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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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File: 1687313147113.jpeg (108.76 KB, 475x600, mary.jpeg)

 No.18244[Reply]

Pascal’s Wager is the best argument for Christianity and is only said to be the worst by those who have not read Pascal. Pascal in his Pensées shows why other religions are false and shows why Christianity is the true religion so the common objection against his wager is wrong.

There are too many unanswered questions in the universe to take a chance on eternal hell.

The cosmological argument. Why is there something rather than nothing? The only explanations from atheists are supernatural explanations. Silly reddit sci-fi explanations like multiverses and eternal universes both of which are not shown in nature at all and are just as likely as a creator of the universe existing.

DNA is which is more complicated and structured than you can possibly imagine created out of stardust for the first microbes in the universe. Consciousness. Where does it come from? Quarks? All this created randomly from nothing? It’s a bigger leap to say the Big Bang, DNA for microbes, consciousness, and everything else in the universe came out of nothingness and random chaos. All of it seemingly so perfected crafted where even a centimeter of difference would mean nothing would exist in the universe. Really. How does something so perfectly crafted and complicated as DNA come out of nothingness and stardust for microbes and every living thing on the universe?

None of this means you have to be absolutely 100% sure a God exists. It’s just enough of a doubt that it’s worth trying to find faith in God.

Think of it like percentages. 20% from the cosmological argument. 20% from the teleological argument. 20% from the argument of beauty. All of these arguments combine into a reason to justify having faith without evidence.


_
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is….
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.
2 posts and 1 image reply omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.18249

>Why is there something rather than nothing?
there just is, ok?

 No.18250

File: 1687342188870.jpg (38.14 KB, 480x640, homer's wager.jpg)

relevant

 No.18251

>>18244
The contradictions and incoherence of the Bible are a certainty that it was made by anti-Roman, anti-Assyrian nihilists who had nothing but belief and a negative evil eye to cast upon their enemy.

Furthermore, all theistic arguments - cosmological, teleological etc reduce to ontological arguments, which has no means to distinguish itself from fiction but human assertion. Kant and Hume did this ages ago.

In the Protestant anglo context, belief reduces to a sinner's prayer, which is as cheap as a politician's speech. You can read the Epistle to the Romans, mumble the words Paul tells you to mumble and still FEEL NOTHING.

And finally the wager refutes itself. It appeals to Tychism, that is chance, to appeal to a Reality without chance. Here we return to Parmenides' challenge - what is, is and what is not, is not.

 No.18253

Nothing and pure Being are immediately each other. "Nothing" by definition is featureless, empty, and also is, and therefore is immediately Being. If you say that Nothing does not exist, then you are saying that only Being exists. So therefore Nothing exists, which means it is Being. But pure Being is empty. It has no features whatsoever. Pure being has no determinate features besides the fact that it is. Because Being is featureless then it is devoid of everything, and therefore is Nothing. it is immediately Nothing. And hence Nothing is immediately Being and vice versa.

When Being ceases to be to become Nothing, and Nothing ceases to be Nothing to become Being then this motion is an unraveling of pure Becoming. Nothing becomes Being due to the necessity of its existence and Being becomes Nothing due to the void existence of Being. Becoming is the ultimate essence of Being and Nothing, which means that potentiality and unraveling are a necessary feature of both. Becoming is the tension that brings forth existence.

Also, as shown, you can't have Nothing without Being, therefore Being must exist, but it can only exist in relation to Nothing, so Nothing must also exist.

And that's why there is something rather than nothing.

:)

 No.18254

Has anyone ever in the history of the world ever come to Christ due to Pascal's wager? It seems like something to justify believe only after the fact, and is it really even "belief" if God to you is just a game of chance? It's not like God is retarded and wouldn't know you're just scared of damnation.
The Wager is about belief in a higher deity in general, there is nothing about it that requires it to be the Christian capital-G God. People criticizing the Wager are perfectly justified in bringing up either deities.
Same with the argument from design, first cause etc. If there is a higher deity, a creator, some entity you could call "God", there is no reason it should be involved in human affairs, or desire worship. Every one of these arguments presupposes Christianity is the one true religion, but why would this be the case? Which Christianity, even?



