/edu/ - Education

>>23683
Start here.
https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/selected-works-vol-1-1938-1965/

>>23689
>the feminist truth ofc is that women dont owe men anything.

This right here is the answer to all of our problems with heterosexual relations.

>the conservative logic is that the father "makes" you a man by submitting you to a series of ritual traumas, but the psychoanalytic logic is that you just need a minimal alienation from the mother (an inaccessibility, represented by the father), so as to desire her, without being consumed by her (otherwise you get a generation, in tandem with market failure, who live in "mother's basement" [the womb] simulating an eternal childhood. this is oedipal dysfunction, and so i would say a real "conservative" should want to regulate the housing market to give his children an independent heterosexuality, not subject his children to the "challenges" of "competition". there is a positive and negative orientation of masculinity, then).

Irony is, most of our arrested developmental folks were born with fatherly influences.

But I agree with your last sentence about how "competition" is not a virtue but rather a farce.

>no, i disagree. i think men just love at a deeper level, since they yearn for mother. it is ALWAYS men who complain that they love their partner more.

You might be right
I did say four and half years ago that men are sentimental beings, more so than women.
Men are always trying to "save the day", thinking themselves as the superhero and end up falling on their faces sometimes literally.
(Especially if you watch romcom movies).

>all societies condition its forms of love. there is no "pure" affection, but it is always mediated

Society complain about teenage love yet the adults fall into the same traps that teenagers do but even more potent in consequence.

Society likes to brag about "adult" love being more finalized but from what I see, people are just bored and sneak around to "rejuvenate" themselves.

>>23684
Ty

>>23696
This is a not the worst take, actually. Especially taking """continental philosophy'"" at face value, zizek et al. But unfortunately, this is divorced from reality, as per usual. What one would perhaps call "idealism". Butler is very neitzchean tbf.

I can't watch the video unfortunately, so I can only speculate what this moron is saying. Transvestites are one of two things, men in drag, or men dressing up as women. Transsexuals isn't even a category nowadays.

A reactionary is completely divorced from reality, as per usual. It's all so tiresome. It feels like the spectacle isn't even related to actual reality, but we're somehow forced into it, and give our opinions about literal non-issues. Like the toilet ban in middle of fucking nowhere USA. Or trans people in the Olympics (a made up fantasy scenario that is completely irrelevant to all 8 billion motherfuckers alive on this earth, except the 10 other olympic competitors in the fantasy scenario).

So, so tiresome.

>>23697
midwit in every sense of the word.
I remember when I thought like you.
Keep reading.

>>23744
Good argument. Useful insights.
>this is also why populism is inherently right-wing, since it seeks to abandon universality for an exclusive generality
It falters here; The Communist counter argument is that real universality is in the objective condition of the Proletariat.

Also polite hint over at → >>23752

>>23756
I loved what I saw from tiktok before it came under burger control.

Research on bluesky topology + bonus text.

have been reading >>>22808 Canada in the world (thank you to all the admins, mods, and posters that make accessing these books possible)
My god this country sucks ass and i wanna change it. specifically there was a Don Cherry quote that i wanna share b/c it was funny
Today i am sick, and i'm planning on stockpiling some weed and doing nothing until my cold goes away.

I have a secret pleasure with bodybuilding history. Despite being a Randian, egoist goober with some very questionable theories on gym routines, Mentzer was showing some interesting focus on critiquing the ideology surrounding gym culture. As far as I know, he is the only man to have critiqued the social aspect of the gym in any serious way. Everyone else defends it.

One of the main points he makes to demystify going to the gym 5+ days a week, is that he points out there is a "loneliness" factor motivating people. He theorizes that all the "knowledge" of gym "truths" are artificially fabricated to justify going to the gym for as long as possible, so they can be in connection to something they feel is "real." So, for example, 5-6 day routines first serve the purpose of getting "real" gym goers to the gym almost every day, rather than some sort of scientific proof that this is optimal. Thus, if you can't commit to this, you are cast to the "outside group" for scorn. Interestingly, the weekend is not emphasized in bodybuilding routines, as Mike mocks that Sundays are taken off for the sabbath rather than any biological necessity. This creates a situation where people take a reprieve at the gym after/before a day of work, which Marxists know is alienating. Once they don't have to work that day, suddenly the motivation disappears.

