hear about the peasents' movements.
190 posts and 53 image replies omitted.

>>8665
Good video on Chonmage as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPoLmHDcoRc
>The Surprising Reasons for Samurai's Strange Hairstyle
>Let's ask Shogo | Your Japanese friend in Kyoto

So how inaccurate is this?
>The Forgotten Story of How British Redcoats Took on Japanese Samurai
>Redcoat History

>>21875
If I remember right, in Musui's Story his dad had him put in a cage for 2 years in their like living room as punishment for being an asshole

>>1931
Any anime in this art style ?

>>22184
I think there is but I don't remember the name of it. I'll ask in >>>/anime/4229



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The history of space travel. I want all material, factoids, trivia, books on space. From Sputnik to the recent Crew Dragon and further beyond
31 posts and 21 image replies omitted.

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Related slightly to the nuclear thread as well >>20394

This is late news but a month back the US MSM was drumming up hysteria about Russian ICBM capabilities and supposed preparations in the use of space-nuking.
https://southfront.press/beware-of-big-bad-russian-space-nukes/

Russia is developing space nukes… as a response to the US refitting the space shuttle platform as an orbital nuclear launch system for glide vehicles in violation of the outer space treaty, which was a response to Russia developing hypersonics* and the US being unable to compete, which itself was a response to the US unilaterally pulling out of the ABM treaty so they could deploy dual use nuclear capable anti-missiles in Eastern Europe pointed at Russia claiming non-existent Iranian threats as justification to escalate to the current war in Ukraine. The USA is also working on space lasers for early warning and tracking against hypersonics and possibly direct energy anti-missile systems which is why in response china developed and successfully tested their satellite killer missile. The interesting part is that the USSR predicted this as being the end goal of NASA's Space Shuttle program, despite denial from them.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-thinks-x-37b-space-plane-could-drop-nuclear-weapons-208369

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a36521988/russia-says-x-37b-spaceplane-is-secret-space-bomber/

Part of the reason for this hysteria is justified, in the sense that Russia's ballistic missiles of every type are superior to NATO equivalents, with only the aging Trident II SLBM being any actual threat and the LGM-35A Sentinel program being delayed heavily because of costs and mismanagement.
https://topwar.ru/232823-lgm-35a-sentinel-novaya-raketa-starye-problemy.html

HyperPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

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The Angara A5 rocket was successfully tested recently. It is the replacement for the Proton-M series of rockets with several serious advantages relative to the older Soviet rockets.

The DPRK jammed a GPS satellite over the Yellow Sea, during operations involving surveillance balloons

https://topwar.ru/243352-kndr-podavljala-signaly-gps-v-zheltom-more-v-hode-naleta-vozdushnyh-sharov-v-juzhnuju-koreju.html



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I have to confess something to you, comrades. I've been a leftist for many years now (here since the 8chan days), and I still CANNOT fully understand what the fuck dialectics is. Yes, I've read plenty, I've read a lot of Marx and Engels, later Marxist authors, philosophy books, dictionary definitions, I've watched philosophy lectures, youtube videos. I've even read some Hegel, with a lot of difficulty. All this and my brain still cannot grasp wtf dialectics is actually supposed to be.
The first problem is that many of these texts on dialectics look like pure gibberish to me, and it makes me mad when I can't understand them. Second, the words and definitions seem to change constantly depending on what I'm reading. Some people talk about the "dialectical method", others about "laws of dialectics", the "dialectic of history", "materialist dialectics", "dialectical biology", "dialectical consciousness", x person's dialectics, x philosophy's dialectics, others even bring up math and physics, etc. It all becomes increasingly convoluted and confusing, and in the end I fail to understand anything. It just leads me back to my initial question, what the fuck is dialectics? Maybe I'm just really not smart enough for Marxism, or philosophy is not my thing.

Still, I've been thinking about giving dialectics another try, maybe starting from scratch again, so if anyone knowledgeable can point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it. Maybe there's some key treatise I've missed or some obscure lecture that will make it all easier. Thanks for reading my rant.
5 posts omitted.