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 No.18833[Reply]

I have suggested before writing a shorter Edition of Capital aimed at the working class. I was mocked for this idea. People said that Capital is "perfect" and that it cannot be made shorter. People said that I "think workers are too stupid to read" (I do not think that). People said that I "think I am smarter than everyone" (I do not think that, in fact I was requesting help in writing such a work). People seemed obsessed with the idea that if a plainspoken version were available, it would ruin the original, even though the original is widely available.

Despite all this, I have found that in an 1868 letter Engels suggested the very same thing to Marx.

Is it not evident, then, that such an idea is not only not stupid, but of the utmost necessity for spreading and popularizing Marx's very important ideas?
12 posts and 1 image reply omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.18846

>>18845
nice GPTpost

 No.18847

>>18844
prequel

 No.18848

Yes, “simplifying” one of the foremost works ever made so you can slide in liberalism and revisionism is bad actually

 No.18849

>>18848
i'm going to simplify you by beating you upside the head with a shovel but i won't need to slide any revisionism and liberalism into you because it's already there

 No.18850

>>18836
i found this "libcom" article criticizing cafiero's summary for being poorly translated (English) and for getting some of the math wrong (original Italian)

https://libcom.org/article/cafiero-and-marx-capital-nutshell

but more interesting was the year long argument in the comments lol



 No.18239[Reply]

The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

The premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls “heroism”: a “defiant creation of meaning” expressing “the myth of the significance of human life” as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.

Such symbolic self-focus takes the form of an individual's "causa sui project," (sometimes called an “immortality project,” or a “heroism project”). A person’s "causa sui project” acts as their immortality vessel, whereby they suscribe to a particular set of culturally-created meanings and through them gain personal significance beyond that afforded to other mortal animals. This enables the individual to imagine at least some vestige of those meanings continuing beyond their own life-span; thus avoiding the complete “self-negation” we perceive when other biological creatures die in nature. [4] By being part of symbolic constructs with more significance and longevity than one’s body—cultural activities and beliefs—one can gain a sense of legacy or (in the case of religion) an afterlife. In other words, by living up to (or especially exceeding) cultural standards, people feel they can become part of something eternal: something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and significance in the grand scheme of things i.e. that they are “heroic contributors to world life” and thus that their contributions last beyond their biological lifespan is what’s referred to as an “immortality project.”

 No.18241

Immortality projects are one way that people manage death anxiety. Some people, however, will engage in hedonic pursuits like drugs, alcohol, and entertainment to escape their death anxiety - often to compensate for a lack of “heroism” or culturally based self-esteem - resulting in a lack of contribution to the “immortality project”.[5] Others will try to manage the terror of death by “tranquilizing themselves with the trivial” i.e. strongly focusing on trivial matters and exaggerating their importance — often through busyness and frenetic activity. Becker describes the current prevalence of hedonism and triviality as a result of the downfall of religious worldviews such as Christianity that could take “slaves, cripples… imbeciles… the simple and the mighty” and allow them all to accept their animal nature in the context of a spiritual reality and an afterlife.

Humanity's traditional "hero-systems", such as religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason. Becker argues that the loss of religion leaves humanity with impoverished resources for necessary illusions. Science attempts to serve as an immortality project, something that Becker believes it can never do because it is unable to provide agreeable, absolute meanings to human life. The book states that we need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic in ways that are agreeable. Becker, however, does not provide any definitive answer, mainly because he believes that there is no perfect solution. Instead, he hopes that gradual realization of humanity's innate motivations, namely death, can help to bring about a better world.

Becker argues that the conflict between contradictory immortality projects (particularly in religion) is a wellspring for the violence and misery in the world caused by wars, genocide, racism, nationalism and so forth since immortality projects that contradict one another threaten one’s core beliefs and sense of security.

 No.18242

File: 1687276390061.jpg (52.17 KB, 349x500, dfw43.jpg)

>>18239
>We all worship, man.

 No.18243

>>18241
>Becker argues that the conflict between contradictory immortality projects (particularly in religion) is a wellspring for the violence and misery in the world caused by wars, genocide, racism, nationalism and so forth since immortality projects that contradict one another threaten one’s core beliefs and sense of security.
unadulterated idealism



File: 1685374091351.jpg (157.06 KB, 752x791, LeTrotskyDB.jpg)

 No.17602[Reply]

How exactly would you define Trotskyism? How exactly would you summerise it's key differences from other Left wing political positions?