In a way, some of his work is a very infantile attempt at critical theory. Sure, he's a lolbertarian individualist, but I strip away the ideology to look at the underlying intent and I was kind of impressed. With the fascist undertones of gym culture, which I know gets mocked but it is real phenomenon if you've been deep in the culture and I'm not just talking about voting Republican, Freudian analysis of the violent reaction against critique of the ideology applied in Mentzer case. He relentlessly critiques tradition, like the "holiness" of three, three days a week full body, three sets, ect. Instead of disagreeing, pretty much all critics of him instead set out to absolutely destroy him.
>he's a meth addict
>he's a sore loser
>he's a grifter selling tapes
>he's a liar
>he's a cuck
>he's a homosexual (not beating the fascist accusations with this one)

His meth addiction was also clearly a self-medication for undiagnosed ADHD, which even today is stigmatized as only existing in children. His hyperfocus on bodybuilding is the first clear sign, and then his later theory about proving the minimum amount of exercise needed is just built off of that hyperfixation. He considered this book his magnum opus, and the vast majority of it is just his attempt at philosophy. It's shitty philosophy, but the intent is what's interesting.

Philosophically, I know he was a critic of subjective idealism as there is an interview somewhere he mentions it specifically. He was also a proponent of "progressive education" or learning by applying the philosophy he studied to his life. In a way, it resembles the "ruthless criticism of all that exists" and this is why I called it essentially "accidental" critical theory, applied to his life around the gym. People Mentzer wrong when they try to label him as trying to become the model, Nietzschean Übermensch, like most bodybuilders (Arnold biggest example) strove to be. If you actually read his work, he implores the audience to attack the brainworms of tradition and convenient structures (10 fingers = 10 reps) that casted a lens over their everyday life. This is the true goal of critical theory, not exclusive to "high art" like many people who read Adorno or whatever get stuck on. Even if he wasn't a Marxist, I realized I really valued his attempts and I'm sad that he's dead because that basically the only attempt to escape dogmatism in something that many people take for granted. Everyone else is like "I'm the great man, follow me."

And to reiterate, I'm not calling for becoming a dogmatic Mentzer follower like the HITbros. I'm appreciating his attempts at dissecting ideology floating over the gym.

On Chapter 3 of Capital: New Translation

Learning about commodity circulation and how money arose and transitioned from gold to fiat

Hi anons, I was thinking if the classic Marxist concept of alienation has any echo on the post modern "narrative" , has any post modern thinker written about alienation?

>>23585
>No.23586
You know, you are a fascist, yes? So, have you read Evola? Not the version that is conventionally available, but the translations of his more serious Italian work. His dialogue against other fascists. He called himself a super fascist not as a meme, but precisely because he sought to transcend natural laws themselves, and therefore, to go even farther in the original rejection of essentialism (a rejection which was actually argued for by the fascists… in the beginning, at least!). He seriously made the case that the laws of nature are subject to change in the penetrative, transcended sense, rather than being caught in a cycle of permutated expressions. Not just with magical idealism, but in direct polemics, see for example here, if you can understand without the broader context:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160313135448/https://www.gornahoor.net/?p=7396
I had to use the wayback machine to find this, that's how obscure it is. The primary website is down, as far as I can tell. Here's part 2 and part 3, respectively:
https://juliusevola.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/32-giovanni-gentile-part-21.pdf

https://juliusevola.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/33-giovanni-gentile-part-31.pdf

Finished Economic Science Fictions by various authors (ed. William Davies, 2018), a bunch of essays looking at science fiction through the lens of economics and the other way around.

Ha-Joon Chang's essay is OK, the rest is meh to godawful. You can expect the average contributor here to be that kind of guy who doesn't know what "penultimate" means but likes to say it anyway. A better bit early in was criticism of the cyberpunk trope of the revolutionary lone individual or tiny group (and likewise there was criticism of the twin trope of the big bad boss or tiny cabal of exceptionally evil people). Later, I was treated with a short story with exactly that and it also got an evil mega-corporation with a big ventilation shaft. Oh evil mega-corporations, will they ever learn. (Or maybe they did and that's why they want to make us all fat.)

An actual passage from one of the essays:
<Land is valued due to the continuous demand for mineral and water resources, meaning that even today mining is the physical action analogous to extraction, as mining punctuates the differing logics of accumulation throughout historical time. Therefore, in terms of the global struggle around labour, mining remains fundamental as a site of exploitation and class consciousness; but it also symbolises a meeting point between the natural and the technological. The film Moon (2009) by Duncan Jones explores the future of mining, now taking place on the Moon.
Isn't it interesting how mining is analogous to extraction. Bet you thought it was extraction, you stupid pleb. Or maybe you said to yourself: "Hmm mining being analogous, hmmmmmm hmm it used to be that way, but… even today??" Mining is also symbolizing something. Imagine what it feels like to have your esteemed logics of accumulation punctuated by mining, I hate that! Very profound that bit, ahem, think about that. Now try reciting above passage into a camera with a straight face.