>>22073
>Yeah. Ever since I became enamored with Marxism I tried to translate dialectical materialism to science. I think complex system theory and some ideas in physics such as critical transition are a scientific expression of dialectical materialism, coincidentally so. Though they still harbor brainworms due to the philosophical grounding of capitalist society (e.g. mechanical materialism, idealisations)
Ok then, good to know I'm going in the right direction. I get that having scientific knowledge is necessary to understand dialectics too. I've heard many times from marxist authors and soviet textbooks that dialectics has been vindicated by science. They mention dialectics in many scientific fields and in concepts like entropy, elementary particles, natural selection and so on. Karl Marx considered Darwin to be pretty important, he told Engels about Origin of the Species
>This is the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views.
Have you ever read Dialectics of Nature? After studying a lot of science back in his day, Engels was convinced that nature is indeed dialectical and wrote this book with Marx's backing in an attempt to prove it:
>"To me there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it."
>"Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature"

>That was a very interesting watch. Are you German? If not then it must be quite difficult for you to understand the content, having to learn all of that in a different language.

No. I should have mentioned that the video has English subtitles. Still, many of these words that the German philosophers used like substance, thing in itself, immanent, spirit, and the infamous Sublimate/Aufheben have been VERY confusing to me. I should make sure I understand them all before trying to step into German idealism.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>22106
>Have you ever read Dialectics of Nature?
Yes, and I was quite disappointed by it because it wasn't what I was looking for. For most of the book, Engels meanders about scientific questions that are archaic today and when he spoke about what dialectical materialism means in scientific terms he did so relatively briefly.

>have been VERY confusing to me.

Bet. The terms are more intuitively understandable when you speak German.

>Really? So you don't prefer to read in German? I thought Marx and Hegel would be way easier in the original language.

I didn't explain that well. I do read them in German nowadays and also think it's easier to understand them when you read them in the original language. What I meant was that I used to read everything in English because most of the content I engage in is in English. Free English PDFs are much easier to find than German ones so I started reading German philosophers in English first.

>>22025
Traditionally, dialectics was a subdivision on of logic and was about the study of how arguments are derived. Hegel's dialectics (which is what Marxists are usually building on) refers to a particular kind of dialectical method used by Hegel. If you want a simple introduction read Hegel's Encyclopedia. Its a basic short summary of his whole philosophical system. Get a physical copy. grab a drink, put on some music, and just read and make notes as you move along. Its the only way to do it.

>>22107
>For most of the book, Engels meanders about scientific questions that are archaic today and when he spoke about what dialectical materialism means in scientific terms he did so relatively briefly.
Oh well. Do you know Alan Woods' works? It's the most recent work I know of that attempts to tackle science from a marxist point of view. He wrote a book called Reason in Revolt and a history of philosophy
>>22108
Thank you, I actually forgot that Hegel wrote a condensed version. I've been slowly reading it these days. I've been forced to consult a couple extra books, like a Hegel dictionary/glossary thing because some expressions are really hard to get (and don't get me started on Kant, he's even more confusing than Hegel). I've been checking out the book The Philosophy of Hegel (1955) by W.T. Stace, which was recommended to me during the 8chan days of /leftypol/, but I'm trying to not rely on it much.

Well I think something is finally starting to click. At least I'm slowly starting to get Being and Nothing, which is way more than I ever knew before. You know it's too bad that Marx couldn't write that treatise on Dialectics he had planned. Would've saved decades of arguments and debates.

>>22146
>Do you know Alan Woods' works?
Yes, I read Revolt in Reason and liked it very much. It's closer to what I expected when I read Dialectics of Nature.



