No.580502
<a onclick="highlightReply('2941', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2941">>>2941</a><br/>You beat me to it! I will have a read and get back to you next time.<br/><br/>I myself have been reading Capital lately with a reading group. It's getting juicy now that we've gotten past the first few chapters. Also going to start Towards A New Socialism soon, if anyone has any tips or resources for that that would be great too.
No.580504
John Brown by W.E.B Du Bois<br/>and the 18th Brumaire (I dun get it)
No.580505
<span class="quote">>Thinking</span><br/>About the Cuban revolution and how their modern focus on ecology and climate change can serve as an example for the soon-to-be socialist states.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Reading</span><br/>Capital Vol. 1 and some assorted Lenin to develop my Marxist thought.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Learning</span><br/>How money works.
No.580508
A thread outlines the differences between Marx and Engels since everyone seems to treat them as inseparable.
No.580509
<span class="quote">>Thinking</span><br/>I think a theoretical direction of an orthodox Marxist Leninism (spelling intentional) could be an effective way of breaking through a large amount of the sectarian fossilization within Marxist communist organizing and solidarity-building currently.
No.580510
<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?
No.580511
<a onclick="highlightReply('2954', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2954">>>2954</a><br/>Jesus that last one is pretty insufferable. I can't believe I ever bought into the whole vegan thing<br/><span class="quote">>In one suburban family home, a woman is threatened by a male fist;somewhere in another, a pet hamster gets flushed down the loo: both areworthless rubbish in the eyes of those who wield relationships of possessionover them.</span><br/>No don't throw that ball! You are exerting ownership of something you consider to be your property and that is bad! This part actually disgusts me honestly, to reduce the suffering of a refugee to that of a fish in a tank that has no water. And they wonder why they are accused of lifestylism! The points about the environment, and cost are reasonable, but they are clearly secondary reasons in the author's mind (since afterall they consider a hamster to be capable of the same suffering as a woman). <br/><span class="quote">>Animals are at the bottom of the dung heap</span><br/>I mean bacteria are definitely below any animal. They are constantly transported against their will, destroyed without mercy and used in industrial processes.
No.580512
<a onclick="highlightReply('2954', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2954">>>2954</a><br/><span class="quote">> A Vegan Revolution Against the Fast Food Empire</span><br/>I agree that it's nice and to the point. I do think that veganism doesn't actually solve these problems however, you can do all of this<br/><span class="quote">>we are individually taking a responsible approach to living a healthy life. With community gardens, local harvests, and organic food co-ops we can empower one another through working together and building a sustainable future. </span><br/>without being vegan. Apart from that it relies on the reader believing in "speciesm". Since it seems you support these ideas, what does animal liberation look like to you?
No.580513
I've been thinking a bit about which definition of the state is better, the marxist or anarchist definition. I'm an ML so I obviously consider the marxist definition to be more accurate however viewing it through anarchist lenses I still think what the goal of most anarchists looks like is still a state. If a state is a political apparatus with a monopoly on violence, wouldn't a free association of communes act as the de facto state? As long as your society has enemies, your FAoC would have a monopoly on violence (to combat your enemies of course, unless anarchists purposefully don't want to have a monopoly on violence, which would be putting them at a huge disadvantage. This is why the marxist definition is so much more accurate imo.
No.580514
Morning comrades. You reached for the book, and not the phone this morning, right?
No.580517
Where my comrades at?
No.580518
<a onclick="highlightReply('2983', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2983">>>2983</a><br/>Good Luck.
No.580520
<a onclick="highlightReply('2966', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2966">>>2966</a><br/>Could you provide more detail on what you're working on?
No.580522
<a onclick="highlightReply('2990', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2990">>>2990</a><br/>I want to create a manifesto of sorts, a bunch of ideas for a new-left movement, largely based off the thoughts/writings of one person. To motivate people and try getting a better understanding of the condition we are in.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('2991', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2991">>>2991</a><br/>Thanks for the suggestion, I haven't heard of this before, but it seems a little less 'organised' than what I'm looking for. I'm currently not sure how much I want to write myself and how much I want to keep quotations in full. <br/>I guess I'm mainly looking for a way to create an efficient workflow, I will be dealing with many different writings on various topics. So currently I have a selection of chapters for the book, and then I will read through each text and just find bits of interest to copy into some big text document.
