/edu/ - Education

>>24705
>Saying heat death is "proven science" is just so stupid, now i gotta jump in.
Wrong. You deny the Second Law of Thermodynamic. Denial of heat death is denial of dialectic. Your admission of ignorance demonstrates you speak from bourgeois contrarianism.
>Physics is not complete.
Irrelevant. The universe does not care about humankind's undersanding.
>Physics is not complete. For example, physicists expect that there are undiscovered "structures" between the quark and planck scales, that there must be issues with the current models due to its inability to correctley predict the higgs boson mass, and lets not forget the breakdown of quantum mechanics and relativity when used for modeling black holes. More blatantly, heat death is currentley predicted by the observation that the universe seems to be expanding, and is explained by undiscovered "dark energy".
Wrong. Your appeal to ignorance and unknown future discoveries is undialectical. Dialectics is based on study of material reailty. Quantum calculations do not determine if a star or the universe dies.
>Heat death is not "proven science", it is a prediction based off assuptions about dark energy, which may or may not turn out to be true. There may be a Big Rip if things expansion keeps accelerating, for example.
Wrong. Heat death is proven science. All proven science is prediction based on evidence. Science has no room for maybes. Big rip is heat death with extra steps.

>>24707
For what it's worth, thermodynamics is fairly clear about the ultimate fate of the universe if heat is analogous to all energy, so eventually there is no more thermal activity as such in the universe, and no way to start the engine artificially. I have no problem with the credibility of the theory. I just reject calling it "proven science" imperiously for the reasons provided, as if it were declared or asserted by nature to doom us. There are other ways for the universe as we can possibly know it comes to an end that aren't about heat systems, and we have no "natural" notion of an artifice that can generate heat in the first place. My take on it is that "the universe as we know it" is primarily artificial history, even if the "artifices" came about by happenstance in nature. We study a thing called "nature" to discern a past and general laws about all of these things, but nature by itself says little about what the universe is or should be. Appeal to nature ends with a gigantic "just-so" story which is where you get stupid things like the "anthropic principle", or pure self-centered hedonism that makes the most ridiculous parts of Christianity and Islam look like bastions of sanity. It's not a great theory or claim to believe that eventually the energy or fuel for processes is exhausted, but for the crass interpretation to hold, heat has to be a "total, closed system", i.e. there can be nothing but heat in the universe which is patently false. If you're not referring to heat then thermodynamics is not the appropriate principle, and one thing I find really annoying are people who make asinine philosophical claims based on thermodynamics about "order", "chaos", and so on. You've probably heard them many times because stupid people raise these points all of the time.

I can't say as much about the current state of the theory or "Dark Energy" since Dark Matter and Dark Energy only exist as a very big cosmological fudge factor, or an acknowledgement that we really don't see much at all with telescopes. My take is that physics went really really bad some time around the 1930s because they didn't want people to know how a nuclear bomb worked and thought they could make their death weapons like magic. The problem is, people can understand fission well enough, and can understand fusion and why you can never do much with fusion power. Maybe if you had enough mPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>24716
Lost my shit at 'science has no room for maybes'. Maybe one abstract in a million would resonate with this insane reduction of the human process of finding out the truth of things.

>>24741
The sick thing about these people is that science doesn't have "maybes" if you're doing it right, but their logical positivist dreck insists every fact is a "maybe" decreed imperiously by a thought leader.

What is not allowed for them, but what a scientist can accept as their limitation, is "I don't know". If you can't defend your claims based on any actual evidence, your claims are going to be dubious or at best speculative. You would still need a theory or model to be complete even if you don't really know, or else the theory can be easily attacked for inconsistency. What you don't do in science is insist imperiously what truth is, then insist nothing new is possible for decade after decade, such that science can only progress one death at a time if we're fortunate.

Humans have ways of knowing things that are not science, and ultimately knowledge is only beholden to itself and the world itself, in all possible interpretations of "the world". If you're going to proclaim Received Knowledge, you can say that and rely on it. In some way, everything we know came about by revelation, rather than a source decreeing by some Working that it shall be so where the Working itself is wholly "unknowable". At some point knowledge accepts that new artifices "out of nowhere" appear first as revelation before we can trace their proper history and speak of their origin and what they're going to do. If we suppose something exists and then prove it, that is different from revelation, but there will be eventually "primary knowledge" which isn't explicable by any history available to us. You'll go insane trying to find a "theory of everything" or some master key to insist the whole universe conforms to something simple and reductionist.

