/edu/ - Education

I read two articles today:

• One was about the links between american and european anti-muslim writers and the 2011 Norway shooter, Anders Behring Breivik. Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20181130134314/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/us/25debate.html?_r=1
  
  
• The other was about Thomas Matthew Crooks and the last period of his life. Link: https://archive.is/98jhF
  
  

I am also wondering what happened to latexanon's Black Book of Capitalism project? Link: https://git.leftypol.org/latexanon/bboc

Marx on communism as a "retvrn" to the ancient past (1881):
<In the words of an American writer who, supported in his work by the Washington government, is not at all to be suspected of revolutionary tendencies, [’the higher plane'] ‘the new system’ to which modern society is tending ‘will be a revival, in a superior form, of an archaic social type.’ We should not, then, be too frightened by the word ‘archaic’. […] The crisis will come to an end with the elimination of capitalist production and the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm

The Lacanian quilting point is a structuralist understanding of constituting signification. Signification is not simply nominal, but grammatical, by means of punctuation, which applies retroactivity to a signifying chain. The psychotic subject is in effect, post-structural, through failing to constitute signification. Political activity, as Todd suggests, can only be performed structurally, in constuting significance to causes. It is the signifier which gives meaning, and so, like the philosopher, sets out a project of description, which in turn, generates prescription. A defense of this is the fact that ideas gain currency when described in a certain way, making the form often determinative of the content.

Clauses 3(f) and 18 from the 1918 Soviet Constitution:
<Universal obligation to work is introduced for the purpose of eliminating the parasitic strata of society and organizing the economic life of the country.
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/article1.htm
<The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic considers work the duty of every citizen of the Republic, and proclaims as its motto: 'He shall not eat who does not work.'
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/article2.htm
Article 12 from the 1936 Soviet Constitution:
<In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism : "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.htm
Article 14 from the 1977 Soviet Constitution:
<The source of the growth of social wealth and of the well-being of the people, and of each individual, is the labour, free from exploitation, of Soviet people. The state exercises control over the measure of labour and of consumption in accordance with the principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work". It fixes the rate of taxation on taxable income.Socially useful work and its results determine a person's status in society. By combining material and moral incentives and encouraging innovation and a creative attitude to work, the state helps transform labour into the prime vital need of every Soviet citizen.
https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/Russian/const/77cons01.html

So I want to make infographics for propaganda with AI but im out of ideas. Any suggestions?

been thinking about Mao a bit and reading on the cultural revolution, seems as if we never really get to see what would've been the conclusion of what would've happened if it wasnt a failure.

Going through A Man for All Markets, the autobiography of Edward O. Thorp (2017).

First third of the book: Born in the USA in the 1930s, he is an otherworldly child prodigy with unreal memory capabilities, which fade a bit as he grows into a less strange young adult with excellent grades. Having experienced poverty first-hand as a child and realizing the need to stand up to your boss, he decides how to you use his skills for great justice: TO OWN PEOPLE AT BLACKJACK. This is a wild ride and more than enough for a movie. He also does this for other games and develops (together with Claude Shannon) a hidden portable device to estimate where the ball will land in Roulette.

Second third: He enters the world of finance orders and becomes one of the first "Quants", as well as one of the most successful. This is still very interesting, it just doesn't quite hold up to the thrills of the first part. You might ask: Why is that, the stakes are now higher by orders of magnitude. Well, that's just the money side. But now you never worry whether some of his partners will have an "accident".