No.580525
<a onclick="highlightReply('2997', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2997">>>2997</a><br/>cute meganekko
No.580526
hello, anyone has read Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani? how does it compare to Nick Land? is it worth reading?
No.580527
I cant motivate myself lately and my focus is shitty but I plan on reading about some philosophical terminology and book reading.<br/><br/>In the nearer future I hope that Ill touch some history of philosophy and of marxism.
No.580528
yo
No.580529
<a onclick="highlightReply('3022', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3022">>>3022</a><br/>yo<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('3020', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3020">>>3020</a><br/>Make a schedule to do an hour of reading a day
No.580530
trying to get through Hegel’s Lectures on the History of philosophy. still somewhat confused by his use of the word “Notion”
No.580531
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.
No.580532
<a onclick="highlightReply('2940', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2940">>>2940</a><br/>I've been thinking about making a Esperanto and Spanish keyboard, I just don't know whether of not I should include additional symbols or just copy the one someone already made but just make it for Linux.
No.580533
got to refresh my already shit japanese
No.580534
<span class="quote">>thinking</span><br/>feeling conflicted about the place of democracy in party structures and in future communist society. Basically the debate between the direct democracy advocated by Cockshott, or keeping the decision making in the party leadership, or some mix.<br/><span class="quote">>reading</span><br/>just finished hinterland, pondering what to start next
No.580535
Besides Deluze, are there other theorists who believe that the revolutionary subject is not the working class, but the self-defeating internal logic of capital itself? I wonder if it's even possible for a conscious political force to oust capitalism because it's even more of a world system now than it was in Marx, Lenin, or Mao's time.
No.580537
<a onclick="highlightReply('3033', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3033">>>3033</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('3037', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3037">>>3037</a><br/>to add to that last part about values, really the only experiences that make me challenge capitalism as a whole are ones that ive had ourside of its grip. Obviously shit sux doing wage labor and experiencing how society is to its constituents, but really all levels of shit can be dealt with with drugs, self-help, and delusion. Suffering is never revolutionary, especially in a world with pharmaceuticals. I wonder how much that plays a role in how unrevolutionary the US seems, for example. Like we never had a past of indigenous people incorporated into our society. The american society clashed with various indigenous ones and ultimately wiped them out or assimilated them, or imprisoned them in foreign (to them) plots of land. So we have no cultural "outside" or past even really.
No.580538
<a onclick="highlightReply('3037', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3037">>>3037</a><br/>link broken
No.580541
Learning calculus and linear algebra to better understand economics. Also reading works of Edward Bernays since he really is a fascinating character, even though he shouldn't get much sympathy.
No.580542
<a onclick="highlightReply('3059', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3059">>>3059</a><br/>There's a linear algebra thread on this board somewhere if you're interested and don't know already
No.580543
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> No.580544
I've been reading a PDF about the rational kernel of Hegel. Someone posted it in one of those anti-dialectics threads.<br/><br/>It's pretty interesting so far, I've been stuck on reading, but slowly going back.<br/><br/>I've been reading on Hegel more generally. It's really interesting and the little I've understood so far seems very profound. I find myself applying the theory (as I understand it) IRL which has been very fun. I want more! But I suck at reading.
No.580545
<a onclick="highlightReply('3542', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3542">>>3542</a><br/>Share plz
No.580547
<a onclick="highlightReply('3543', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3543">>>3543</a><br/>If you read anything let me know. I've been wanting to discuss hegel, but I still feel too baby to do it.
No.580548
I take the bar exam for the third time on monday. So I've been reading outlines and practice questions. Reading infinite jest before bed. <br/><br/>God I don't want to fail again. Both previous times it was by 1%. Now it's all online. How is it that I can dismantle the ideological underpinnings of any person I meet, but I can't pass this stupid neoliberal bullshit exam. God damn it. <br/><br/>Wish me luck anons. And if you figure out how to unlock your subconscious through meditation or lucid dreaming, let me know, I know that I know this stuff I just can't remember any of it.
No.580549
<a onclick="highlightReply('3553', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3553">>>3553</a><br/>Good luck comrade. I know how you are feeling, it is truly awful. You have got it all under control. I have however heard very good results regarding meditation as a tool of focus and relaxation (in the anti anxiety sense).