 

Seems like there are a few people on leftypol interested in this subject so I thought I'd create a thread dedicated to discussing the Wydna collective and Pseudodoxology podcast
>What is Wydna?
Wydna is a research collective dedicated to reading history through a unique lens. Taking inspiration from Marxism and Accelerationism, Kantbot and other members of the collective dedicate themselves to uncovering the conspiracies, traditions and ideologies that circle the elites of the British and American Empires. Through their podcast, they discuss secret societies, scandals, and factions of the deep state in a fashion considered unconventional to our current interpretation of history.
>That sounds great, where can I learn more?
Their episodes are paywalled, so that's why I'm making this thread. I will be uploading some of their more noteworthy episodes on request here for those who aren't interested in paying the 5$ a month on patreon.
You can listen to their most popular episodes for free on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/45p4IYDT96zuulXl1oH5wW?si=4uuH0B85RjWbbqdEmnwQkw
And I will be filling this thread with links to episodes I consider noteworthy.
I'll start by uploading their episode on the history of political economy, which is 7 hours, so I'll be breaking the audio up into several parts. This post, OP, contains the first 3.
72 posts and 14 image replies omitted.

>>20145
Maybe a simpler way to talk about it is that Kantbot thinks that the deep state works by structuring information.

In spycraft, there's a lot of good reason to create information silos – divide up a complex task into discrete parts and run each thing in parallel so that no one else has all the information to put together the entire operation. This is a lot of thinking, so Kantbot tends to believe that the intel services will use similar "playbooks" or patterns across multiple operations. And since a whole plan gets modularized, it also makes sense for the planners to build in things like redundancies. So one of the things that Kantbot gets caught up on are all of these "doubles" that happen around various plots. He sees lots of assets that get spun up and spun down circulating around the more famous plots, and he sees this as evidence that the planners / plotters were working with redundancies and failsafes.

The flip side of this is that Kantbot doesn't think that these structures of information can be reconstructed directly from evidence, because all of that evidence is broken up, but that there have to be some pretty heavy heuristic choices involved. In other words, you have to use something like "The Secret Team" as a cipher for reading and interpreting complex events. This is a huge move on Kantbot's part, because it means that he's basically working deductively – he has his models, and then he searches out evidence to fit his models. And he spends a lot of time looking at and thinking about the things that people use as/for models, such as the architecture of PDFs.

>>11454
>>11455
>>11495
obv chatgpt posts

>>20968
lol I wish
Purple monkey dishwasher

I have spent hours listening to KB/wydna and thinking about his overall project. Can't say I'm proud of it, but that's the truth. He's an interesting if frustrating dude. At some level his intellectual commitments are just, like, German media theory and the sociology of knowledge. But at another level he's got this completely shamelessness that lets him dick around with frog twitter and that intersection is basically where his interesting shit comes from.

>kantbot: one of us, a poster, not credible, no rigor.
>Aaron Good: A scholar, sole protege of Peter Dale Scott, academic rigor fwiw, works daily in this field with people of all politics without compromising his own long-declared Marxism.
If you're gonna spend hours in this area, and you should, the choice is clear.

>>22144
lol what the shit I'm sucked in by a necropost.



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I've read plenty of theory but any good books from the last 10 years about police? I'm particularly interested in the culture of fear police have when it comes to interacting with people.
3 posts omitted.

Oh that's the third edition, originally from 2007, so maybe OP won't like it.

>>21933

I'm in a marxist org that I think has shied away from attacking the police and I want to correct our line. I believe Farell Dobbs was in the right when he said the following in Teamster's Rebellion:

"Under capitalism the main police function is to break strikes and to repress other forms of protest against the policies of the ruling class. Any civic usefulness other forms of police activity may have, like controlling traffic and summoning ambulances, is strictly incidental to the primary repressive function. Personal inclinations of individual cops do not alter this basic role of the police. All must comply with ruling-class dictates.

As a result, police repression becomes one of the most naked forms through which capitalism subordinates human rights to the demands of private property. If the cops sometimes falter in their antisocial tasks, it is simply because they-like the guns they use-are subject to rust when not engaged in the deadly function for which they are primarily trained. No police organization is exactly the same day in and day out. Two essential factors determine its character at a given moment: the social climate in which the cops have been operating and the turnover of personnel within the force. An unseasoned cop may tend to be somewhat considerate of others in the performance of duty, especially while class relations are relatively peaceful. Even in such calm times, however, the necessary accommodation must be made to capitalist demands, including readiness to shoot anyone who tampers with private property. Otherwise the aspiring cop, if he is not kicked out of the force, will have little chance of rising beyond a beat in the sticks. By gradually weeding out misfìts along these general lines, a police department can keep itself abreast of requirements during a more or less stable period in class relations."

