Hello comrades. I propose a general thread in an attempt to get the /edu/ ball rolling again. Everytime you visit /edu/, post in this thread. Tell us about what you're thinking about, what you're reading, an interesting thing you have learned today, anything! Just be sure to pop in and say hi.
<a onclick="highlightReply('2946', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2946">>>2946</a><br/><span class="quote">> Max Stirner, Individualist Anarchy, And a Critical Look at Egoist Communism</span><br/>I really liked their view on the topic in general, I think the ending pages were kinda shitty, it sounded like they really just want to own the ancoms and didn't really think much about it. But in general a really good read.<br/><span class="quote">> Manifesto Against Schools by Armeanio Lewis</span><br/>A perfect overview on schooling in general, very well written with some very good points on the topic. The narration is a little bit more informal, but I actually like how everything is expressed here, it is a really nice touch.<br/><span class="quote">> BITING BACK: A Radical Response to Non-Vegan Anarchists</span><br/>It is a nice critic, not one of the bests - but still, it is short, and a nice read nonetheless<br/><span class="quote">> A Vegan Revolution Against the Fast Food Empire</span><br/>It is just so short, but so well written, it explains all the basic concepts so bloody well in one page, thinking in translating it because it is just a really good, really short introduction - you can read it in like 5 minutes.<br/><span class="quote">> Against Speciesism, Against Anthropocentrism: 8 Reasons for Radical Veganism</span><br/>I actually didn't want to include this one mainly for the title, it really sounds like those bait youtube video titles. I didn't like the arguments very much, I think he focus too much on > muh morality, muh duty - and gets kinda boring to read. But still, it isn't that bad, has some good points.<br/><br/>Those were my favorites, there are still many more, like way more to read; the good part is that they are very short and quite nice to read. What about you? Which ones have you read?
been eating up lots of anarchist audiobooks and essays. Ive totally burned myself out on insurrectionary works, but found some nice critiques that actually advanced my own thought a bit, so it was worth it. <br/>Been listening to Perlman's "Letters of Insurgents" or whatever, its bomb as fuck. Oh yeah, and have been reading Camatte essays, mostly from the pdf hosted here on bunkerchan that some comrade uploaded in leftypol a week or two ago. (shoutout to whoever did that, thanks) Also just bought Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states (i think is the title). It's good as fuck, in fact it contradicts a lot of primitivist thought, and even prior works of the author a bit, and he totally acknowledges it. So a hearty thumbs up for this book, for coming from an anarchist perspective and taking new research into account in order to give a more accurate model of how the early states were formed, what material conditions led to them, and how people lived outside of them. <br/>I highly recommend this last book to anyone whose whole anthropology comes from either Marx, or Zerzan. Remember that history and anthropology are sciences, and not there to support your ideology with concrete abstracts, and so the feild is always moving and learning. Might as well move and learn too, and adjust to the new information. No shame in that.<br/><br/>Most of all what im thinking about recently is how leftism ties in to anti-civ sort of critiques. The first politics i got into when i was younger was marxist theory and communist thought. Over time i got into anarchist and later deep green theory. Just now getting into Camatte, surprisingly. And now i realize that i never really changed my deep views that much, but was looking for things that gave words to my feelings and desires. And all the tendencies did give word, more or less, to some facet of my feelings about the current world. I think this needs to be more strongly recognized for us all. For me, the person most different isnt some nazi or capitalist or whatever, its someone who treats "ideologies" as something that can be right or wrong, better or worse, and that should explain the whole of reality. I might not be explaining well, but you probably know the people im talking about. The ones for whom communism isnt there to releive alienation, bring about the human communities we're missing, give us a common goal and fight for a better world, but for whom communism is a project for increased efficiency, purely logical, objectively better than capitalism, etc. Those are maybe my real enemies (or at least foreign people), and i think it doesnt matter so much what "ideology" someone is playing with at the time, but why they arrived at is. <br/>Much love to all my real comrades out there, who are together in this project to dismantle the things that hurt us and make life unfulfilling, precarious, boring, and mentally and physically degenerating.
I'm here to post this archive of the current cycled /burgerkreg/ aka /riot/general on /leftypol/, bc near the bottom there's a few posts from a minneapolis anon describing the initial uprising and current developments on the ground at George Floyd Square and citywide in Minneapolis, which I enjoyed learning about and find to be of great historical value:<br/><br/><a href="
https://archive.is/MciNJ" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://archive.is/MciNJ</a>Well the bar exam happened. <br/><br/>Started reading Dubliners. Haven't finished Infinite Jest.<br/><br/>Been practicing writing recently with /lit/'s genre burgerpunk. Dunno where else to share it. It's been fun testing out different styles, methods, and techniques on how to tell stories. I know it's probably not as funny as I think it is, but treating today as dystopian science fiction makes me giggle. Multiple layers of irony allowing for a literary critique of late stage capitalism. I think it's a good exercise overall. <br/><br/>Here's the link if you actually want to read it. Let me know what you think!<br/><br/><a href="
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/36209/burgerpunk-pizza-time" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/36209/burgerpunk-pizza-time</a><a onclick="highlightReply('2940', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2940">>>2940</a><br/>Hi anon, I'm dropping in because of the board shuffling proposals on /leftypol/ though I posted in the medieval thread too. I am halfway through G. Agamben's "Homo Sacer", and then I'm going to read this weird thing by 'SDK' called Turn Illness Into a Weapon. There's a lot I want to do, mostly to more clearly and essentially grasp Marx (I have Postone's tract on Time, Labor, and Social Domination open somewhere), but also Hegel. This idea in my head is that the regeneration of the human being or species essence is inextricably tied to revolutionary praxis and that a certain liminal human figure mediates this process.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('3565', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3565">>>3565</a><br/>I think I have Kaufmann's translation and in his forward he btfo's the Nazi shit. Also you may be in the wrong because his was a very original project (specifically the genealogy) that smarter people than us (Deleuze, Foucault) say all the time they are indebted to. <br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('3569', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3569">>>3569</a><br/>That's fine as long as you are assimilating the main points. You will be better-read than half this chan. "What is to be Done?" is a hard text full of little historical tidbits (I could be thinking of One Step Forward…), don't miss out on the overall point. <br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('3576', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3576">>>3576</a><br/>What I see in this centralization-decent debate is different understandings of the terms' meanings and more importantly certain modernist(?) conceptions of space and freedom. Like the world is a big abstract space, where anything can be put anywhere, and it's a big matrix-puzzle to solve. We should instead conceive of different bioregions as organs in the Earth's total metabolism.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('3625', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3625">>>3625</a><br/>gib update soon.