No.580551
<a onclick="highlightReply('3557', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3557">>>3557</a><br/>Thanks Comrade. Test is tomorrow and tuesday. I have prayed to the gods and cast the runes. I am hogging down spaghetti and meditating. I am not doing this a fourth time. <br/><br/>Also kinda new, wow /edu/ is slow. Thought it would just be lefty /lit/.
No.580552
<a onclick="highlightReply('3562', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3562">>>3562</a><br/>Yeah it's a great board, lots of high quality posts, but that comes at a price
No.580553
Hello comrades, I’m reading On the Genealogy of morals by Nietzsche, am I in the wrong to be thinking this guy is fucking retarded? This guy would have been deffo been a nazi
No.580554
Am going to finish State and Rev, am gonna move on to finish Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and then I'm gonna read What Is To Be Done?. I admit I'm not really diligent in my studies as I spend a lot of time online since I can't really go out and organize. I'm gonna change that and improve myself, though. I've also been studying more Serbian and want to be able to visit my family in Serbia on my own at some point rather than needing someone to go with.
No.580555
<a onclick="highlightReply('3553', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3553">>>3553</a><br/>Read Infinite Jest this summer. I haven't researched this, but Wallace strikes me as sort of centrist, maybe conservative in some of his stances. That being said the novel has really stuck with me. The story is filled with so many details that pander to North American nostalgia, the landscape that all the characters inhabit is just so American to the detail from sports to TV to suburbia and adolescent culture. How far are you anon?
No.580556
<a onclick="highlightReply('3571', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3571">>>3571</a><br/>Let me check…<br/><br/>I'm on page 342. First time I tried was for the meme and dropped it at 64. Now it's because it's so real. The themes of isolation, addiction, escapism, expectations, unused potential. It all resonates so deeply. It feels like a personal attack on my near 30 years existence on this earth. He really captured the zeitgeist of American consumerism. Those boring little details he so endlessly describes that everyone experiences but are so minute that you don't actively think about them. This time around it has been a much more interesting book. I've laughed aloud a few times even. I've watched most his interviews and read a bunch of his articles. Can't wait to finish reading it. It's been haunting me for years now. <br/><br/><br/>Also day 1 of the bar exam finished. Fuck my brain hurts. 1 day left.
No.580557
Ive been trying to read imperialism by lenin. Been thinking about how solarpunk has a lovely aesthetic and a bunch of sort of beliefs baked into it that make it very amenable to a new communism. Im not sure i buy that the sort of centralisation the USSR and China have are necessary and ive been trying to find works/write my own theory on how we might create more decentralised states. Ive read a little bookchin but i hate his writing so tyle so its a struggle.
No.580558
Just finished reading Blackshirts and Red by Michael Parenti, it was an enjoyable read and he really got the point across about how shit the restoration of capitalism in the warsaw pact was. Also I found his chapters about Left-wing anti-communism and leftists who refuse to talk about class to be really relevent considering the state of breadtube and grifters like Vaush. It's a book I'd recommened to anyone especially those who are still infected with the liberal idea that fascism and communism are both terrible totalitarian ideologies.
No.580559
<a onclick="highlightReply('3594', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3594">>>3594</a><br/>Based. I read that book a few years ago.
No.580560
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> No.580562
<a onclick="highlightReply('3600', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3600">>>3600</a><br/>Is there an English Translation?
No.580563
<a onclick="highlightReply('3601', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3601">>>3601</a><br/>As far as I know it has only been translated to Spanish and Portuguese.<br/>I'm actually thinking of translating it myself, but I don't know if I have the time right now. Maybe if I get some other comrade on board.
No.580565
<a onclick="highlightReply('3610', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3610">>>3610</a><br/>I am more at one with failure and the world this time around than the previous two times. I've come to accept who I am regarding taking the bar exam. Some parts I think I did well, other parts might be up in the air. It's all just tumbling down<br/><br/>tumbling down<br/><br/>tumbling dowwwwwwwwwwwn.
No.580567
I've been reading a lot about the Red Army Faction and the situation in West Germany in the 70s in general. Absolutely fascinating stuff.
No.580568
<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.
No.580570
<a onclick="highlightReply('3643', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3643">>>3643</a><br/>I'll know in December. In the mean time I'm in a weird limbo for employment. Not a lawyer yet, nor do I want to leave the house and accidentally kill my grandmother.
No.580571
I am re-reading Harry Cleaver's "Reading Capital Politically" to hopefully use it as the basis for an introductory study group on economics (as it covers a few chapters from Capital 1) but not sure if it will bear any fruit.