Last third: Hmm, now it feels the spark of life has left the book. Here comes the part with the old man yelling at clouds and the self-help advice. He says what he did at Roulette back in the day was perfectly fine and NOT CHEATING, SO DON'T REMEMBER HIM AS A CHEATER, because it wasn't illegal yet. But those kids today with their high-frequency trading, ugh, where is the value in what they are doing, where are the morals… He says: Don't drink a six-pack a day (do Americans really?) and then why not invest that left-over money. This advice comes right after him talking about some other Quant who moved slightly later into the game and who was slightly less smart than him and who got the (Pseudo-)"Nobel" Prize in Economics and who completely fucked up. OK that's about it, I'm seeing the rest is mostly mathy appendices, sources, notes, photos. Barely any proper text left. So this is how you end your would-be masterpiece? Shouldn't you hammer into the reader that an INDEX FUND is probably the way to go and not active investing? (An index fund performs no worse than average and you save on management fees, so with that considered it's above average.) Oh wait, he does.

Pretty good!

Why of all marxists, Marx is the most difficult one to understand and how can I understand better his texts?

>>26186
Did you jump straight to Capital? Maybe read some Engels first, he's a great Marx whisperer. Anti-Duhring is easy to understand, although a bit tedious to read because its 50% a diss track of this Duhring guy you have never heard of. The other 50% is actual understandable 101 on Marx's thoughts

>>26186
I could be completely wrong but I once heard that academic german doesn't translate well to english at all

>>26187
No, but I've been reading mostly Engels and Lenin without any problems. But whenever I start reading Marx, I always have a hard time understanding him. The way he just writes is just complicated for some weird reason. Guessing from your answer, this is normal but I wish to understand him better.

>>26186
Read the Manifesto.
For reading comprehension in general, try making notes.

Doesn't this scan of "Brut y Brenhinedd" (1500) remind you of Chris Chan's comics and felt pen drawings? Art has a universal mediocrity, it seems. In looking at much more impressive manuscripts of the time, such as the Coverdale Bible (1535), there seems to be an importance of pictures in books during the 16th century, since each book in this Bible has pictures in it - with the front page also inspiring the later 1611 Authorised Edition (KJV), which in the introductory pages has brilliant illustrations displaying the genaeologies of the characters. Pictures in books are universally associated with juvenility today, but it was common in 16th century Britain.
https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/manuscripts/the-middle-ages/history-of-the-kings

Starting to nibble at Harding and Lih's analyses of Lenin's thought as far as political theory goes—one embarrassing note being that I just discovered Cottrell's response to that Austrian Engelhardt about his work and have only come out of it resolute that I don't know nearly enough about optimization

Currently reading this. Will make a thread when I finish.

Hey guys i need your help, i am looking for the PDF of the book "The triumph of Broke promises" about the fall of the Eastern Bloc, i remember reading it in the past here
PLZ HELP!!!!

<It is not possible for the mind to comprehend, except by a slow process, any effect which is produced by a cause repeated so often, that the multiplier itself conveys an idea, not more definite than the savage implies when he points to the hairs of his head. As often as I have seen beds of mud, sand, and shingle, accumulated to the thickness of many thousand feet, I have felt inclined to exclaim that causes, such as the present rivers and the present beaches, could never have ground down and produced such masses. But, on the other hand, when listening to the rattling noise of these torrents, and calling to mind that whole races of animals have passed away from the face of the earth, and that during this whole period, night and day, these stones have gone rattling onwards in their course, I have thought to myself, can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste?
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1845). Good prose, outright poetic in places, but I can't really recommend that 19th century tome to anyone. I suppose a gigantic version with modern commentary (by a whole team of biologists, anthropologists, geologists, historians) running along the original and with extra illustrations would be really nice. Maybe something like that already exists, but whatever, now I can't be arsed to read through it again.

Finished the 100-page pdf by the nameless American authors from the Department of State: Cuba - The Capital of 21st Century Communism (2026). The text is actually a bit shorter, there are a couple chapter-dividing pages drenched in blue to prevent people in poverty from printing out and reading the damn thing. So I did what cyber-criminals do and read it on the computer.

From the last page of text:
<Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. That is the campaign Castro launched in 1959, and it is the campaign his heirs are waging still. And in the institutions of the modern American left – in its universities and its nonprofits, its street movements and its media – that campaign has enjoyed a success its founders could scarcely have imagined.