The issue is these are powerful words but I want to prove that they have been borne out by reality. Particularly I think since the financial crisis/anti police movements police have shifted more and more right wing as relative class peace falls apart. Similarly I'd also be interested in works that look into the nature of police unions.

>>21943
>Under capitalism the main police function is to break strikes
which is why they get the privilege of being the only work force that is universally unionized and armed. because their job is to make sure other work forces are not

>>21943
>Under capitalism the main police function is to break strikes
they kinda pivoted from this to doing stochastic terrorism

>>21932
Relevant

https://youtu.be/_nl5zMIwcmQ

It sucks. I really wish there was good ethnographic work on the cops the same way there was on Neo-Nazis. IMO state gore workers and non-state gore workers are pretty similar.



 

Serious discussion.

The right completely rejects any anti-natal ethic (see pic related). most antinatalists are overwhelmingly pessimists (or cynics) and when politically active they tend to be leftist socialists (Think Thomas Ligotti, David Benatar, Philipp Mainländer… etc). antinatalism is very underground, even more so than veganism and is mostly perceived in a negative light even by the left. it's seen as reactionary and extreme and therefore dismissed.
however, I think that anti-natal ethics have a huge potential to reduce a lot of suffering as antinatalist philosophy often asks deeper questions about life, meanwhile most of the leftist discourse is focused on social identity and capitalism. it's not that antinatalists don't think of those things as big problems that need to be overcome, on the contrary, antinatalists tend to be hardcore socialist leftists but they also recognize deeper issues that (I would argue) are even more pressing than the overcoming of capitalism.
now before you slam antinatalists as genocidal defeatist nihilists, you should understand that antinatalists are not a monolith, some are apolitical and some aren't, some have unconditional anti-life attitudes and some are transhumanists and so on…
the point im trying to make here is that I think it's a mistake to outright reject antinatalism or antinatalists from leftist discourse, and as allies, as antinatalists care deeply about suffering, something that the left is synonymous with.
465 posts and 80 image replies omitted.

"Leftist socialist" doesn't always equate to good. There are after all Fabian eugenicists, Nazi socialists, and lumpen anarchofascists that technically count as socialists but are fundamentally of the reactionary socialist types ultimately. Many Western socialists are simply disaffected petty bourgeois who are mad that the world has some laws.

>>14251
Its only positive if retards dont reproduce.

Why are people so obsessed with reproduction when adults lack empathetic ability towards childrens personhood?

Why is it that procreation is the only activity thats not given any regulation?

I'm very sympathetic to antinatalism and I think it's a logical conclusion. Unfortunately, the average person is too close minded to even hear it out. I've learned that the average person isn't necessarily stupid, just anti-curiosity. It's why veganism (although being a completely logical endpoint to animal rights) is so hated on. People don't want to think about their ethics or a way to improve the world.

>>22133
this. Most people love to preach abput intellectual curiosity amd advocate for mandatory literacy but then will criminalise others for differing opinions.



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Half of your DNA is from viruses. You are as much virus as human. How does this make you feel?

>Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruses, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have a viral origin. Those extensive viral regions are much more than evolutionary relics: They may be deeply involved with a wide range of diseases including multiple sclerosis, hemophilia, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), along with certain types of dementia and cancer.


https://www.cshl.edu/the-non-human-living-inside-of-you/

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man viruses are so fucking weird scientists still haven't even agreed alive yet. Me personally I lean towards alive but a different type of life per se

The COVID virus was created by the future spacedweller intergalactic timetraveler Communist union as retrocausal weapon to destabilize capitalismo.o

It possible that a good chunk of evoltuionary processing was viruses?

Pretty cool actually.



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