<span class="quote">>what you're reading</span><br/>Finished "Is Socialism feasible?" (Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 2019). Meh, he's like a less intelligent and more verbose Alec Nove (mixed economy good and maybe some co-ops, NHS also OK, big socialism bad). In a footnote he complains that the writing of writers such as "Marx are marred by anti-Semitic remarks." The sentence the footnote is connected with doesn't mention Marx (nor the sentence before that or the page or the page before that page). My impression is that the author had a to-do list of bad things to say about commies and when rewriting parts in the main body of the text, he forgot to change this footnote.<br/><br/>Authors of the far right get a careful reading and polite response, for left-wingers he analyses a few <em>slogans</em> and finds these lacking in <em>nuance</em> (page 156):<br/><span class="quote">>An even cruder misunderstanding is that <em>public good</em> means ‘good for the public’. While anyone who has taken Econ 101 should spot this error, it is nevertheless widespread. The term ‘good’ in this context does not mean virtuous or worthwhile. Instead in this case it means objects of trade, including traded services. Bad things, like tobacco, heroin and personnel mines, are also <em>goods</em> in this sense. As leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn has opined that ‘education is a public good’ and suggested that this implies that it should all be provided by government and funded by taxation. All three leaders of the UK Green Party since 2012 – Natalie Bennett, Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley – have repeated the phrase ‘education is a public good’.</span><br/>He continues on this on page 157:<br/><span class="quote">>Influential organizations are led by people who have not learned the lessons of Econ 101.</span><br/>Then on page 158, there is this breathtaking finding:<br/><span class="quote">>Nevertheless, with education there are also strong positive spill-over effects. Educated people help to raise the levels of public culture and discourse and can pass on some of their skills to others. Educated people are also vital for a healthy democracy.</span><br/>Page 159:<br/><span class="quote">>Consider the positive externalities of education. It would be impossible or socially destructive for every educated person to charge a fee to participants in an intellectual dinner conversation, or to invoice the government for making a well-informed choice when casting his or her vote in the ballot box. The internalization of these positive externalities is impossible or undesirable.</span><br/>So the message is that <em>your soundbite is bad, and even though I agree with the gist of what you say here I must denounce you since you fail at econ 101, even though I disagree with econ 101 myself.</em><br/><br/>As you can probably tell by now, he's a pretty shitty writer. I picked up the book because Cockshott's TANS is in the references, but he doesn't actually discuss sortition etc. (I don't believe he has actually read it). He also refers to the work of Rudolph Rummel when discussing the USSR body count. If you don't know who that is, see this thread: <a href="https://archive.fo/GCcfp" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://archive.fo/GCcfp</a> Currently reading Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It's an interesting work. I've only read the very beginning so far, but am very interested in seeing where the rest goes.<br/><br/>On another note, I've been thinking a lot about Kant and his transcendental idealism. I recently read Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and both touch on Kant's philosophy, though the Theses do it more indirectly. Reading these I think I've been able to understand and form a pretty consistent critique of transcendental idealism from a materialist point of view, though this only makes me more interested in actually reading Kant, which I haven't. I guess I'll work on studying him more closely as I read these other Marxist works. I'll probably start with Descartes then Hume or something like that. Might check out Leibniz at some point too.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4368', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4368">>>4368</a><br/>So the book shows how economists/philosophers like Smith and Ricardo were not just responsible for indirectly 'justifying' liberalism, but also directly engaged with its politics, all the while knowing its flaws and surrounding opportunism? That sounds pretty interesting, I guess I'll check it out sometime. Will add it to my 'critique of liberalism' reading list.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher" by Charles Babbage (copy from standardebooks.org). Disjointed ramblings about physics and engineering, how annoying street musicians and beggars are, his fascination with his figurine "Silver Lady" etc. He also makes lists about which ethnic groups play which annoying instruments in public and who encourages them (e.g. "ladies of doubtful virtue"). He got harassed a lot in public over his opinion on banning street music by the mob. While he's explaining his calculating Difference Engine at an exhibit:<br/>&lt…I was insulted by impertinent questions conveyed in a loud voice from a person at a distance in the crowd. My taste for music, and especially for organs, was questioned.<br/>As for his other politics:<br/>&ltIn the course of my efforts to inform myself of the real wants of those around me, I profited much by the experience of one or two friends, both most excellent and kindhearted men, whose official duties rendered them far more conversant than myself with the subject. Mr. Walker and Mr. Broderip, both of them magistrates, were amongst my intimate friends. Mr. Walker, the author of <em>The Original</em>, maintained that no one ever was actually starved in London, except through his own folly or fault.<br/>&ltWhenever any further extension of our representative system becomes necessary, the dangers arising from the extension of the personal suffrage may fairly be counterbalanced by giving a plurality of votes to property.<br/>About half the book is like looking at a REEEing Pepe with a monocle. Not recommended.
Done with "How to Prepare for Climate Change" (2021) by David Pogue, a successful writer who usually explains computer stuff to lay people. It really is a book written only for people who live in the US. It starts with some inane shit about seeing a therapist because you are so sad about climate change… He could have done a much shorter book if he had omitted the things that involve spending big amounts of money, but that doesn't need to stop you. You can just jump in and go straight to whatever interests you and if it the section relates in some way to something written in another section, the book tells you that.<br/><br/>He has some advice on where to move (within the US), you move North and away from the coasts, basically. He lists 14 nice cities to live in based on how the climate will develop, how they are currently doing economically, the proximity to water supplies, and some other factors. And here they are: Madison, Wisconsin; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Burlington, Vermont; Bangor, Maine; Denver, Colorado; Boulder, Colorado; Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; Boise, Idaho; Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; Duluth, Minnesota; Buffalo, New York.
Finished two books, <strong>Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI</strong> by Dave Mark (2009), a very easy read and rather superficial. I don't remember how I encountered it, probably some thread about how terrible Yandere Dev is. It completely omits path-finding and the author gets a bit too obsessed with randomness in the end IMHO, but it's an OK book for absolute noobs (Yandere Dev would surely benefit). It lead me to another book published by the same company, <strong>Video Game Design Revealed</strong> by Guy W. Lecky-Thompson (2008) and that book is, well… something else.<br/><br/>The author claims Smash TV introduced dual-stick controls in top-down shooters, even though Robotron already had implemented that years earlier. The author mentions Crazy Taxi (written Crazi Taxi) in the same sentence with GTA as an example of violent games. The author claims Mario Sunshine to be the first 3D Mario and classifies it as a <em>puzzle</em> game. The author claims that the release of the Sony PSP "prompted Nintendo to combine the GameBoy Advance and GameCube into a similar kind of gaming system" and he means the Nintendo DS by that. The author seems to believes that the original Doom used polygons and that CryTek invented variable level of detail in polygon models (and he calls Far Cry "Cry Freedom") and he says <em>bump mapping</em> is when you recycle a monochrome texture by mixing in different colors to represent sand and asphalt. The author says that in Doom episode is the term for a level, that modern shmups use momentum in their control schemes, that the d-pad came about with the 16-bit generation, and that R-Type got 2D <em>top-down</em> scrolling. This thing is so terrible I'm going tinfoil mode: Was that on purpose?<br/><br/>Here's a representative excerpt:<br/><span class="orangeQuote"><There may not actually be an on-screen character. Puzzle games such as <em>Tetris</em> do not actually have a lead character or even enemies. The idea is to beat the machine, which becomes the “enemy.” The blocks falling from the top of the screen, and which need to be arranged in order to complete lines and thus win points, can be seen as enemies or heroes—you can be either with them or against them, depending on your point of view. Puzzle games rely on a recognizable screen layout, the game environment, and its dynamics to achieve success.</span><br/>The author likes above paragraph so much that he reminds you of it later in the book, and by later I mean literally the next paragraph:<br/><span class="orangeQuote"><In addition to the characters, there is the game environment which they inhabit. While “character development” might not apply to some types of games (we used puzzle games as an example of games without characters), the “environment” applies to all games. Even games such as <em>Tetris</em>, which do not have a discernable character beyond the blocks that fall from the top of the screen, have a game environment that is instantly recognizable.</span><br/>It's extremely repetitive. The author mentions that Tekki on XBox has a special controller <em>seven times</em>.<br/><br/>Here are some more real quotes from the work:<br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><For example, take a game such as <em>Brain Training</em> for the Nintendo DS. This is a game that relies on the player’s wish to have his brain “trained” for periods at a time.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><Skin looks like skin, and a moving thing that is covered with a skin-like surface is probably an animal or a person.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><As animals, we rely on our hearing (one of our five senses) to give us information beyond that which is delivered by our eyes.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><In the GameBoy world, the LCD screen is composed of a series of dots (pixels), each of which can be lit up as required.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><An automobile, for example, is a compound object that can be used as a container for other automobile parts. A mix of parts with different properties will make automobiles with different external characteristics. Red and blue automobiles will share many of the same objects, but each will have different color properties that will give the automobile its distinctive red or blue features.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><Consider films like <em>Star Wars</em> or, more recently, <em>The Matrix</em>. They present alternate realities that have their basis in our day-to-day experiences and, therefore, enable us to believe in them, even though we know that they are not real.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><We expect flying vehicles to give us a different perspective than submarines or race cars.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><It is worth checking out the Nintendo of America site (<a href="
http://www.nintendo.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
http://www.nintendo.com</a>). Search for <em>Super Mario Sunshine</em> and take a look at the (eye candy) screenshots. Even a “platform” game like <em>Super Mario</em> has been updated to reflect an FPS, over-the-shoulder 3D feel.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><br/><the text adventure might just take over the future of gaming</span><br/><br/>WHO IS THE AUDIENCE?! It's like a boomer writing for aliens. Maybe the author is both a boomer and also an alien. I don't know how the author functions in this world as a believable human being. Zero stars.