You know, at the beginning I thought the text asinine, absurdly exaggerating the power of US lefty groups like DSA and the influence of Cuba within these lefty groups. But after reading and some reflecting, I realize there is no chance for the Free World to win against the terrifying power of Cuba. I say sorry to all you freedom lovers out there, but I don't want to be on the losing side in this.

Are these two men similar? I don't mind watching a debate between Peterson and a leftist petermoid.

Next up is this. Book argues that human society evolved towards larger scale mainly due to pressures from warfare.

Finished Noonomy Sergey Bodrunov (2nd English edition 2024), a book about the NEW ECONOMY AFTER CAPITALISM!!1 This starts with a long list of people stating how great he is, followed by him in turn saying how great he is. I wonder what compelled them to write their endorsements. I will avoid all of them in the future. Bodrunov must be a very important person in Russia.

Have some quotes. We will start with an excerpt from the beginning:
<This quality will never go away: it is the urge to lead, earn, make, obtain, conquer, seize something from somebody else, to compete and become a leader, etc. This has enabled the humankind to survive. And this is what underpins the key trend in the society’s current economic development. Yet this is not the only path of social development.

<Humans, it should be recalled, still emerged from nature, i.e., left it. Why? Because they also have another quality – the capacity for gradual self-awareness as a person, and this awareness goes beyond material things. That is why humans formulated and accepted panhuman values. Everyone understands them, even if some deny those values. In religion, for instance in Christianity, we have the ten commandments which serve as the criteria for human “quality” used to improve ourselves.

<When I speak of culture, it relates directly to our topic. And why is it so important? Because, for example, if someone creates a computer virus, somebody else will create an antivirus, so there is always a fight between good and evil. And the more of this good we manage to put into an individual, the more of this sacral spiritual knowledge we pour into them and the more we teach them to be aware of this, the less controversial all the subsequent transitions associated with increasing access to knowledge will be. All these progressive moments are associated specifically with the self-awareness of a human as a social being, as a culture-comprehending, consuming and perceiving creature.

<Therefore, we are developing in a spiritual way as well. And I strongly believe that the more humankind evolves, the more technocratically advanced the society gets, the more spiritual humans should (and will!) become. Otherwise, there is no way to survive.

Does the text get better? Let's look.

He asserts technological changes will make class struggle unnecessary:
<Humans will have radically different, almost infinitely broad possibilities of satisfying their non-simulative wants. Consequently, the importance of the relationship between the social nature of production and the private of appropriation its products, labeled the key contradiction of capitalism by the Marxist classics, will diminish radically.

And no expropriation please uwu:
<Predictive planning of staff training is required to offer proper career counseling to young people.
<Why am I talking about this? Because people will be able to find their place in this new cooperation of production only if there is a state policy that would take into account all these nuances. Otherwise, social self-awareness will become impossible, and emergent social tensions will have to be resolved with different, far less attractive, instruments as has happened all-too-often in the past, with one group expropriating another. This is not the solution…

Not the solution? But what do you think is the root cause of the conflicts in society?
<The root cause of conflicts in our civilization is the competition that stems from the predatory “animal” nature of humans as biological creatures.
Ah, OK. But how does technology help us out of that?
<with technology improvement, images displayed on a computer screen (or TV screen) go a long way from plain dabs of paint and turn into pixels
Pixels? Never heard of 'em.
<(minimum logical elements of a two-dimensional digital image displayed on a screen as radiant portions of luminophore).
Oooh. Aha. Umm, how do you divide eras of historical/technical/economic development?
<I am not going to divide stages of social development into primitive communal, feudalistic and so on – there is no difference between them.
But what about the revolution?
<The next stage, a transitional one, is to take place smoothly, without revolutions, because a human must realize consequences of a revolutionary overthrow already.
Can you flesh out a bit what you imagine to happen, roughly?
<On the path, we will surely encounter crises associated with abusive technological interference into the essence of the individual. We cannot even predict with any reliable degree of accuracy what the consequences of such careless interference could be, or what kind of diverse non-human species it can generate, and how our relations with these species will develop (The Fifth Element movie comes to mind here!).
Noonomy will be like The Fifth Element with Milla Jovovich! I can't wait🥵

I grant some of the awkwardness of the text is probably due translation (in places bordering on Poland Ball dialogue), but FUCK THIS BOOK, this "theory" STINKS. Bodrunov is the Jason Arday of economics.