From my understanding most people here are Marxist-Leninsts, and even those who aren't certainly don't seem to look favourably at Trotsky.
So in your view what was wrong with Trotsky's ideas, and with the modern Trotskyists?
38 posts and 5 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.18201


 No.18202

If you have to read Trotsky the meme response is Terrorism and Communism but here have a serious recommendation in regards to your questions

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/index.htm

 No.18231

>>18201
I see sarcasm is not your strong suit

 No.18234

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/08/ame.htm
<This system will be made to work not by bureaucracy and not by policemen but by cold, hard cash.
<Your almighty dollar will play a principal part in making your new soviet system work. It is a great mistake to try to mix a “planned economy” with a “managed currency.” Your money must act as regulator with which to measure the success or failure of your planning.
<Your “radical” professors are dead wrong in their devotion to “managed money.” It is an academic idea that could easily wreck your entire system of distribution and production. That is the great lesson to be derived from the Soviet Union, where bitter necessity has been converted into official virtue in the monetary realm.
<There the lack of a stable gold ruble is one of the main causes of our many economic troubles and catastrophes (…) Soviet America will possess supplies of gold big enough to stabilize the dollar – a priceless asset.
What did he mean by this?
<While the romantic numskulls of Nazi Germany are dreaming of restoring the old race of Europe’s Dark Forest to its original purity, or rather its original filth, you Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics.
?
<One final prophecy: in the 3rd year of the Soviet rule in America you will no longer chew gum!
??

 No.18238

>>18231
>its just a joke bro!!



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 No.20240[Reply][Last 50 Posts]

I couldn't find any left-com threads in the catalogue so I decided to make my own.

Also, can we get some flags to differentiate between the only 3 left-com internationals? The current left-com flag is that of the PCInt and Bordigism.
I suggest for Damenites use the ICT logo and for the whatever ideology the ICC is use the guy with the hammer.
I know the council coms have a pancake flag but I think the logo on the council-communist reader goes hard. Just a thought.
140 posts and 41 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.20381

>>20375
>marx failed to consider that poop emoji pillows keep the third world employed

its over commiesisters….

 No.20382

this is the only good non-ml & non-ccru theory thread currently

 No.20383

>>20338
>wikipedia link

sorry buddy, no wikipedia.

 No.20384

>>20265
>ultra-leftists (anarcho-councilists, communizers, rewilders, tiqqunists)

anymore like them ?

 No.20385

Can we elaborate on the likeness, distinction between
1. demcent and orgcent
2. Leninism and Stalinism
from the POV of ICP/Bordiga's contribution / critique?



 No.18743[Reply]

The anti party group were Marxists who has survived Nikita Khrushchev's purges. They attempted to democratically replace Khrushchev and return the USSR to Marxism and were arrested.
84 posts and 16 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.18828

>>18826
>But what a lack of judgment it requires to declare the Commune sacred, to proclaim it infallible, to claim that every burnt house, every executed hostage, received their just dues to the dot over the i! Is not that equivalent to saying that during that week in May the people shot just as many opponents as was necessary, and no more, and burnt just those buildings which had to be burnt, and no more? Does not that repeat the saying about the first French Revolution: Every beheaded victim received justice, first those beheaded by order of Robespierre and then Robespierre himself! To such follies are people driven, when they give free rein to the desire to appear formidable, although they are at bottom quite goodnatured.
t. Engels

 No.18829

>>18825
Bukharin was a proto-dengoid and that's bad enough without making shit up.

 No.18830

>>18829
Turns out, the Bukharinite-Dengist line was the correct one. The USSR is gone while the PRC is economically defeating imperialism. Huh.

 No.18831

>>18830
>PRC is economically defeating imperialism.
Lol

 No.18832

>>18831
The facts don't care about your idealist dogmatism.



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 No.12769[Reply]

Leftypol, what do you think it means to be a man worthy of death? I don’t mean in a way that they deserved to die, I suppose I applaud them for having died on noble conditions . Its a topic im still thinking about it, what about you? What does death mean to you?
3 posts and 1 image reply omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.12942

>>12782
What pills?

 No.12944

>>12942
gay pills

 No.12951

>>12771
Technically true, but it means something to other people. That matters.