Thinking about <a href="
https://sci-hub.do/donate" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://sci-hub.do/donate</a>Found this site recently it's a barrel of laughs if you're in the mood for hand-wringing stupidity <a href="
https://communistcrimes.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://communistcrimes.org</a>Just finished reading this. Trying to learn more about the transition to Abstract Expressionism in American art. Philistine communists who smugly regurgitate the 'AbEx is CIA lol' talking point never mention that Jackson Pollock studied under (and was in fact the star pupil of) Thomas Hart Benton—one of the big three 'Regionalist' painters. They also fail to discuss US arts patronage during the New Deal era, of which 'Regionalist' and 'Social Realist' styles became widespread, and eventually found themselves deeply wedded with big business (as an example, Benton himself is on record lamenting his advertising work for the American Tobacco Company). When you look at their two styles, Benton and Pollock, they're miles apart; but Erika Doss convincingly argues that the underlying motivations both artists had in their work were actually quite similar. To this day, many art historians act as if Abstract Expressionism came out of a void; but, like most things from that era, this is just the residue of Cold War propaganda. One cannot hope to understand the rise of Abstract Expressionism without also understanding Regionalism. Benton "tried to unify American culture through the regeneration and redefinition of the producer tradition"—the very fetish for the yeoman farmer applied to factory workers once held by his father during his failed career as a Missouri politician from 1897-1905. Pollock on the other hand, took Benton's liberal reformism and calls for social change to its apparent conclusion by fusing Jungian therapy with artistic production, yet, stymied by postwar consensus culture, found himself in a "no-man's land of formalist experimentation […] and elite patronage." It's interesting to read about all of the art historians and critics associated and adjacent to the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Partisan Review attempt to justify themselves in this new climate; news of CIA funding didn't drop until 1966, after all. It just makes me think real American Modernism has never been tried. But if one were to try, then they'd have to reckon with Benton's liberalism first and foremost.
>>580699the reason abstract expressionism was important was because it was the first American made style of art and its popularity made the art world reoriented itself from France to new york.
I totally get it.
All that being said i still think its 2deep4u bullshit
>>580702Just found out about this. The purpose of the search engine is to give more weight to long texts and simple web design and it seems to work very well from what I have seen.
Done with
A History of Mathematics third edition (2011) by Carl Boyer and Uta Merzbach. If you ever wanted to know who invented the equal sign, this book is for you (it was a more recent invention than you think). Here is a quote about something else:
<Condorcet is perhaps best remembered mathematically as a pioneer in social mathematics, especially through the application of probability and statistics to social problems. When, for example, conservative elements (including the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Theology) attacked those who advocated inoculation against smallpox, Condorcet (together with Voltaire and Daniel Bernoulli) came to the defense of variolation.Some things never change, eh?
>>580705Also also it's interesting to read about communists in the New York art scene before WW2. Like, imagine being an artist in the 1930s and the two most popular styles are:
A: Regionalism (Reinforced by New Deal liberalism; its noteworthy artists are too afraid to just come out as modernists, much less as communists)
B: Social Realism (CPUSA and CIO-adjacent; think John Reed Clubs and Artists' Union—explicitly communist on-canvas, in dialog with the USSR)
Especially when talking about it after 1933/1934, you'd be stuck between making art in this very liberal, arguably early 'modern' style that would receive massive government patronage employing tens of thousands of artists across the country on the one hand; and making art in a very communist-sympathetic, arguably 'postmodern' style that would fail to gather as much rapport with the masses on the other. I guess if you wanna piss off philistine communists then just say "Social
ist Realism was the first postmodern Russian art movement" because that's literally true, lol.
>>580710I don't have any reading recommendations re: modernism ig because my art history knowledge so far is the result of a handful of courses I took in college years ago under a professor who specialized in a topic related to Picasso ('modernist primitivism' and notions of the 'grotesque'). A big reason why I've been reading so much about
American modernism lately is because I didn't learn a damn thing about it in art undergrad, lol! I'm now realizing that the circumstances that led to its many stillborn movements were actually quite special, albeit a little underwhelming compared to their European counterparts. In order to better understand the latter, though, you'll definitely need to go to late 19th century France and learn about Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and (crucially) the emergence of Cubism. I've heard good things about TJ Clark and HW Janson; Meyer Schapiro too.
Embedding error.
Recently I learned about the reason so many English buildings have bricked up windows
Apparently it's because of a tax on fucking windows during the 1700s - 1850s. video related.
Sources:
1)
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/towns/tyne-and-wear-case-study/about-the-group/housing/window-tax/2)
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-57349499>>580730It's been three and a half years
fuck and now I finally have the opportunity to post this screencap:
Embedding error.
Recently learned about the near-war between France and Brazil… over Lobsters
>>580740Lol, it's mostly just banter and cursing of the French in an ironic jingoistic manner, which he does so to show he's heard about this really odd event.
Though, watching this video made me feel that, but unironically. Goddamnit, why are some Europeans so insufferably snobbish?
>>580744>Just started reading Endnotes from the beginningGood for you. I like reading them and their chinese cousins from chuang, even if I don't agree with everything they say obviously
>Curious to see their takeOn what tough?
>>580746If he really pointed out this:
>He mentions how Colin Powell used maps with wrong information to convince people of the necessity of going to war with Iraqhe probably knows Powell was lying on purpose.
>>580754You should try reading the non-autistic/anglo-boxed side of the aisle when it comes to consciousness. Look into people who attempt to provide and develop a non-physically reductionist explanation of consciousness, look into mysticism, etc.
Before dismissing this out of hand, consider your own prejudices and recognize that these accounts are cosmological and philosophical just as much.
>>580755>angloStop this racializing nonsense. There have been plenty of Russian, German etc. researchers pushing in the same direction as Churchland.
>Look into people who attempt to provide and develop a non-physically reductionist explanation of consciousnessChurchland's book already does that.
>>580756The book you've mentioned is an insufficient tip of the iceberg, not a pointless one sure, but there's so much more out there. You're disserving yourself on the topic by omitting such engagement.
Also it's not literal racializing, it's just a colloquial term which relates to the geo-historical origins of this type of thought, not an essentialization of it as being innately characteristic with respect to a sole group.
>>580500Hello /edu/
I am planning on starting a thread with everything
Deleuze and Guatarri. I don't have time to do it soon, but please keep in mind for the next week or so.
If someone wants to make the thread, please go ahead.
>>580766If you're American there's no real reason to call it by the German title unless you fully intend on diving into Marxology at some point. Which, I think it's hard to determine that until after you've finished reading
Capital.
>>580767Be sure to point everyone to Jon Roffe's new(ish) book on Deleuze; it's fast becoming the best introductory secondary lit on the guy:
https://re-press.org/books/the-works-of-gilles-deleuze-i-1953-1969/ >>580786I meant James
Heisig, sorry.
>>580792Manufacturing Consent is pretty good (from what I read, the first part about the 5 filters). It's Chomsky, so suitable to newbies.
Parenti (Against Empire) is like a book specifically for people with no experience with the subject matter.
There is quite a lot of different material for this case.
<George Orwell once commented that ‘good prose is like a window pane’; that is to say, it should be clear and understandable to all. I don’t share Orwell’s view on this. It seems to me that as the sciences and social sciences probe ever deeper into our reality, such an increased specialization and depth of knowledge require a more technical and intricate language in order to express it. I wouldn’t expect a medical treatise on Lymphedema to be ‘like a window pane’ in terms of its clarity, and I, for one, would lack the specialist knowledge to understand the terminology and the arguments. For this reason, my criticisms of an Adorno or Althusser do not boil down to the fact that they use a technical language which is often difficult for a non-specialist reader; the works of Aristotle, Hegel and Marx all do that at times, and with good reason. My critique is not motivated by anti-intellectualism. Rather I would suggest that the sheer obscurity in style and language of a writer like Althusser has two main functions. One, it works to foster a pronounced sense of elitism. What you are reading is so profound, so monumental, and so esoteric, that only a few great minds will ever be able to master it. What a thinker like Althusser or Adorno does with their ridiculously complex jargon is to differentiate themselves from the mass of humanity, to better facilitate the image of themselves as a world-historic genius while at the same time disguising the paucity and crudity of the arguments they are actually making. Two, and this is the more important issue: much of the complex and opaque language overlays a process of reification; that is, the thinker in question is able to take what are living and fluid socio-historical entities and contradictions – particularly the contradictions of class – and convert them into things which interrelate in a purely structural and physical manner.
Above is from "The War Against Marxism" by Tony McKenna (2021). He points out there is something misanthropic about things like "consumer criticism" and the general attitude towards mainstream culture of academic people posing as Marxist radicals. McKenna demolishes Walter Benjamin and other cultural critics as pretentious pseuds. (He also occasionally brings up Stalin = bad. I don't think that most people he criticizes had a high opinion of Stalin nor that most Stalinists have a high opinion of most of the people McKenna is bashing, so I have no idea why he does this. Trots gonna trot, I guess.) He also gives positive examples of how one can discuss themes related to capitalism in books and movies, by dedicating one chapter to the John Hughes comedy "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" and one chapter to Stephen King’s horror book "IT" (completely spoilering everything and also "The Sixth Sense" and "Psycho" while he's at it; but at this point you have probably seen a dozen parodies of each, so no big deal). These chapters will get him no admiration for creativity, since the topics are plainly there in the works and not something that is perfectly hidden until decoded (or hallucinated to be there) by some great intellectual. He writes in mostly plain language, aside from a bit about how Zizek has Hegel wrong that gets rather technical.