No.580572
Just started taking a sociology course and I'm eager to read all of the material (it includes Marx, Gramsci, Weber and others) yet I feel intimidated by the amount of work expected - a large volume of reading, annotation and writing expected weekly. Anyone have similar experiences with how to manage rigourous social science courses for newbies?
No.580574
<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> No.580575
I'm pretending to do my homework. Never posted here before, and I want to read theory but I'm always procrastinating. Help me, I'm in neverending pain.
No.580576
<a onclick="highlightReply('3678', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3678">>>3678</a><br/>Read the books atomic habits, deep work, and make it stick. Do your homework anon.
No.580577
<a onclick="highlightReply('3679', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3679">>>3679</a><br/>Thank you… Last time I tried reading a book for productivity I almost read half of it. I'm afraid that nothing I read will work because my impulse control is so fucking abysmal.<br/><br/>Anyway, <span class="spoiler">I'm trying to fix something that someone helped me write for my assignment, which is overdue at this point, but god fucking damn, my douchebag-ass neighbors just had to throw a fucking party with alcohol and blaring music right when I'm most worried about submitting this shit ASAP. It's midnight, and it sounds like it's coming from inside my house. Makes me wanna shoot myself, I'm actually tearing up. Sorry, I just wanted to get it out my chest.</span> I think I'll stick around this board from now on and try to actually read something.
No.580578
I'm investigating about Object Oriented Ontology.<br/><br/>The name has semblance to a programming concept which is pure neoliberalism and makes me want to shoot myself. There is still a lot about philosophy that I don't get, it sounds radically different than hegelianism (and materialist/marxist hegelianism), because as I have understood it so far, it ignores the human element in the understanding of reality.<br/><br/>An object is never just itself, it exists in relation to a shit ton of things, and these relations are social in nature. The social part is human. It could be animals of course, but the point is that a set of consciousnesses has to create said social relations of objects. Zizek doesn't seem to have too many qualms on this area as far as I've seen, so maybe I'm missing something obvious.<br/><br/>And it seems OOO is kantian + heideggerian in origin? Which ignores the advances made by hegel and marx to "unify" the phenomena and neumena.
No.580579
<a onclick="highlightReply('3683', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3683">>>3683</a><br/>Hmmm, from a youtube comment of a lecture of the star of OOO:<br/><span class="quote">>Most of the issues raised by Harman in this lecture were solved long ago by Hegel. It's disturbing how many philosophers can still continue to work in the shadow of Kant.</span><br/><br/>So maybe I'm not that far off the mark. I feel a need to tell everyone IRL about my shitty understanding of Hegel, but nobody seem to give a shit TT_TT
No.580580
<a onclick="highlightReply('3683', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3683">>>3683</a><br/><span class="quote">>a programming concept which is pure neoliberalism and makes me want to shoot myself</span><br/>How many layers of ideology are you on right now?
No.580581
<a onclick="highlightReply('3683', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3683">>>3683</a><br/>I don't think OOO is kantian or heideggerian explicitly. Maybe just on the most vague levels. Would like it if someone else could clarify.
No.580582
Rafiq thread was excellent. My collection of his compilation of posts grows and I am very happy with the discussion there.
No.580583
<a onclick="highlightReply('3682', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3682">>>3682</a><br/>Did you get your stuff done anon? Did you at least get some sleep? It's all gonna be okay bud.
No.580584
<a onclick="highlightReply('3710', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3710">>>3710</a><br/>Thanks for taking the time to read it, Comrade
No.580586
<a onclick="highlightReply('3738', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3738">>>3738</a><br/>go check on libcom, im pretty sure i saw something like radical america there
No.580587
Finished "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. It's musings about how minds work without talking about the brain as an organ, very autobiographical and full of tedious punning (I admit I'm somewhat biased against puns in general as I always think about the poor translators when I encounter them).<br/><br/>He makes the point that language doesn't only have metaphorical meaning in a few sentences here and there. People talk and think in metaphors and analogies all the time, it's just that we usually only explicitly call out the big and wild ones. He gives an example of you eating a cookie from a plate and remarking it's delicious, some kids then eagerly grab similar-looking cookies from the plate (instead of pulling the one you said is good out of your mouth like a REAL SCIENTIST would, stupid kids). The kids reached a conclusion through a mini-analogy. Hofstadter has actually worked on a computer program that finds analogies and my hope when picking up the book was he'd describe it in some detail as well as other AI research, but he doesn't.<br/><br/>Instead he craps on soul-body dualism, ultra-individualism, and John Searle's Chinese room argument. He argues against these three entangled issues (or is it one issue?) very well, but I didn't need any convincing. I'm more like Hofstadter when it comes to that than he is himself.