 No.12952

This is the current most bumped thread on the education board
Let that sink in

 No.18229




 No.18040[Reply]

I know this sounds like a bizarre request, but does anyone have all 3 volumes of das kapital as a single unformatted .txt file? I want to be able to ctrl+f all 3 volumes.
21 posts and 3 image replies omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.18065

>>18042
>Capital has sadly been removed from Marxists.org for copyright claims
uh, no it hasn't
>>18064
shortest communist meme

 No.18066

>>18065
We know from further up the thread comrade >>18047

One edition they were holding has been
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/index.htm
Come the revolution I will greatly enjoy electrocuting Lawrence & Wishart by the testicles Inshallah

 No.18067

>>18064
there's a bunch of form feed characters ( U+000C). cleaned up txt (tr -d '\014') attached
>>18066
I see. I think Marx' PhD thesis is also not on there for similar reasons

 No.18224

>>18066
a lot of the stuff removed by lowrinse and fishfart can still be found on the archives

 No.18225

>>18067
thanks comrade



File: 1687110685997.png (68.4 KB, 480x360, ClipboardImage.png)

 No.18206[Reply]

What's the memo regarding this? I haven't looked deeply into the case of Tuchachevsky specifically but I've heard several things.

>Czech intel sending evidence to the USSR that Tuchachevsky was pro-German and made pro-German remarks in Prague.


>Tuchachevsky was framed by German intelligence under Reinhard Heydrich and Walter Schellenberg.


>Tuchachevsky was plotting a military coup against the Soviet leadership.


My questions are:

1. What was Tuchachevsky's relationship with the Trotskyites and their secret organizations that were exposed?

2. What was Tuchachevsky's relationship with Nazi Germany and Japan?

3. Is the modern Russian Federation sitting on critical files and documents which explain the Trials and subsequent purges of the Red Army and Soviet gov? If so why?
7 posts omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.18214

>>18213
Literally nobody outside your fbi.gov.org pseudo-friend circle gives a shit.
Save it for there and spare us.

 No.18215

>>18213
cringe

 No.18216

from what I remember of the threads about moscow trials, I had been convinced they were legit, and had all the necessary proofs through cross examination of testimonies and a few docs.


>>18207
>>18214
if the topic doesnt interest you just fuck off elsewhere maybe ? go touch grass for example

 No.18217

>>18213
its funny cuz every trot org will accuse slightly different leninists of the exact same shit ion even fw tukhachevsky like that Im just sick and tired of minor sectarian issues being treated seriously

 No.18221

>>18206
Interesting article here:

https://stalinistcivilization.substack.com/p/killing-tukhachevsky
>Tukhachevsky persists in the historical imagination as a deeply fascinating character. The “Red Napoleon” who never was, a brilliant military thinker whose life ended in abrupt fashion at the hands of the NKVD. The execution of Tukhachevsky and his allies has traditionally been characterized as a carefully orchestrated campaign of lethal repression carried out to ensure Stalin’s absolute power. This Cold War era narrative, which has largely been discredited with the opening of Soviet archives, has been used to show how Stalin’s ostensible megalomania sabotaged his own army’s prospects on the eve of war. On the other end, many contemporary Marxist-Leninists, adhering to the view of Stalin’s Soviet state, justify the execution of Tukhachevsky on the grounds that he was the ringleader of a fascist plot.

>In contrast to both of these theories, I draw on the work of various historians to argue that the execution of Tukhachevsky was the outcome of a factional power-struggle between two competing visions over the strategic direction of the Red Army. Tukhachevsky’s notorious personal power ambitions and his embittered military-strategic opposition to Stalin’s officer, Voroshilov, were perceived as a source of internal disunity capable of a producing a crisis that could potentially derail the war effort. Historian Vladmir Rogovin, in reference to the Stalin-era purges, stressed the importance of needing “to separate the fantastic and absurd charges from the evidence of the defendants' genuine anti-Stalinist activity” (Rogovin, 1998, p. 482). This requires going beyond Stalin’s psychology and the sensationalism of the Moscow Show Trials to find the power-struggle and oppositional politics at the heart of this matter.



 No.18656[Reply]

you're just a GNOSTIC!!!1! - Eric Voegelin

It's important to examine the the thought of reactionary thinkers. So here I present Eric Voegelin, buddy of Hayek, and conservative thinker.