>>580802check out The Condition of the Working Class in England, it's also a great antidote to vulgar leftist garbage
also, i feel bad for bullying you on /leftypol/
>As in 1849 so during this year's parliamentary recess — the party of Order had broken up into its separate factions, each occupied with its own restoration intrigues, which had obtained fresh nutriment through the death of Louis Philippe. The Legitimist king, Henry V, had even nominated a formal ministry which resided in Paris and in which members of the Permanent Commission held seats. Bonaparte, in his turn, was therefore entitled to make tours of the French departments, and according to the disposition of the town he favored with his presence, now more or less covertly, now more or less overtly, to divulge his own restoration plans and canvass votes for himself. On these processions, which the great official Moniteur and the little private Moniteurs of Bonaparte naturally had to celebrate as triumphal processions, he was constantly accompanied by persons affiliated with the Society of December 10. This society dates from the year 1849.
>On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society" - insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus his expedition to Strasbourg, where the trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms. They represent the army. In his Society of December 10 he assembles ten thousand rascals who are to play the part of the people as Nick Bottom [A character in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. - Ed.] that of the lion.
>At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history. What the national ateliers were for the socialist workers, what the Gardes mobile were for the bourgeois republicans, the Society of December 10 was for Bonaparte, the party fighting force peculiar to him. On his journeys the detachments of this society packing the railways had to improvise a public for him, stage popular enthusiasm, roar Vive l'Empereur, insult and thrash republicans, under police protection, of course. On his return journeys to Paris they had to form the advance guard, forestall counter-demonstrations or disperse them. The Society of December 10 belonged to him, it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he appropriates is put into his hands by the force of circumstances; whatever else he does, the circumstances do for him or he is content to copy from the deeds of others. But Bonaparte with official phrases about order, religion, family, and property in public, before the citizens, and with the secret society of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs, the society of disorder, prostitution, and theft, behind him — that is Bonaparte himself as the original author, and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history.
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Probably the best description of conservatism ever.
>>580823CTRL + ALT + SUPPR
task manager
go to "on wakeup" or however it's said in your language
remove them.
(there are also litteral option in the app itself you moron)
>>580824>>580825Picrel
>>580827Thanks.
>(there are also litteral option in the app itself you moron)<I've tried way too many times to stop them from opening up, but it never lasts for long. adorno was right
>>580831just look up his bibliography
>>580838>>580839 (me)
Here are the webms in question, saved for being absolutely hysterical lmao. This is what rightoids actually believe
>>580840Oh, and the site from which i originally got the video in
>>580838 from both claimed that blm is "le radical marxist group" only to later say:
>Uhhh, ackchyually they are capitalistshttps://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/07/these-18-corporations-gave-money-to-black-lives-matter-group/https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/02/15/dont-worry-blm-founders-arent-corrupt-theyre-capitalists/<Well guys, sorry for the false alarm. We had no way of knowing. Finished Democratic Economic Planning (2021) by Robin Hahnel, Michael Albert's co-visionary. The entire book is written from the point of view of neoclassical economics, gah! There is a very brief analysis of the competing proposals by Cockshott & Cottrell and Daniel Saros.
Hahnel criticizes the model by C&C (correctly) for being overly simplistic in assuming that there is just one single production technique for each product. I would fix this issue by scoring the different allocation scenarios with a more sophisticated method: Consumer items can be grouped in a tree, starting from a few very abstract categories like edible VS non-edible, splitting off into less abstract categories, and ending in the crown of the tree with the specific products. We assume that the more specific the category gets, the more we zoom in, the better high availability of some stuff can compensate for low availability of other stuff. So at the broadest categories, the one with the worst score of a these determines the overall score of the scenario (with second-worst and so on only working as a tie-breaker), the scores of branches within the same broad category give the score for the broad category according to harmonic mean, the score within a branch is determined by geometric mean, and when it comes to items that are practically identical (and here we are with the different production methods for the same thing), we can just use the arithmetic mean. (I just only listened three means because I'm lazy, AFAIK even the old Greeks knew at least ten means or so, so of course you could make a tree with more distinctions than maxmin-harmonic-geometric-arithmetic.
Hahnel criticizes Saros (correctly) for reading ordinal data (people rank items they wish to consume) as if it were cardinal data and suggests people just assign points whatever way they feel like instead of being forced to use a particular configuration of point weights for the rank positions. Hahnel criticizes that consumers "must" provide so much data ex ante, but IIRC Saros's scheme does allow spontaneous consumer decisions, it just gets more expensive for you than pre-ordering.
>>580846a little too cozy with german petty bourgeois democrats
worryingly uncritical of european anthropology, especially of that time
a dogmatic hegelian even decades after the split with the young hegelians
>>580865Also reading Losurdo atm, his book on the language of imperialism to be precise. Among other things, it is a good breakdown of the history of antisemitism. There is a somewhat popular idea around that the Nazis hatred of Jews is just a development from the Christian hatred of Jews. Losurdo points out that Christians have been obsessed with converting and absorbing the Jews, which is a
horror scenario from the Nazi point of view ("damaging" the race). So these views are not just somewhat different, but opposed. The source of inspiration is colonialism, slavery, the American genocide of the native population. And you can get that straight from the horse's mouth (and by horse I mean Mr. Hitler and friends). Nazi terms like Untermensch were translated from the American discourse ("underman") and German race-purity regulations were likewise inspired by prior American examples.
>>580870Well. Might get Liberalism by Losurdo, or Washington Bullets by Prashad.
And I'll make a thread about Losurdo, hopefully soon. Anything worth mentioning?
>>580871>Losurdo>LightI love his work but I find him very dense and Liberalism is even more so than his other work (from what I've heard - I've only read Stalin apart from Liberalism).
I still wholeheartedly recommend him, though. Excited to read War and Revolution next.
I read To Have or To Be by Fromm, who i read somewhere was a freudian with some marxist bent. It's total shit, Fromm is a total reactionary (he'd be a Nazi if we wasn't Jewish) who probably never read Marx despite quoting from him numerous times. It's pretty shit. It's not really a study of psychology so much as it's a textual stew of all the references he could find to support his edgelord ideas.
Which is disappointing since the thesis has a lot of merit (the thesis being that we have two modes of understanding our being, Having and Being). Already this looks like a class problem. Why would we, in capitalism, the bourgeois society, focus on Having rather than being? And to make this work, Being really ought to be Doing, as this is what fundamentally expresses the proletarian position. I suspect the reason he chose Being was because he's an intellectual and a reactionary who imagines a utopia of living in feudal times when people respected tradition and humanism (he actually thinks that all previous modes of production have been humanist, including early capitalism, and he blames industrial society for the creation of our supposedly uniquely non-moral production), I suppose he sees himself as an aristocrat then because it would be most in keeping with his current class position. Anyways he totally sidesteps the idea of class, of bourgeois ideology or proletarian consciousness. I think this is a really important idea, that the bourgeoisie impose a dysfunctional ontology onto us, and a real class consciousness goes beyond a mere enunciation of class relations, but has to be a total shift in our view of what constitutes life.
It's a good study in reaction though, since he shows very well how a third cop out way can be imagined. Obviously it's ridiculous though, since what kind of mode of being is Being. Like you just sit there, aspirate? Obviously being has to have some character, and the bourgeois mode is ownership and the proletarian mode is labor. Being through having or being through creating. With this model in mind, the bourgeois ownership model is progressive even, since it posits a sort of superhuman limitless conglomeration of object and subject, compared to a feudal ontology which is probably closer to "just being" (It'd be super neat actually to see a study of how the people in past modes of production saw themselves and their relation to the world). Having is necessary, and whatever sense of self comes after it must be an improvement. And lo, verily it is! Through our labor we reproduce society, and this act of abstracted production ties us in with the whole material body of society as necessary poles. It's our labor which grants to us our right to the universal productivity of society. This is held back by private property. Having gets in the way of having.