No.580588
"The Invention of Capitalism" by Michael Perelman, very good book about Adam Smith and other classical economists. It's a common trope among Marxists that economics used to be more scientific while the bourgeoisie had been a progressive force and then took a nosedive post Ricardo. The book shows that the change to capitalism was not a basically automatic outcome of tendencies within feudalism, but to a great extent helped by political machinations, with our respectable philosophers/economists being quite aware of that and being for a rather hands-on approach despite how they are remembered. There's some real vile shit in it from their private letters.
No.580589
<a onclick="highlightReply('3738', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3738">>>3738</a><br/>guess that guy succeeded his goal of triggering me because wow, fuck that guy. burning a book isn't the most evil thing you can do but it is one of the most transparently, pointlessly evil things you can do, IMO
No.580590
<a onclick="highlightReply('4124', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4124">>>4124</a><br/>I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter.<br/><br/>The rest of your post was good, I have little to comment on, but I enjoyed your review.<br/><span class="quote">>I'm more like Hofstadter when it comes to that than he is himself.</span><br/>Based and marxism-pilled.
No.580591
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.
No.580592
halfway through my first book since probably middleschool, Against Empire by Michael Parenti<br/><br/>I wish this board was more active<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4382', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4382">>>4382</a><br/>someone did this on /mu/ once too, they got a whole suitcase full of EXTREMELY rare Three Six Mafia tapes and other very valuable Memphis Rap releases and were like, <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>I no longer agree with the message of this jungle music, it promotes violence and degeneracy</span><br/><br/>and then procedes to start melting them and throwing them in the garbage
No.580593
<a onclick="highlightReply('4407', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4407">>>4407</a><br/>I've had this book for a while but have put off reading it. Maybe it's time. <br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4412', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4412">>>4412</a><br/>You can make it more active comrade. Look through the catalog and see if there's anything you like if you don't wanna make a thread!<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4408', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4408">>>4408</a><br/>Based. One of my favorite Engel's works, was a huge breakthrough moment for me in getting the 'bigger picture' of humanity.
No.580594
Anyone read Ted Reese's book "Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown"?
No.580595
Am reading Carr's History of Soviet Russia. Currently on Part 3 (Socialism in one coutnry), vol. 1. PARTS 1 and 2 were really good.
No.580596
Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations". When people sit alone at home and do philosophy, they rip words out of their usual social contexts, and with these shifted meanings they "find" many "logical flaws" in how normies are talking. Wittgenstein points to normal usage of words and while he gives many weird scenarios, their purpose is to highlight by contrast something about how language normally works. No familiarity with other philosophical works is needed to read this. The less familiar you are with philosophy, the more often you'll say to yourself while reading: Well, isn't this banal. The more familiar you are with philosophy, the more likely it is you will get a headache.
No.580598
It's Christmas comrades. Time to get some mulled wine and armchair away the days with good books. Still working my way through Zizek's Living In The End Times. Very much enjoying it regardless of its length.
No.580599
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.
No.580600
Hey, this is anon from earlier in the thread. I fucking passed the bar exam! Woo! Anyone know of any resources for leftist attorneys?
No.580602
<a onclick="highlightReply('4598', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4598">>>4598</a><br/>I lold
No.580604
<a onclick="highlightReply('4597', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4597">>>4597</a><br/>Congrats man! You're free!
No.580606
This site wont let me post threads, i wanted to create a thread with the contents below but the captcha 100% of the time says its wrong or expired so i dunno.. can someone post a thread for me?<br/><br/><br/>I have fuck all time but to be a proper revolutionairy i need to read and comprehend much more than i do. I don't have the time to read books and not remember the contents.<br/><br/>I was hoping everyone could drop their tips, hints and self-help books on reading and studying more effectively so that we can all become more effective students.
No.580608
<a onclick="highlightReply('4656', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4656">>>4656</a><br/>Lukacs wasn’t purged but he was exiled, and it was sort of his own fault
No.580609
<a onclick="highlightReply('4657', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4657">>>4657</a><br/>WHat did he do?