I have been thinking a bit about the software industry, and whether or not software even counts as a commodity, as it replication is practically cost less. It has an obvious use-value, but I don't get what its exchange value would be. Therefore I question how would someone make money, in a hypotechical ethical manner would work. Would it be donations, with a bar showing the needed money per year be the play, with a drop of the project after shown lack of interest, be the play?

>>24160
Consider Marx's Fragment on Machines
Video unrelated

Finished listening to Presumed Guilty. Chemerensky is one of the forefront constitutional scholars of our age and no one in power ever listens to him. His conclusions are lib “they could pass laws” but his analysis of the historical ramifications of Supreme Court jurisprudence on criminal law is pristine and depressing as hell. Every right set out in the constitution has been gutted to hell and back since the Warren court, which itself was milquetoast at best. After all, they still decided terry.

>>24177
Thanks!

>>24184
Finished death of a salesman. I bet it’s better live.

Drunkenly reading the house of usher to my girlfriend. I fucking hate em dashes.

Something I want to research was how Engels dealt with his factories and his employees.

Back on the obsidian horse. Got all my lists of books I’ve read in one place. All my research notes. My fiction writing. My journaling. Anyone else using obsidian for a zettlekastin or at least a dumping ground so the brain knows it’s all in one place? I still have lots of folders of old notes from school and continuing educational material I want to put into my system. Would be cool to have an accountability buddy.

Finished History of Economic Management in North Korea by Phillip H. Park (2025). This takes the novel approach of not trusting defectors and foreign "experts" and instead relies almost entirely on official documents, read through a skeptical lens.

A lot of quotations with wooden expressions. As for the author's own words: I suspect the author used LLM help to stretch some sections that were just bullet points into longer text (delve/delves/delving occurs 19 times), then thoroughly checked for nonsense and traces of accidental wit and removed all that. The result is… OK I guess, like oatmeal that could take a bit more liquid.

I forgot who Jordan Peterson was for a second. I had him mixed up with Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker

Where should I begin and what works should I read if I don't want to go too far down the theory rabbit hole?
I'd also be open to works by authors of non-leftist views just to get an idea of what they actually believe. I see neoliberals referenced frequently but I don't even really understand what they believe besides looking at dems/repubs.

>>19860

today i am researching the impact of open access policy on environmental research accessibility for my final paper.

It seems to be a bit of an elusive topic unfortunately…

So I was looking for a way to improve my rhetorical skills in English. (I don't even live in an English-speaking country, but you never know… maybe there will be a career opportunity in another country, maybeeee even a… romantic opportunity?) And while taking a break from search, I somehow stumbled upon a text shilling for a book supposedly full of interesting expressions, demonstrating it with this bit:
<For example in the morning following a late night when he was a teenager his father would say: "Your eyes look like two piss-holes in the snow."
"So this is it!" - my brain.
Rosen's Almanac by Michael Rosen (2024) has entries for each day of the year, but, aside from etymology regarding certain dates, it can get pretty random, going from general English to national variants to regional slang to family in-jokes, and back, and again, and in leaps, though most often looking at the micro-slang end of the scale. Some entries are a couple pages long, musing and noticing things like kids today using "so" so much; but most entries are tweet-size, a lot of these being literal tweets Rosen liked. And I paid money for this! And so now you know how to write a book if you ever got famous.

I'm not mad actually. It's an OK book.

>>24512
Michael Rosen was the author who did monologue stories that YouTube Poop artists satirized.

eh schniff
my eh fucking zizek impression is eh getting fucking better you know and so on and eh so on

Following a discussion in >>>/tech/

just finished Materialism and the dialectical method by maurice cornforth, and they recommend i read next:
Socialism, utopian and scientific (engels),
Anarchism or socialism (stalin),
to prepare me for
the communist manifesto,
so i can read Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which is my target.
I've wanted to understand what historical materialism is ever since i stumbled upon what appeared to me to be the insane ramblings of https://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/ earlier this year

>>24614
What's insane about it? (Length aside.)

>>24615
was really struggling to understand dialectics at the time, so to me nothing made sense at all, it just looked like another time-cube sorta website

Finished The Chapo Guide to Revolution by the podcasters of Chapo Trap House (2018). Humor can only do so much for me when the topic is awful (burger politics). I found it depressing to read. Hasn't aged much, which makes it even more depressing. Among other things, the book got taxonomies of types of libs and cons, with illustrations by Eli Valley.
<LIBERAL HAWK
<The horrors of the world are unavoidable. But while most of us look at those horrors and say “I like that” or “That’s good; keep going,” there are a brave few who boldly declare that things are bad and we must “do something.” And if the evil actor in question happens to oppose America’s imperial goals, there you will find the Liberal Hawk, bravely crying for nonspecific action.