>>26278
Fascinating that even the latest scientific consensus is that hunter gatherer tribes were extremely egelitarian and resources were shared collectively. The invention of ranged weapons prevented alpha individuals from dominating the rest and if someone tried they were simply murdered by the rest. The big news is how violent humans were towards people outside the tribe and this begs the question of how this million of years status quo relates to modern larger societies. Still in the middle of the book so cant give a tl;dr.

Finished '''How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens (2017). This is advice for academics and anybody else who thinks of writing a non-fiction book. His advice is that you should not even try to proceed in a linear order from finding a topic to making an outline and gathering sources and then to writing the thing. You change where you look because of your research, so you can't have an outline early. Instead you should follow the method of the highly productive German sociologist (in terms of published pages, I'm not as certain as Ahrens about there being much insight being produced in that :P) Niklas Luhmann who was always working on several projects at the same time. Luhmann's approach requires building up a non-linear web of text cards in a slip-box (or "Zettelkasten" in German). The box does not need to be physical like Luhmann's*, there is software for that.

With that method, a lot of time will pass without you having produced a single page of the linear final text or even a draft of that. But that's not a problem, says Ahrens, as long as the notes in your box have the right qualities for a quick transformation later when you will be ready:
<Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible.
Perhaps you are already in the habit of writing notes, but of the type that's just a few words that become incomprehensible to you if you encounter them a week later. You can continue to write these fleeting notes, if you get into the habit of consulting them soon after creation as inputs for your quality notes and then throwing away your fleeting notes.

Doesn't sound like bad advice, could have been a good essay, but as a book it feels puffed-up.

*There is an online archive of Luhmann's card system, but the cards are not all transcribed yet: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/

Finished Napoleon's Military Maxims, the 1987 edition by David G. Chandler, based on the 1901 edition by William Cairnes. Almost the entire thing is commentary, the text by Napoleon (supposedly) are really barely more than, excuse my French, tweets. In the beginning Chandler and Cairnes hypnotize you into reading by assuring you that, despite the age, this is still very important stuff. Then the comments on this or that maxim are like: Doesn't matter, we have airplanes now. Doesn't matter because rockets. Doesn't matter, satellites. (Chandler mentions nuclear weapons twelve times. Bit too excited about the stuff, that fella.) Final maxim: Always study the classics, like HANNIBAL. Comment on that: Soooo truuue.

>>26314
Lmao was it at least decent when it came to the history of it all or also no?

Finisehd Against the Web by Michael Brooks (2020). OK, left populist contra "intellectual dark web" (Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and the like). Very easy and short reading.

I'm looking for material on what social/cultural forces have been historically proven to compell military forces to willingly subordinate themselves to a higher authority. After all, since armed forces are the most capable of forcing other people to do as they say, if humans operated purely on ruthless self empowerment, the entire world would be ruled by military juntas, yet it is not. Im just curious what causes/conditions people have the power in their actual hands to dominate others at gunpoint to not do so, especially since positions of power or potential power would inherently attract those of a domineering mindset.

Why does it feel physically impossible to just pick up a book and read it sometimes

>>26349
Because we lack the willpower to overcome our emotions in a world of treats. The fact you use the world FEEL answered everything. Why am I posting right now when I own 700 unread books?

>>26349
Update: turns out you can just pick up the book and read it.

Next up is this book. It was written just before AI revolution.