In science we discount revelation because we quickly learn there is a history and a way anything in the world goes on, and revelation disallows that history. There is not a good or naturalistic explanation for why anything exists at all, let alone anything exists as it does in these peculiar formations. You'd be left with either absurdism, that the universe is arranged this way for no particular reason, or you'd start building this human-centered theories for purely asinine reasons to fill in for a reason that preceded humanity and life and occurred for its own purposes. Probably the hardest thing for the imperious mindPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Where you place history isn't even metaphysics or any of the standard categories of philosophical knowledge. You can base a metaphysics on "history" as the foundation if you like, but this runs into some obvious problems. It implies there is a place where the past is "happening now" and that there is a permanent record, time travel is possible, and the universe has to be constructed in a way that requires a lot of "just so" stories to hold true.

The more effective approach to history is that history is a category of investigation about the world generally, which does not at first need to suppose any particular 'things" or "beings" are at work. History could pertain to generalities or groupings of things vaguely defined and still be a history. We suppose there is a past and a future because for any of OUR knowledge about the world to be sensical, this is a necessary understanding; that for everything that "is", there is a "was" and "will be" at the least. This way doesn't require there to be a "universal history" that ties anything together. We could understand time and causality in other ways that are perhaps more effective for describing the universe we live in. I learned recently there was a Soviet physicist, Kozyrev, that had an interesting theory of time and believed he had proven it during the 1950s, but he was discredited by the establishment and had a troubled life to say the least.

The important thing for understanding histories of the world isn't that there is a geist or daemon binding the world together to make history possible. Historical agents can operate on their own power and for their own purposes, and we can suppose there is such a thing as space allowing those things to be related to each other and affect each other. Small, almost imperceptible things can coalesce into greater structures, up to as large as we can imagine. We have to hold there is a world to speak of whose history precludes "anything can be anything" due to the finite structures we see. The galaxy isn't spontaneously disappearing and didn't form as a system by any grand intent, and it is limited in size. We demonstrate the concept of space and proximity simply by a few axioms about what it means to even speak of space, and that if not space, then what "mediates" things? It would be the simplest possible environment, since at the start there is only the world for us to evaluate when speaking of "history of the world". We don't need within that world a "totPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

'Trash' found deep inside a Mexican cave turns out to be 500-year-old artifacts from a little-known culture

While investigating a cave high in the mountains of Mexico, a spelunker thought she had found a pile of trash from a modern-day litterbug. But upon closer inspection, she discovered that the "trash" was actually a cache of artifacts that may have been used in fertility rituals more than 500 years ago.

"I looked in, and it seemed like the cave continued. You had to hold your breath and dive a little to get through," speleologist Katiya Pavlova said in a translated statement. "That's when we discovered the two rings around the stalagmites."

The cave, called Tlayócoc, is in the Mexican state of Guerrero and about 7,800 feet (2,380 meters) above sea level. Meaning "Cave of Badgers" in the Indigenous Nahuatl language, Tlayócoc is known locally as a source of water and bat guano. In September 2023, Pavlova and local guide Adrián Beltrán Dimas ventured into the cave — possibly the first time anyone has entered it in about five centuries.

While taking a break to look around, Pavlova and Beltrán were shocked to discover 14 artifacts.

Among the artifacts were four shell bracelets, a giant decorated snail shell (genus Strombus), two complete stone disks and six disk fragments, and a piece of carbonized wood. Pavlova and Beltrán immediately contacted Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which sent archaeologists to recover the artifacts in March.

Given the arrangement of the bracelets — which had been looped over small, rounded stalagmites with "phallic connotations" — the archaeologists speculated that fertility rituals were likely performed in Tlayócoc cave, they said in the statement.

"For pre-Hispanic cultures, caves were sacred places associated with the underworld and considered the womb of the Earth," INAH archaeologist Miguel Pérez Negrete said in the statement.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

<La joya prehispánica de Perú de más de 3.800 años, Peñico, abre sus puertas al mundo
Este lugar floreció entre los años 1800 y 1500 a.C., al mismo tiempo que lo hacían las primeras civilizaciones en Oriente Medio y Asia. Ubicado a tan solo 12 kilómetros del sitio arqueológico de Caral, el Peñico ahora es noticia porque, tras ocho años de trabajo en el yacimiento —llevado a cabo por un grupo formado en su 80% por habitantes locales—, por fin abre sus puertas

Wake up babe, new Ancient Americas dropped. This one's about controlled burns managing wilderness.