It feels like the hotdog school is one big psyop to push a misinformed popular version of marxism
https://deutschestextarchiv.de/nrhz/?d=nn_nrhz301_1849.txt.xmlLooked up the original German text to the last issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Here’s what the infamous paragraph reads like when put through Google Translate:
>We are ruthless, we ask no consideration of you. When our turn comes, we will not sugarcoat terrorism. But the royalist terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and justice, in practice they are brutal, contemptible, mean, in theory cowardly, covert, double-dealing, dishonorable in both respects.Definitely a bit less rosy than the official English translation floating around.
Done with "How to Learn and Memorize German Vocabulary" (2012) and "How To Learn And Memorize Math, Numbers, Equations, And Simple Arithmetic" (2014) both by Anthony Metivier, both shit. There is a lot in the math book that is not math and a lot in the German book that is not German. He repeats himself within the books and between them. For example, both books have passages about relaxed breathing. Reading him feels like watching a never-ending infomercial.
Oh, and the German is terrible. Three things in increasing order of cringe:
<Ich hole mich ab.
That sentence is nonsense. Ich hole X ab means I pick up X. But it only means picking up in the narrow sense of getting a person (or thing) and then walking with that person or transporting that person (or thing) elsewhere. For example, I pick up the kids at the cinema. You do not use hole ab for something like I pick up the coin. There is a different verb for that. And neither verb is used in a construct like I pick up myself, which is what the author is apparently trying to say in German. Such construct does not exist.
He recommends to come up with some memory hook for at least every letter of the alphabet (I approve). And he goes further by also memorizing pictures for common prefixes. He gives the example of using Zorro to memorize words with the prefix zer. It makes sense to expand the collection of memory hooks to syllables if the syllables are basically random. But this is not some random sound, it carries meaning. A zer word almost always has something to do with a bigger thing getting destroyed and spread over an area. (For example, brechen is to break and zerbrechen is to shatter.) He does not seem to be aware of this.
He mentions zerunten and zeroberst. These words do not exist. How can you fail like this? This is not a mistake a normal fraud would make.
Question: I'm at Chapter 17 in Capital, and this particular passage confuses me:
>(1.) A working day of given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the productiveness of labour, and, with it, the mass of the product, and the price of each single commodity produced, may vary.
It doesn't make sense to me because of course if you were to do really productive labor throughout the working day, your necessary labor would be done quicker, and surplus value would increase(along with overall value), no? Please help me, I've thought it through and this has confused me for a bit. Why assume something like this in the first place, even as a hypothetical?
>>580902The passage is about
society-wide changes.
>>580500is there a book talking about this guy ?.
Molotov has more books about him.
Rushed through Fair Division of the Commons, 2019 Thesis by Dominik Peters (DPhil in Computer Science). Not bad, but also not what I was hoping for as I was looking for a budget allocation procedure that is better than Paul Cockshott's proposal of just taking the arithmetic means.
Two nitpicks about the intro. First one:
<In the 1980s, social choice theorists noticed that under many of these rules, it can be beneficial for voters to abstain from an election. For example, it can happen that a voter who ranks candidate c in top position causes c to lose if the voter participates; if the voter abstains and does not submit the ranking, then c is elected by the rule. In particular, this occurs for voting rules from a class proposed by the 18th century French intellectual Condorcet.
Ambiguous language make this confusing to a lay person. The bit "this occurs" correctly refers to abstaining, but not the given drastic example where voting against the voter's top choice (failing that specifically is called mono-add top and the Condorcet method Simpson-Kramer Minmax meets it). This is also something the author knows as he tells you about one billion pages later.
Second one: A lot of stuff in this text is about allocating things with connectivity constraints, since for example individuals care that allocated plots of land are connected:
<This is in contrast to the situation with connectivity constraints, where it is known that EF1 and Pareto-optimality can be jointly achieved by maximising Nash welfare.
Typo. This is in contrast to the situation WITHOUT connectivity constraints…
I have more serious criticism of the section Preferences Single-Peaked on Circles. I don't follow the author's motivation for analyzing these patterns. He gives two reasons:
1. There are plenty decisions that are single-peaked on a line (true, consider setting a penalty for example) and circles are generalizing that. Stuff that cannot be well-represented with a line but with a circle looks like a very niche topic to me :P so that leaves us with the second motivation…
2. Simple computation. That's an important goal, but there are other avenues to it than assuming these preferences. He says that it makes Proportional Approval Voting easy. Normal PAV is hard because it tries to find the committee with the highest satisfaction score and that means combinatorial explosion. But if you are willing to tolerate slightly less proportional results you can just use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, which greedily selects one winner, re-weights the ballots, selects a second winner, re-weights the ballots, and so on. He says that Young's Condorcet rule (find what would be the Condorcet winner if you deleted the smallest possible amount of ballots) can get hard to compute and it gets easy if everybody's preferences are single-peaked on a circle. Imagine actually proposing this to a committee as a general voting rule, why would they have these computationally pleasant preferences?! (Not accusing him he would do that, but then he has to admit there is not much practical scope for this.) Why not instead use a Condorcet method easy to compute while in similar spirit to Young (find what would be the Condorcet winner if you added the smallest possible amount of ballots, yep that's Simpson-Kramer Minmax).
Now for the alternative to using the means for allocating a budget, a variant of Moving Phantom Mechanisms he calls "Independent Markets". OK, this starts from the idea of median ratings which are super robust against exaggerations and then adds something that makes the ratings add up to the budget. This would be pretty good if not for a briefly mentioned
<tendency to shift the aggregate towards the uniform distribution…
This means this procedure is vulnerable to category spam! Whoever cooks up the categories can split up a topic into sub-topics and it will receive more funding. Even if there is no evil person doing this, the results get massively changed by whatever category-division scheme we happen to use. I cannot accept this. It is true that using just mean ratings instead is vulnerable to exaggeration, but this can be reduced by limiting how much voters can change a category's budget size from one referendum to the next, and it's still possible to change the funding drastically without waiting too long if only the intervals between the budget referendums are short enough.
Posted in the wrong thread, reposting here.
I read the nonfiction chapters of Half Earth Socialism.
The video game they made to promote the book is very fun and thought provoking, so I bought the book.
The book is not particularly good. It attempts to link the necessity of economic planning and large scale rewilding (half of the terrestrial surface must be nature preserves in order to have a viable ecosystem). The thesis of the book is that a planned economy is necessary to preserve human life on earth, but the argument entirely rests on the unsupported assertion that "Half of the earth could not remain uncommodified under capitalism". No attempt is made to develop this claim through an economic argument. The authors criticize John Bellamy Foster and the Monthly Review , saying no attempt to read Marx with green-tinted glasses is going to expunge the Promethian aspect of Hegel from Marx's work. Lacking a strong understanding of Marx's theory, the authors of Half Earth Socialism have no way to prove their point. Instead, they rely on extensive citations from the scientific literature describing the current impacts of the capitalist world-system, and tearing apart neoliberal fantasies about geoengineering. The book contains almost 50 pages of citations, and the main text including introduction is only 180 pages.
Its a very puzzling book, the authors are familiar with neurath, beer, etc regarding planned economies, but fail to invoke the law of requisite variety in their critiques of geoengineering, despite referencing it in planning. The authors and game developers had a research group during the game development process, and the game developers actually mentioned these undeveloped ideas in the general intellect unit podcast, that could have produce a systematic critique of geoengineering based on cybernetic or economic theory.
The high reference density and tendency to citing an argument instead of printing it reminds me of a lot of popular science / popular economics writing. I am pretty disappointed with the book, but look forward to reading the fiction chapter at the end. The authors are at least capable researchers and prose writers.
Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Jacques Barzun, 3rd edition (an unlikely candidate for translation given how punny the original is). Was OK, sensible chuckle here and there. Tropes, silly recommendations, nonsensical etymologies. It doesn't have the same arrogant didactic tone many satirical dictionaries have (yes, this is an established genre). Some entries:
<MACARONI. When prepared in the Italian style, is served with the fingers.
<MATERIALISM. Utter the word with horror, stressing each syllable.
<PRINCIPLES. Always “eternal.” Nobody can tell their nature or number; no matter, they are sacred all the same.
<PRAGMATIC SANCTION. Nobody knows what it is.
<SEA. Bottomless. Symbol of infinity. Induces deep thoughts. At the shore one should always have a good glass. While contemplating the sea, always exclaim: “Water, water everywhere.”
>>580930I just also read Half-Earth Socialism. This is really like if Towards A New Socialism had a retarded little brother. Bringing up Kantorovich and Neurath, countering Austrian economists, all of that you also find in Cockshott's writings.
What does this book bring to the table that isn't in TANS already? Three things:
1. Anti-nuclear hysteria. The authors go ad-hom against the pro-nuclear minority among the greens like George Monbiot by bringing up one of those guys in one interview being dismissive of vegetarianism. I'm 100 % certain Monbiot is strongly in favor of reducing meat consumption.