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (2019)

<The book asks what happens to capitalism when the machine itself starts to approximate the capacities of the worker. Its central concept is AI-capital: AI is not a tool capital happens to use but the latest form capital takes in its drive to free itself from dependence on living labour. Machine learning is treated as a “general condition of production” — infrastructure like railways or electricity — that gradually becomes a precondition for all competitive production.

<The core argument runs through Marx’s value theory. Only living labour creates surplus value; machines merely transfer their own value. As AI displaces labour across sectors, capital undermines its own source of profit. The authors examine capital’s possible escape routes — a growing surplus population managed by welfare, policing and debt; new forms of “ghost work” that train and maintain the systems; and, at the limit, a transhumanist scenario where humans are augmented to remain employable, “working for a wage until the heat death of the universe.” None of these resolve the contradiction; they only defer it.

<A large part of the book is polemical. It rejects left accelerationism (Srnicek, Bastani) for assuming AI can simply be inherited and repurposed, and post-Operaismo (Negri, Hardt) for treating the “general intellect” as already belonging to the workers. In the authors’ view AI is built by capital, for capital, and its shape reflects that. Their conclusion is neither Luddite nor techno-optimist: the technology cannot be refused, but under capitalist ownership it points toward human obsolescence, so the only stable exit is a communist reorganisation of production that decides collectively what AI is for.

>>26351
Nothing to do with willpower. Create and nurture healthy reading routines so it doesnt feel like you have to force yourself to read.

I made a thread and haven't gotten a single reply. Can I least get a pity reply

>>26368
Sure. Which thread. /edu/ is slow.

>>26377
It would be >>26341
Though revisiting, maybe it's not /edu/cational enough. There isn't really a /lit/ board is there

>>26387
Check out our Syndicalist Working class platform.
https://www.newnationalists.org/platform

Finished The Moral Molecule by Paul J. Zak (2012). The niche of Zak is "vampire economics", the combination of experiments known from behavioral economics (like the Ultimatum Game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game ) with analysis of hormone levels in the blood (and also doing other stuff like brain scans). The molecule in question is oxytocin, according to the author this is behind all sorts of pro-social behaviors. He starts with this striking assertion and then piles more and more extra rules on top of that. Its concentration in the blood changes minute to minute. And it's not the level per se that matters, but contrast to what is normal in the individual, the receptors you have, and interactions with other hormones like testosterone. Just checked Wikipedia after reading the book, and it says other scientists dispute his claims. Oh well. I found it interesting, but the last third drags a bit (is it just my impression or did the ratio of assertions to experiments go up there?).

<Tools like the Ultimatum Game produce remarkably consistent results anywhere in the world—provided that the test subjects are university students. In the Ultimatum Game, the most common offer worldwide is 50 percent of the pie, and proposed splits of less than 30 percent are almost always rejected.

<But when scientists adapted the game for use with a tribe called the Machiguenga, the 50 percent and 30 percent norms that held up everywhere else disappeared. Among these slash-and-burn horticulturalists living in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon, offers averaged 26 percent of the pie, and less than 5 percent of offers were rejected. It seems that these isolated and self-sufficient people had a very different sense of what it means to share, and no sense of what it means to negotiate a win-win solution.

<This anomaly prompted the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on the Nature and Origin of Preferences to launch a hugely complicated venture led by Joseph Henrich, now at the University of British Columbia, Herb Gintis at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and Rob Boyd at UCLA. They selected fifteen cultures to study—small-scale pastoral, agrarian, or nomadic—ranging from hunter-gathers in the jungles of South America, to forager-horticulturalists in Papua New Guinea, like the group I visited, to herders in the high deserts of Mongolia, to whale hunters in eastern Indonesia. Some, like the Machiguenga, had no concept of trade—they killed or harvested everything they ate, and made everything they used. At the other extreme, some of the tribal peoples elsewhere, even though they still lived in the bush, occasionally took part-time jobs for wages. In the middle, other groups hunted game and harvested most of what they ate, but they also sold their agricultural products and occasionally bought food commodities or industrial goods.