>>11186
I think their huaco retratos are beautiful, the moche are such an underated culture.

>>24733
Didn't watch this yet, but it's interesting that gendered division of labour in Tupi societies was delineated between everyday menial jobs and agriculture done by women as opposed to intense, seasoned work for burning and cleaning new croplands done by men. You can use this as an example of how patriarchy could've developed in past neolithic societies (by exaggerating gendered labor) that we don't have information anymore.

>>24723
>Marx gives us a stage theory of history where human societies evolve from more simple modes of production to more complex ones like capitalism. This entire model is empirically false and it assumes there's some linear tech tree that all human societies must advance through.
No, that's just your misreading of Marx. There's a tendency that people reduce dialectics to the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Well, I also think that there's a tendency that people reduce Marx's analysis of capitalist to the triad slavery-feudalism-capitalism. Looking back, everything does seem linear.

The message you should get from Marx is that capital is univeralizing and history during and after Marx proves this - capital is international, it spread with sword and fire of colonialism and imperialism. Where there is capital, there's a working class and vice versa. Capital reproduces the working class and the enslavement of the working class under capital. The working class has vested historic interest to overthrow this system. That's the big story.

In general I think you're arguing a Marx strawman. With some Twitter ML ghost that ratio'd you earlier in the week.

>>24727
I'm not talking about dialectics. I'm talking about historical materialism and his theories of historical development. Marx is a social evolutionist: all societies should eventually develop the same social and productive structures, regardless of how he thinks this development happens. This really could be a side thing to his whole critique of capitalism which mostly holds up even if its dated. You can accept some of Marx's ideas without being a Marxist and you don't have to believe in X or Y thing Marx said. Marxists try to clobber you into this dogmatism.

>>24724
That's why I say that free will is not the same as true freedom.

>>24729
thats dialectics

>>24729
>I'm not talking about dialectics
yeah congrats for not reading the post
>>24727
<there's a tendency that people reduce Marx's analysis of capitalist to the triad slavery-feudalism-capitalism. Looking back, everything does seem linear.
<The message you should get from Marx is that capital is univeralizing and history during and after Marx proves this - capital is international, it spread with sword and fire of colonialism and imperialism. Where there is capital, there's a working class and vice versa. Capital reproduces the working class and the enslavement of the working class under capital. The working class has vested historic interest to overthrow this system. That's the big story.

Ispahsalar

Heresiarch or Arch-Heretic

The Field of Blood

>>21647

redditor

Market socialist reforms

Anti-corruption reforms

There was no future for socialism, so it could only die no matter what you did to resuscitate it. The argument for socialism was never premised on economic growth, nor was that seen as the purpose of capitalism necessarily. The argument for socialism was whether there was any interest in continuing the project, or if the favored wouldn't cut loose anyone who wasn't meant to make it in the world to come. They chose the latter, some enthusiastically, some only out of immediate self-interest, and some entirely against their wishes and sense of the world but mandated by the pressure of the first two groups. It became impossible to speak of a world where someone could simply exist as a poor. Only exceptional people are wanted in the world to come, and exceptional people are by definition not the masses.

Literally "The rent is too damn high". The entire economy is set up for as much rent extraction as possible by decades of policy, with the intent of imploding capitalism as anything involving actual capital.
In the rest of the world, real estate is not ridiculously overpriced, with the exception of some parts of the Middle East that are already an advanced model of the new program they want for the world. It's still expensive everywhere, but not so expensive that it is inflated ridiculously beyond what anyone actually pays for it. The entire purpose of such high rents is to make them unpayable, so that there is no more family home and you can't rent an apartment without three working-class incomes that you can't possibly attain. The only reason there isn't a mass implosion is because of those holding on to their accumulated wealth from generations ago and housing programs that prop up the ridiculous rent-seeking… sometimes. If you are a poor, you are dead in this world. Dead. The poors are made to live as if they were illegal aliens in their own country, squatting in their friends' homes. Such is life. If any of them find a place of their own, the mob of squatters comes in to wreck it, all with the tacit approval of the rent-seekers. No one could afford these rents without being selected to live, and those selected to live are just handed everything. They do not struggle. They do not.