<Don’t confuse the Liberal Hawk with its cousin, the Neocon. Sure, they may advocate the exact same policy goals of vague “American leadership” and push for the same confrontation with Iran and funding for any group from Ukraine’s Hitler Appreciation Club to Syria’s Jabhat al-Cumshit irredentist militias, so long as they “undermine Putin” and “advance democracy,” and yes, their livelihoods are funded by magazines no one reads and think tanks that benefit no one but their murky Gulf sheikh and robber-baron descendants—but they’re completely different. For one, the Liberal Hawk won’t rail against safe spaces and PC culture the way the Neocon will. In one breath, the Liberal Hawk will quote a potential six-figure death toll from a potential intervention as “a price worth paying,” then in the next be moved nearly to tears while describing to you the last book they read, which is invariably called something like The Balls to Be a Woman: Golda Meir’s War against Toxic Masculinity.

<But like all things, this comes down to compensation: while the Neocon is usually a fudge-fingered treat addict who can be bought off by any lobby so long as they bring snacks, the Liberal Hawk requires things like dry Riesling, ski holidays in Gstaad, and tickets for shit like “A Jazz Tribute to NATO.”

<FIGHTING STYLE: LinkedIn posts, cluster bombs
<SEXUAL REPRESSION LEVEL: Offers free foot rubs to IDF soldiers

i js thought of a hypothetical kweer kommunist klub for some reason

You asked me what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking that objectively speaking I am an oppressor and an enemy of humanity and I can’t go on living with this knowledge. White settler Maoists, how do you continue existing with the knowledge that your annihilation would be a good thing and any violence against you is justified? I’m not going to do anything drastic tonight but I desperately need to communicate with someone who understands me on this.

>>24619
I have been avoiding reading because I’m afraid it’s going to send me even further down this spiral. There, hope we’re on topic now. I’ve been avoiding studying Marxism for the same reason for 10+ years. I only know what I’ve gleaned from certain verbal abusers on reddit and other social media

Finished The Lifespan of a Fact a book that shows an essay by John D'Agata, with comments and corrections by editor Jim Fingal, and some back and forth between the two (2012). The essay is about a teen suicide. And I don't want to be disrespectful to the teen's parents, but this is so fucking funny (bet they loled too).

Pro-tip if you ever read it: This isn't over when you close the book. It's the last sentence on the back about what John and Jim are up to now that really marks the end. So don't spoil the ending for yourself. (Not to brag, but I gotta say: I had a hunch.)

>>24619
>>24620
"Settling" this question means standing on the side of the oppressed, organizing to bring about a revolution that negates white colonial identity through socialism-communism. Similar stuff to the proletariat doing a revolution that in the end is gonna negate the proletariat itself.

Unfair critics of J Sakai point to a supposed demobilizing tone in his main book but it's really a descriptive analysis of a particular form of oppresion that hinders worker's solidarity by making racists side with the bourgeoisie and petit borgeoisie. The point is to demystify white ideology whenever possible, not being afraid at times (sometimes, most times) to be a minority because you don't go pander to the lowest conscious workers.

Finished the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It's advice how to face destiny like a Vulcan from Star Trek. Felt pretty meh. So I guess it succeeded and made me a Stoic. That's means it's good. Now I have feelings, that can't be good. Meh. *brain stuck in loop*

>>24632
Did you tell your wife’s boyfriend about how great the book is?
Gaylord

>>24614
Partway through Anarchism or Socialism, working through the implications of "content precedes form".
Would that mean the nature vs nurture model for development is mostly bullshit then? Considering it argues that the phenotype of an individual would be partly a result of their environment (nurture), and partially a result of their nature (genetics). While content (environment) precedes form implies that the environment determines gene expression too, and therefore only the environment is responsible for the form of an individual.

>>22717
The leftypol twitter account (leftypol_org) Is now shilling for this incoherent book with a pinned tweet.

Slowly making my way through De Leon's works on the marxist internet library thing. I think I really like De Leon's ideas!

i’m wondering if he likes me
i’m bi

Finished Fundamentals of Scientific Management of Socialist Economy (USSR, 1989). Has anyone else ever failed as hard as the nameless authors of this "work"?

Look at this. LOOK AT IT:
<The essence of profit-and-loss accounting is in its principles whose practical implementation actually means profit-and-loss accounting.
Page 65.

The text is like a turd from a ghost. These are the educated people that brought down the Soviet Union.