2. Belief that there is an invisible hand that holds nature in equilibrium. I need some justification here because they never explicitly say it and they even mention several times that nature went through several mass extinction events before the appearance of humans. My point is they talk like they believe in natural equilibrium. They want to keep massive chunks of land off limits for humans to keep bio-diversity. But regulations can require diversity. If you have good regulations and the means to check and punish, what's the problem with humans being in the picture? And mass extinction can also happen without human help, so their big idea that they named their book after doesn't make much sense IMHO.
3. They sketch some future scenario with people having a mishmash of various vouchers (also with a bonus for skilled work because they are more conservative than Cockshott) and waiting queues. They oppose labor vouchers as pseudo-rational because the vouchers have a one-dimensional character and planning with physical constraints must be multi-dimensional. In their view, one-dimensional planning for profit-maximizing is wrong and so the one-dimensional vouchers must also be wrong. But this does not follow. Capitalist profit is one-dimensional because it is a goal in itself. Your consumer budget is a means to various ends. Your consumption is always a multi-dimensional affair. For a given pile of various consumer items to allocate, having multiple voucher systems does nothing to protect the environment better than allocating via a one voucher system and only serves to reduce consumer freedom.
Nitpick:
<Just weeks after the Fukushima disaster, the German Green Party took power at state level for the first time…The German Greens already entered a national ruling coalition in 1998.
>>580937 (me)
Throughout the book, there are
bad psychological takes, not just that one thing about pro-nuclear greens:
They claim the reason Thomas Moore did write Utopia not in the style of a proposal was that because Plato lived in a society people more directly and consciously shaped so Moore was incapable of thinking that way. A simple alternative motivation would be to avoid punishment.
And they also don't seem to know that Plato was basically fascist (inb4 calling me ahistorical for that), but just mention him as an inspiring thinker together with Neurath (who certainly wouldn't like being grouped together with him!).
And they repeatedly claim a distinction between cybernetics people who want to control and economic optimizers who are somehow less authoritarian. This appears to be a figment of the imagination of the author they got this idea from. Maybe that guy found good support for the thesis, but they don't bring that to the reader of their book. Instead they give you Stafford Beer as a counter-example to this claimed pattern.
Despite being written
three decades after TANS, the authors neither have any new proposals for allocation systems or communication tools / decision methods they came up with themselves, nor do they give an overview of such systems developed by others or even a single recommendation (like LiquidFeedback).
>>580500ive been thinking about leftist ethical realism
does it exist?
if so i really need some resources
books videos anything
(preferably not christian nonsense)
>>580941More than a century ago, Robert Michels analysed the structure of the German Social Democrats and called what he found
the iron law of oligarchy. In the 1950s, C. Wright Mills wrote The Power Elite. What's probably more exciting to you is a recent US study about how much political decisions coincide with the views of people at different income levels, but I don't have the link atm.
I've been reading some Marx and Engels recently. Some question arose though and if anyone is willing to clarify things or just discuss them.
At the end of Socialism: Scientific and Utopian, Engels writes out the main contradictions in capitalism. One of them the contradiction between the way production is organized: the labour is collective, yet the appropriation is purely private in nature. This contradiction is resolved when the appropriation is collective, and the surplus created is used not to replicate capital or profit but to develop society more.
Many times they discuss how the economy functions on fundamental laws (like the appropriation of surplus) which cannot be changed. But doesn't this somehow imply that socialism, that is, the transitory stage, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is simply the class conscious proletariat only manipulating capitalism like one would manipulate an experiment, in a controlled manner?
Is this why Lenin says that socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat plus monopoly capital?
This kind of thinking, that we are actually not changing anything, but we are consciously manipulating the economy – is this the point of socialism?
>>580947Pirate archivists ftw
I haven't checked it and never used Z-Library so I don't know if this is pure archivism or available in a browsable format. Tor site also seems to work, because they seized the domain and not the server I think.
https://teddit.net/r/DataHoarder/comments/ymiwzs/zlibrary%5C_isnt%5C_really%5C_gone%5C_but%5C_that%5C_maybe%5C_up%5C_to%5C_you/ >>580954u don't (pretty much)
The Che pdf talks about the ultimate goal of growing from a guerrilla force, to a conventional one (guerrilla forces don't win wars)
The other one just talks about air defense if you don't have real air defense
Cool
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209427119>Aberrant cortical spine dynamics after concussive injury are reversed by integrated stress response inhibition<Significance>After traumatic brain injury, temporary pharmacological inhibition of the integrated stress response (ISR) with a small-molecule inhibitor (ISRIB) rescued long-lasting trauma-induced cognitive deficits. Here, we found that ISRIB treatment rapidly and persistently reversed the aberrant changes in cortical spine dynamics in the parietal cortex while rescuing working memory deficits. These data suggest that the link between the ISR and memory function involves, at least in part, changes in neuronal structure. Targeting ISR activation could serve as a promising approach to the clinical treatment of chronic cognitive deficits after brain injuries.<Abstract>Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of long-term neurological disability in the world and the strongest environmental risk factor for the development of dementia. Even mild TBI (resulting from concussive injuries) is associated with a greater than twofold increase in the risk of dementia onset. Little is known about the cellular mechanisms responsible for the progression of long-lasting cognitive deficits. The integrated stress response (ISR), a phylogenetically conserved pathway involved in the cellular response to stress, is activated after TBI, and inhibition of the ISR—even weeks after injury—can reverse behavioral and cognitive deficits. However, the cellular mechanisms by which ISR inhibition restores cognition are unknown. Here, we used longitudinal two-photon imaging in vivo after concussive injury in mice to study dendritic spine dynamics in the parietal cortex, a brain region involved in working memory. Concussive injury profoundly altered spine dynamics measured up to a month after injury. Strikingly, brief pharmacological treatment with the drug-like small-molecule ISR inhibitor ISRIB entirely reversed structural changes measured in the parietal cortex and the associated working memory deficits. Thus, both neural and cognitive consequences of concussive injury are mediated in part by activation of the ISR and can be corrected by its inhibition. These findings suggest that targeting ISR activation could serve as a promising approach to the clinical treatment of chronic cognitive deficits after TBI.>>580949 (me)
>>580950Not sure if that's a facetious comment since Cheng has mainstream-press popularity (as much as you can have as a mathematician) and I expected a bit of ridicule in this thread because even your average teenager without good math grades can just fly through these books like they are nothing, so the stuff might be too trivial for some here. Her goal is the same as Quanta Magazine: Explain stuff as simply as possible to the broadest audience. The language is very easy for the most part, once in a fortnight a special term comes by and is explained immediately. I'm already done with another book by her.
After giving me diabetes with the recipes in How to Bake Pi, Eugenia Cheng shows in the follow-up
The Art of Logic in an Illogical World how to argue why your taxes must pay for my health care using the power of facts and logic (while not neglecting emotion). There is also a lot about discrimination. In general she writes from a liberal-progressive POV. Some handy diagrams are shown to reveal pseudo-conflicts due to imprecise language (e. g. saying a statement is not true does not necessarily mean your stance is a
polar opposite) and due to different levels of generalizing different people are on at the same time. I believe some conservatives would rather defenestrate themselves than getting lectured about her "cuboid of privilege". Now that's not a logical reaction and the cuboid makes perfect sense, believe me. Though one supposed example of tight logical reasoning I found a bit iffy:
<1. If you say women are inferior, that is insulting to women.<2. If you think that “feminine” is an insulting way to describe a man, you are saying that women are inferior.<3. Therefore if you think that “feminine” is an insulting way to describe a man, you are insulting women.In my experience people with a negative attitude about feminine men
tend to think less of women and it's also my experience that people with negative attitude about feminine men tend to make fun of mannish women. Any of this is sexist behavior for sure. But would you seriously argue that a person making fun of mannish women logically means that person must also hate men?
Overall it's not bad, but my impression is that it's a bit worse than How to Bake Pi. Maybe because of some déjà vu. (And of course that experience depends on reading order, so is it really a worse book?) The pattern of Battenberg cake is discussed again, the joy of toddlers who figure out climbing stairs comes up again, the philosopher Michael Dummet is quoted again (even the same quote).