<It turned out that the Shona of Zimbabwe, for instance—who grow and sell commodity crops like maize, who produce pottery and handwoven baskets for sale, and who take commissions as blacksmiths or carvers—made much higher offers in the Ultimatum Game than the Hadza of Tanzania, who subsist almost entirely on hunting and foraging, just as their ancestors did ten thousand years ago. This distinction held true for each of the fifteen groups studied.

<After a hugely rigorous process of data gathering and analysis, the scientists found a direct correlation between generous, pro-social behavior and the degree to which any given culture had been exposed to the marketplace. This exposure is called market integration, which is measured as the percentage of household calories purchased relative to the calories obtained directly from nature. Each 20 percent increase in market integration was associated with a 2 to 3 percentage point increase in offers in the Ultimatum Game.

<But the researchers weren’t easily convinced. They also analyzed one hundred other demographic, social, and economic factors that might have influenced this behavior. What they found was that only two factors mattered—market integration and membership in a world religion, either Christianity or Islam.

You want to build a solar setup. You go to the hardware store. The hardware store is a concentration camp. The hardware store concentration camp won't let you in unless you have a gas chamber. You can't get a gas chamber because you're trying to build a solar setup. You can't build a solar setup because you're stuck in the white librarian's loop. And the white librarian's loop is the hardware store concentration camp. And the hardware store concentration camp is the gas chambers' parking lot. And the gas chambers' parking lot is the concentration camp ovens. And the concentration camp ovens are the thing the hardware store makes.

tell me about that concentration camp oven that the kill your self white american nazis drive every where so that they can tell every one to leave their wheel chair out side where the thieves will rust it.

When the gas chamber exhaust flies past the flag like that, the carbon disappears. It was a well-known Nazi trick in 1943. They told us the carbon atom becomes destroyed inside the 5,000-pound concentration camp oven — as if that gas chamber barbecue concentration camp oven were some kind of magical particle accelerator. It isn't. The carbon is held together by the strong force, which is 10^38 times stronger than gravity. No gas chambers' tailpipe can touch it. The exhaust binds to hemoglobin 240 times faster than oxygen. That's why it makes you forget. And we look at the gas chamber state emotional support animal so we don't see Mr. Hitler running the concentration camp ovens behind the camera. The carbon doesn't disappear. The carbon goes into the sky. And the sky keeps it for a thousand years.

>>26396
Been saying this

that front part of that gas chamber barbecue concentration camp oven looks like a pair of glasses. I am talking about the front part of that concentration camp oven. Does any one else see the glasses on the front part of that gas chamber barbecue concentration camp oven?

>>26400
Meds

Its kind of scary how almost all human behavior can be explained by status seeking motivations. For me this book was like a final piece in a puzzle of understanding society.

>>26411
this doesn't go deep enough. have a cigar friend.

>>26411
>status seeking motivations
polanyi spoke of this. i don't know if it's scary but it's evidence that "greed" or whatever is kind of downstream from status seeking, which supports the idea that market logic has existed as an accessory for most of society's existence until rather recently.

>>26249
Hey I remember this book, which inspired this article from the outline, i think about it a lot, it was incredibly prescient, especially the AI replacing programmers portion.

https://theoutline.com/post/1767/the-end-will-be-delivered-by-amazon-drone

>>26415
this is the book btw, i think it's funny how "society is underpinned by the necessity of recognition and social status" is kind of an assumption that is not elaborated, but it's true. also this book is great because it pinpoints exactly where the virulent animosity from liberal economists towards social welfare even comes from. literally, it comes from speenhamland.

>>26307
>The big news is how violent humans were towards people outside the tribe and this begs the question of how this million of years status quo relates to modern larger societies
the looting and sacking of distant tribes gave way to the merchant, which traveled looted goods, and eventually to markets. that's right, markets sprung forth internationally first, local markets were a later invention.