Essentially his whole thesis is that Marx, Nietschze, and Scientific Positivists are "gnostics". and that Marx was a "speculative gnostic".

>Voegelin understood "gnosis" as a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection; the special gift of a spiritual and cognitive elite and 'Gnosticism' as a type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. Gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).


And basically that modern thinkers, by rejecting metaphysics and the origins of things (God) were unconsciously self deceptive but what sets apart Nietschze and Marx is that they were self aware of the self deception and therefore consciously "demonic" or "demono-maniacal".

>Voegelin's work does not lay out a program of reform or offer a doctrine of recovery from what he termed the "demono-maniacal" in modern politics. However, interspersed in his writings is the idea of a spiritual recovery of the primary experiences of divine order. He was not interested so much in what religious dogmas might result in personal salvation but rather a recovery of the human in the classical sense of the daimonios aner (Plato's term for "the spiritual man"). He did not speculate on the institutional forms in which a spiritual recovery might take place but expressed confidence that the current 500-year cycle of secularism would come to an end because he stated that "you cannot deny the human forever."


vidrel is a catholic workers/left wing catholic's take on Voegelin.

According to his critics:
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.
12 posts omitted. Click reply to view.

 No.18669

>>18668
I suspect if you go read through the primary texts you'll find that the denizens of the republic by and large viewed themselves as searching for truth in dialogue with others like socrates than picking produce from the market place of ideas

To the extent you may be correct it would have been from the fringe gawkers only engaging in the movement through consumption

Ah I believe we may be onto something here on the genealogy of the pomo burger brainrot

>Ah I am an intellectual I read journals publishing letters from the republic picking and choosing truth like I am shopping for a fancy


Here I suspect we have the ur postmodernist cockroach shuttling around feeding off scraps in the dark

 No.18670

>>18669
>republic by and large viewed themselves as searching for truth in dialogue with others like socrates than picking produce from the market place of ideas

whats the difference

 No.18671

>>18666
>Jefferson already have the idea of a republic of letters in the 18th century
The "republic of letters" isn't equivalent to the "marketplace of ideas," and the concept (and term) predated Jefferson by centuries.
>Hayek's theory of knowledge is a totally different thing which says that tacit knowledge is distributed throughout society and that the market and price signals are a way of communicating that knowledge.
That would be the middle period Hayek, more under the influence of Michael Polanyi. For the later Hayek (in "The Fatal Conceit", this summary makes the similarities clearer:
<Strangely for a doctrine that started out so concerned about respect for the inviolate individual and his or her subjectivity, the late Hayek rendered his system internally coherent by admitting that some knowledge did not really persist at the level of the individual mind, for the most part, but was processed and invested with meaning at the suprapersonal level. In a catch phrase, since so much that people actually knew was inaccessible to them, the only entity that really was capable of judging and validating human knowledge was The Market. The key turning point, as Hayek informs us in The Fatal Conceit, was his essay “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” (1968):
>[Epistemology is governed by] competition as a procedure for the discovery of such facts as, without resort to it, would not be known to anyone…. The knowledge of which we speak consists rather of a capacity to find out the particular circumstances, which becomes effective only if the possessors of this knowledge are informed by the market which kinds of things or services are wanted, and how urgently they are wanted… . Knowledge that is used [in a market] is that of all its members. Ends that it serves are the separate ends of all those individuals, in all their variety and contrariness.10
<No longer was knowledge being treated as an elusive thing by Hayek, scattered about in an inconvenient matter; in this version, not only is much human knowledge unable to be retrieved from within by the individual in question but, indeed, there exists a species of knowledge not “known” by any individual human being at all. Here we are cosseted in the Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

 No.18672

>>18661
>>18662
Talk about how schizo it is to call every non-Abrahamicuck a single word, rather than engaging in labelbrain & associationist arguments about the postmodernism boogeyman.

 No.18673

>>18670
>whats the difference
A republic isn't a marketplace, for one. The former is a political notion, with each member having an equal vote and the ability to change the system in substance. A marketplace doesn't suppose such an equality or even a voice in how this market functions, and the consumers exercise influence only on the vendors who operate within it. While the "republic of letters" implies the ability to enact changes in the form and content of the political system, the "marketplace of ideas" implies a more limited control over content and no direct control over the form.



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