I have started yet another book by her,
The Joy of Abstraction, and I'm 10 % in and it looks really promising so far, deeper than How to Bake Pi while still very easy to follow.
this guy DJ Pons cracks me the fuck up. He's some researcher from new zealand who's probably the world's most dedicated proponent of dialectical materialism at this moment (tho probably unbeknownst to him).
https://sci-hub.se/10.1504/ijpom.2012.048221>Abstract: The practice of project management is described by a codified standard, but many projects fail nonetheless. This paper describes a new conceptual approach for project management, using a systems-modelling approach to create a graphical representation. New activities are identified not evident in existing models. The model achieves a three-way integration of theory (proposed causality), process (operational detail), and software tools.Idk if my brain is just fried from reading too much commie lit but this reads like a joke lmao.
Also his conceptualization of the cordus model brings science back to causality, back to materialism, and is all around very dialectical. It's honestly the most optimistic thing i've read in a long time, i dont care if it turns out to be a debunked chimera in 100 years (not that it has any takers now), because this guy (and the other authors) is bringing militant materialism back to science.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1a0c/842dc8fdb878770b6c7bc7a4fb40dcb9d95f.pdfhttps://vixra.org/pdf/1104.0015v1.pdf>>580961A lot of what Elull writes is theoretical, and it is very lengthy and verbose, but surprisingly I've never felt bored reading it. Reading anything by him felt more as if I was trying to understand the world around me.
As for Propaganda itself, it's hard to summarize it all, and I'm not going to copy paste the wiki summary of the book because anyone can do that. I can only describe it as "an explanation for why and how I would have gotten sucked into ____ politics." For a book written in the 1960's it's still extremely relevant, maybe even more so.
<Emotionalism, impulsiveness, excess, etc—all these characteristics of the individual caught up in a mass are well known and very helpful to propaganda. Therefore, the individual must never be considered as being alone; the listener to a radio broadcast, though actually alone, is nevertheless part of a large group, and he is aware of it. Radio listeners have been found to exhibit a mass mentality. All are tied together and constitute a sort of society in which all individuals are accomplices and influence each other without knowing it.>>580963I'm sorry see if this works.
>>580968This is what happened to us: reviewers had some brilliant suggestions for analyses we hadn’t considered—especially helpful when, as with our brain-atlas project, the idea is to write a paper that’s practically useful to other researchers—and we agreed to run them. Anna has just finished all the statistics, and we’re safe in the knowledge that we’ll definitely get a publication (
so long as the reviewers, who get a second look, agree we’ve done what we promised).
>>580972That was just the title. (That book is bad and got one of the cringiest passages I have ever read about some show trial and expulsion in an irrelevant micro sect and how the ones to be purged
enjoyed the procedure of being purged, which was the heroic highlight of their lives.)
<Our debates possessed me so fully of the subject, that I wrote and printed an anonymous pamphlet on it, entitled “The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency.” It was well received by the common people in general; but the rich men disliked it, for it increased and strengthened the clamor for more money, and they happening to have no writers among them that were able to answer it, their opposition slackened, and the point was carried by a majority in the House. My friends there, who conceived I had been of some service, thought fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money; a very profitable job and a great help to me.https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/benjamin-franklin/the-autobiography-of-benjamin-franklinThis is an unfinished work, ending abruptly. Franklin's autobiography is partially a self-help book, especially the earlier chapters. He gives tips how to be popular and agreeable, but it's still a mystery to me how he achieved so much influence over people early in life already, long before his experiments with electricity. In my head canon he had highly potent weed on him all the time and smoked that together with the people he had conversations with. In the essay mentioned above Franklin heavily cribs from William Petty and proposes that labor as the just measure of price. The topics range from rhetoric to ship building to religious tolerance to enjoying the sight of Native Americans destroying themselves through alcoholism.
<Conversations often drag on and on, fulfilling no one’s needs, because it is unclear whether the initiator of the conversation has gotten what she or he wanted. In India, when people have received the response they want in conversations they have initiated, they say “bas” (pronounced “bus”). This means, “You need not say more. I feel satisfied and am now ready to move on to something else.” Though we lack such a word in our own language, we can benefit from developing and promoting “bas-consciousness” in all our interactions.
That's from Non-Violent Communication (3rd ed.) by Marshall Rosenberg. I heard him getting shilled by a guest on Mexie's "Total Liberation" podcast (formerly "Vegan Vanguard") as well as by some other alternative leftish types.
(I don't know whether Rosenberg saw himself as radical left. Maybe he had anarchist-pacifist leanings, since in another book, "Living Non-Violent Communication", there is a chapter about respecting kids and another one where he talks about some vaguely spiritual ideas that lurk in the background, about as much Christian as Buddhist. This other book recycles a lot of the material and it looks like its chapters are also available as separate booklets, so please take a look on Libgen before you buy the same anecdotes a dozen times.)
Rosenberg's method takes a page from Carl Rogers, the therapist that made a big deal out of frequently paraphrasing what the other person is saying. (The most influential follower of Rogers is the ELIZA chatbot.) This can get very annoying for your conversation partner, but doing it proves that you are listening and you can invite the other person to also do it. First try to observe without judging. Identify feelings. Identify needs. In the here and now. Be concrete. Don't be guilt-tripped and don't try to guilt-trip. It all sounds a bit cheesy and there are even some lyrics and poetry in the book here and there. Instead of being cool and showing you the most cringe parts to laugh at, I will be lame and talk about my honest impression and feefees: I'm incredulous about some of the stories around Rosenberg's miracles and I don't expect this to work across class divisions. Keeping it strictly within my class, I feel mildly optimistic and hope I will reduce the number of my enemies by a bit and pretty soon.
>>580987yo the part about "this can get very annoying for your conversation partner", this is really tru idk why u gloss over it, at least to me its annoying af and shows the other person is not listening, if all you can do is repeat back some key points, but you can't add anything of value or tie it in to something else, its like talking to a wall. Maybe a more wholistic strategy would be to gauge whether or not someone wants to monologue and have some mild affirmation your ears are working, versus someone wanting a two-sided conversation, and applying different tactics to each
Thanks for the writeup by the way anon, I just had to say that because I don't want you following some book advice by white ppl in positions of power on how to socialize, and have people annoyed by the aloofness
>>580991 (me)
>>580992(I'm not 12246 and I see what you are doing here.)
I don't consider it annoying per se. It depends on the frequency of usage and whether I have high expectations of the quality of the conversation or not. People often conjure up motives why somebody is saying or doing this or that and these motives can be pretty offensive. Even worse, some people make up me saying things I never said so they "win" some virtual debate. (I don't even believe they are very deliberate about this, but suspect their memory about the less important people in their lives is like Swiss cheese.)
So sticking for a moment to what is plain and observable and just rephrasing things can be an improvement over that. I don't have an interest right now in carrying on this ELIZa-ish convo for long because it derails the thread and you might be trolling… yet I have to admit that when it comes to some people in my life, it would be
thrilling for me if they talked back like that.
>>581004 (me)
Highly recommend this PDF instead because the original, clearly formatted for a pamphlet, is unbearable to read. picrel
Started trying to test myself by reading "Economics for Real People" by Gene Callahan. I ashamedly did have to dust off Chapter 1 of Capital again(despite having already made it to chapter 8) but I think I still have something worth saying.
>As Smith famously put it in the "The Wealth of Nations", free man acts as if 'led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.'
> […]
> Economists, Marx contended, were simply describing society as they found it under the domination of the capitalists. […] the laws formulated by the classical school…will not apply to those living in the socialist utopia.
Immediate misrepresentation, since Marx's argument in Capital and otherwise was that it was this very same "invisible hand" that creates exchange-value, demands either the growth or cost-cutting of industry depending on whether their cost of production is below or above the necessary labor time, that consequently leads to a falling rate of profit as the ratio of variable-to-constant capital decreases.
>[The classical economists] attempted to base their theory of value on the labor involved in producing a good or the usefulness of the good, by some objective measure.
>But consider such a simple case as finding a diamond lying on the ground during a stroll.
Half-truth, since Smith believed in this and it was Marx that introduced the split of subjective use-value and market-based exchange value. How ironic of Mr.Callahan! Either way, again fails to consider the consequences of his rules. The reason we have diamonds is because we collect them via "social production": someone has to mine them(or make them in a lab nowadays), another person has to transport them, yet another has to cut them, and however many in-between steps before you buy them for the love of your life. 'Invisible Hand' stuff, right? The more labor it takes to get diamonds, the less of them they'll be able to produce for a given investment, and if that ain't enough to meet demand you better find a way to make it rise(either through innovation or cost-cutting) before someone else does and takes your market share!