QRD on all the books:

"Witness" – Chambers was a fucked up guy, joined Communist Party USA and was part of its underground network, wife refused to abort their child which lead him down the path of religious conversion, claimed he understood the godlessness of communism so he quit, became a Christian, and then snitched on CPUSA during the 2nd Red Scare ("McCarthyism"). Book is highly melodramatic and presents a highly good-vs-evil Manichaean worldview. Chambers also blames intellectuals for propagating communism in America, heavily promotes Christianity as the only way to save the world from the communist menace, and is overall a sensationalist asshole.

"School of Darkness" – Bella Dodd was an Italian immigrant who longed to fit in with American society and culture, joined CPUSA in the mid 1930s, recruited a bunch of CPUSA-affiliated teachers into the Teachers Union in New York, worked her way up to become very successful in the Party, fell out with the Party soon after Earl Browder got purged, ended up leaving CPUSA and became a born-again Catholic after meeting with Fulton Sheen, Sheen then convinced her to snitch on the Party during McCarthyism as a form of "repentance". Basically, Dodd was desperately searching for validation her entire life. When communists didn't want her anyone she became Catholic and anti-communist and got validation from that crowd.

"Radical Son" – Horowitz grew up being raised by CPUSA-affiliated parents, was raised to believe in communism, became a big name activist in the 60s New Left, worked with the Black Panthers, then had a falling out with the Panthers, accused them of murdering a friend of his, had a complete falling out with leftist politics and embraced Reaganite conservatism in the 80s. Most of his memoir is about "growing up" and realizing the leftist beliefs his parents raised him with were "wrong". He also hates intellectuals and is highly self-righteous.

"Unplanned" – Abby Johnson worked at Planned Parenthood and became very successful at it. She became a clinic director. Then, one day she allegedly witnessed a fetus being aborted on an ultrasound and this destroyed her mentally. She became a staunch anti-abortion activist afterwards. A lot of details in her memoir have been scrutinized by her former coworkers. Her book doesn't have some great metaphysical discussion on the "evils of leftism" as the other three but it's a more contemporary conversion memoiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Most of these stories are often aimless semi reformed degenerates or underachievers

There is also a specific libertarian brand of
>i was briefly a member of a trotskyist party and it felt a lot like a cult
<therefore all leftists are middle-class hipsters who can't think for themselves (unlike me bc i'm so smart and basic economics)
Here is something in this vein by Robert Anton Wilson:
>I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new Correct Answer Machine in my brain.
>This happened to be a Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine, I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines then available were less “Papist” (authoritarian) and therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent out of shape by the good nuns. (Why was I immune to Stalinism — an equally Papist secular religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late ’40s were all middle-aged and “crystallized” as Gurdjieff would say. Those of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist alternative allowed me to feel “radical” and modern, without becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again a I had in my Catholic childhood.)
>After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power, he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.
>Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being denounced for “bourgeoisie tendencies.” That was irritating then and amusing now because I was actually the only member of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class bPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>24627
None of these examples were people who "briefly joined a Trot party".

>>24018
I heard Nikocado started his career as sort a joke/whim.
All the people morally obsessing over him because of his obesity are the reason why shock jock artists exist

People are addicted to indignation. And that addiction to indignantion is what fuels self-righteousness.

Everyone thinks to themselves "That could never be me. I'm too smart/mature for this". And then it happens. They fell into a rut and are desperate for saving face. This is the problem with LeftyPol.
They all whine about the right being hypocrites and cringe lords, yet their own camp does the same shit.

LeftyPol whines about "women are gold diggers". They whine about certain ethnic minorities being troublesome (Indians in this case).
They go hysterical over entertainment franchises having canon-reboot sequels.
Alot of them are NEETs or semi-NEETs who think they're owed free money for being miserable bastards.

>>24021
So that's why Nietzsche says "God is dead and we killed Him"?
Of course, Christians take it out of context and frame it as an attack against their religion.

>thread about the power and danger of freemasonry gets derailed into schizobabble about aliens and a discussion of christianity
Wasn't convinced about a masonic conspiracy until I saw this thread and noticed masons scrambling to divert. Trotsky and Molotov were right. Communists must kill all freemasons.

>>24034
Some of our early post-Revolutionary War American presidents were anti-Masons.

kill yourself now

>>24348
>Why was Marx able to come up with his theory of history?
hegel.

>>24348
>why was marx able to come up with his theory of history?
Because he was smart and worked hard

>>24345
what an actual retard.

>>24351
lmfao

imagine believing theres a "marxist method of looking at things". marx did regular science, not some philosophical gibberish