I could go on, but I think you get the point. A central flaw of strawmanning Marx as rejecting the "Invisible Hand" rather than arguing its natural conclusion; that is, monopolization, falling rate of profit, and the exploitation of the proletariat.
If I find anything more interesting to rebuke, I'll come back.
>>580500Read Parenti's book on Caesar and the Fredrick Douglass's first narrative. Actually reading first hand accounts of slavery makes the reality of the situation so much worse, I thought I knew how horrible it was, i didn't.
Does anyone have any YouTube lecture recommendations? I've run out of Parenti ones.
>>581026>>581026https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpc6eFEd8osVlCfKCrP6H2F9NJDPCcEqThere’s a few versions of him giving these lectures.
Mark fisher too if you’re okay with uhm’s.
Zizek is great but I know leftypol thinks he’s a nato shill.
David graber did a few great talks.
Half hour Hegel is great.
Banned from glowpedia for a year no idea why haven't been editing in years
and I helped write the NPOV policy years agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danuvius_guggenmosiThere is an error it this article
s/gape/gait
Some wikitard plz fix
Tankyoo
>>581030Did you start using a proxy? Could also be a dynamic IP address.
>>580952Wind in your back, lads. Wherever you go!
>>581040>trying to find a common denominatorTrying to find common political ground between them and you?
Maybe, although I'd be cautious about stereotyping based off something as broad as ideology.
It's useful to keep in mind things like remembering which co-workers have admitted to being socialists or who expressed annoyance when the manager's manager's manager made chilling comments when a conversation shifted to wage theft. I don't have to write it down, but if you know you need to write it down to remember then so be it. Just make sure you're not writing down their political views while they're talking ;)
>>581042I realize my reply is a bit low quality for /edu/, but the cultural fallout from two nukes through the Cold War tensions, plus high-profile nuclear plant disasters making world news (blah blah Chernobyl blah blah Three Mile Island) showed the real dangers of these plants, and their increased safety in the many decades since doesn't make news or get drilled into them by Fox & Friends. Cute puppies are more newsworthy than technological safety advancements. And I guess the Fukushima Fuckup doesn't help.
So, intense prolonged fear with no re-education means they're full of irrational levels of hate for the wrong things.
>>581045A vid full of lies from youtube's foremost Stalinist, unable to accept REAL, EXISTING tankie socialism that doesn't fellate his mustached daddy. Pathetic. You'd think he'd blame the guy who openly took credit for Stalin's death, Beria (see: Molotov's memoirs), but I guess FinBol can't handle putting the blame on a fellow gulag fetishist and statutory rapist.
When will Stalinists accept that so-called "anti-revisionism" theory is nothing but Trot degenerated workers state theory, but where Stalin is the good guy? Even the Trots have a better case for it, all Stalinists can do is try to slander an authentic communist as a counter-revolutionary for saying some spicy things one time, which weren't even false.
>>580504This still exists wow
I finished these books
>>581051Which unsourced claims? Or did people already forget what FinBol did. Unless you mean Beria, in which case lmao
>a smarter GorbachevI would say you're thinking of Beria, but even Gorbachev was smarter. Beria made Gorbachev look like Lenin by comparison. Here's the NYT praising him:
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/opinion/beria-the-reformer.html To whichever one of you retards insisted photosynthesis doesn't exploit quantum effects
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/scientists-find-link-between-photosynthesis-and-fifth-state-matterI told you so
>>581056I guess it's the mixed feeling of work time being a sort of doggy paddling through it all. I know I'm learning on the job, but it's only ever what's right in front of me. Say a motion to suppress, I'm only looking into what fits exactly the issue I'm arguing as opposed to a more broad perspective of the subject for future times I need to narrow the thing down. It feels almost like when you work out one muscle group too much and the others suffer because of it.
>>581057It's always been a little idea in the back of my head to have some weird rambling blog about the law, but I'm not sure what exactly it would look like. I feel like my understanding of all these things is so shallow. But maybe the blog becomes the excuse to set time aside to study and dig deeper into things and gives an excuse to write out my thoughts. Strange to think I could write from any place of authority after having met people far smarter and more experience than me.
>>581058I have a paralegal that works a few hours a week filing stuff whenever they have the time, but I do eventually need to hire help full time. Right now the appointed cases don't pay enough to really sustain even myself, but the county just gave us a raise. So maybe over the next few months.
Thanks guis.
https://www.youtube.com/live/6HicAVYbuZ0Live now the secretariat of the FPCI
Role of middle powers in a divided world
Finished "Organizations - A very short introduction" (2011) by Mary Jane Jo Hatch. This book is, well… let the work speak for itself:
<Einstein’s theory of relativity included the principle of the curvature of space-time, which implies that gravity forces light to bend, a phenomenon that has since been proven by scientific experimentation. One popular way of explaining what this discovery means in human terms is to note that, if we were able to look far enough forward in spacetime, we would end up looking at the back of our own heads. What does this imply about the positions we take in the world that define our ways of seeing as well as what we (think we) know? Would it be possible to look beyond the back of our heads and glimpse what lies over our shoulders?
<Metaphorically speaking, looking over our own shoulders is more or less what we do when we glimpse culture and come to understand its symbolism, social construction, and sensemaking processes. Keeping our shoulder in view reminds us that we are bound to a unique subjective position even though it is one that looks out on a larger reality we share with others who are similarly bound to their unique locations within the whole. This uniqueness explains the intersubjectivity required to access culture, we cannot experience it unless we engage with other cultural members. Might intersubjectivity position us to explore the fifth dimension lying within our collective consciousness?
<Combining the new physics with dynamic ways of thinking about the three Os suggests we always confront our past as we create our future in the momentary present of our existence. Culture manifests our heritage by inserting its vestiges into contemporary life, not unlike the idea of spacetime bending back on itself, an idea that provokes much speculation about time travel. Some physicists are convinced that jumps between two temporal points brought into proximity by the furrowed surface of five-dimensional space could allow for time travel. Could cultural intersubjectivity furrow individual awareness such that we might leap from our own narrow understanding to empathy with another cultural member or even with the whole?
<Given that culture allows us to symbolically align with our origins, as when we share stories of our ancestors or contemplate the artifacts they left to us, could it be that these intersubjective experiences constitute and/or grant access to a five-dimensional space whose contours form and are formed by our cultural heritage? Literature shows us that stories can transport us somewhere beyond the limits of ordinary consciousness, as do dreams and religious experiences. Some spiritual leaders, such as the Dalai Lama, have noted the striking similarity between the territory spirituality opens and ideas being explored by the new physics of hyperspace. As far as can be told from the archeological record left by the Cro Magnon, culture and religion originated together – why should they not work together now to help us confront the future?
Just finished reading: Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital
A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation
by Fred Moseley (published 2023, already on Libgen).
Michael Heinrich is an academic and has been a professional Marx explainer for several decades.
Moseley argues that what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. Mosely is basing his interpretation on various statements by Marx in Capital, for example:
<What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.
Now I know that some might think that this means that according to Marx what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. But apparently just because Marx wrote
<What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production
doesn't necessarily mean that he meant that what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production and Heinrich certainly denies that
<What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production
means that according to Marx what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. This is just like, Moseley's opinion, man, says Heinrich. So Moseley wrote a hundred pages to defend his interpretation (that what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production). Book's a bit repetitive IMHO.
Heinrich claims that according to Marx value is determined in exchange. In particular, Heinrich means an "exchange relation" which Heinrich defines in the glossary at the end of his Marx-explaining book like this:
<The relation between two commodities that are exchanged, considered in abstraction from commodity owners.
I could not find a single passage in Capital unambiguously supporting this. And indeed, it's a big gripe of Heinrich that Marx wrote in a very garbled and frustrating way from the point of view of those enlightened ones who know that's what Marx really meant…
Are you smarter than this parrot?
If not browse
>>>/edu/Been reading some random essays about the history of science. Dunno what to read next. What I will certainly not read is Michio Kaku's book
Quantum Supremacy, which Scott Aaronson (usually a very polite guy) shreds to pieces here:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321Excuse me coming through
A quick note on the video @ >>>/leftypol/1538283
Also [vid related] for archival purposes
Around the 29 minute mark Peterson criticizes Marx and Engel's for assuming that workers would magically become more productive once they took over.
This actually happened historically, most of the actually effective productivity tricks work places use now were developed by Stakhanovites.
https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1936-2/year-of-the-stakhanovite/year-of-the-stakhanovite-texts/stalin-at-the-conference-of-stakhanovites/Reality has a Marxist biasThis thread hit the bump limit and is in auto sage.
New thread
>>19860Unique IPs: 291