No.580610
<a onclick="highlightReply('4655', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4655">>>4655</a><br/><span class="quote">>make it stick</span><br/><span class="quote">>how to read a book</span><br/><span class="quote">>deep work</span><br/><span class="quote">>atomic habits</span>
No.580612
Still reading Hegel's logic. (a secondary source on Hegel's Science of Logic). I read ridiculously slow and I've been very distracted lately.<br/><br/>I'm like 20% of the book done after months of reading lol. I recently shared the books with a friend and they already surpassed me -.- <br/><br/>My biggest hurdle is actually starting to read. The book's material is not easy for me, so I actively try to not read. I can have the book open in front of me, but I'll watch an hour of youtube videos just to avoid starting to read. I'm not sure how to mitigate this.
No.580613
<a onclick="highlightReply('4678', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4678">>>4678</a> (me)<br/>I was reading Capital a while ago, also ridiculously slow. I noticed I've gotten much better at reading, because when I read normie books, I can read them much much quicker and with less effort than before (I still read them slow, but at least I can read now). I stopped reading after chapter 1 *facepalm* but I'm meaning to retake it once I've matured my Hegel knowledge a little bit more.
No.580614
hey guys
No.580615
<a onclick="highlightReply('4726', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4726">>>4726</a><br/>Hi friend. I’m almost done reading Bullshit Jobs: a theory.
No.580616
Wondering how to get USanos with an libshit allergy to Stalin to study Stalin's works
No.580617
is anybody here?
No.580618
<a onclick="highlightReply('4762', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4762">>>4762</a><br/>yes
No.580619
<a onclick="highlightReply('4762', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4762">>>4762</a><br/>Yeah, just holiday busy. I bought a book I plan on reading soon. I'm somewhat tired of the book I was reading previously.
No.580620
Reading Frances Stonor Saunders' Who Paid the Piper? about the cultural Cold War of the mid-20th century. It's really interesting but the "cast" of important figures is vast and quickly becomes difficult to keep track of.<br/><br/>Willing to compile a short list of the most mentioned people if enough interest arises.<br/><br/>Anyway, I like the book because it paints a really good picture of how great of a job the CIA did painting itself as innocuous when it came to cultural matters, even though it was pretty much everywhere. I imagine most of us are familiar with the horror stories of 1950's McCarthyism, but the other side of the coin is just as interesting to me: it could be as simple as getting a pre-screening of a new John Wayne western and slipping them a few thousand bucks to put more of an emphasis on freedom and individualism. Didn't even have to be an explicitly anti-communist movie, even though there were enough of those to go around as well - quite the opposite, the CIA's involvement in cultural projects it didn't start itself was designed to steer independent art in a direction that benefited it most.<br/><br/>Another great example of how the CIA achieved this was by appropriating burgeoning artistic movements before they had a chance to make a name - or a means of making a living - for themselves: the abstract expressionist movement that arose from the New York avant-garde. In the name of freedom and fatherland, through CIA assets like the MoMA, artists like Rothko got more exposure and cash than they knew what to do with.<br/>I'm not through with the book yet and I know my thoughts seem scattered as all fuck but still, I recommend it if you can keep track of all the guys.
No.580621
Don't know how active this is but I came and I saw.
No.580622
<a onclick="highlightReply('4780', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4780">>>4780</a><br/>Slow board, now on a new website. Things are a lot slower than they used to be, we can only hope threads like this help garner attention towards the board.
No.580625
<a onclick="highlightReply('4795', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4795">>>4795</a><br/><span class="quote">>fell for a /lit/ meme</span><br/>ngmi
No.580626
I am spreading myself thin between work stuff, errands, comradely work, and depression. <br/><br/>I bought On the origin of family. So far the writing is good. I needed something mellow, easy and pleasant to read. I'm tired of struggling to understand what I'm reading. I thought of reading fiction but it feels so pointless at this moment, I don't know why.
No.580627
I'm getting strong urge to start quantitative finance thread as I spent lot of time studying rigorous books on option pricing and stochastic calculus during lockdown <span class="spoiler">picking up few tendies here and there</span><br/><br/>I know, I know, this is no place for profaned bourgeoisie 'science' but I genuinely think there are few things we can learn from how modern 'quants' are modelling markets and how traders actually interpret it without even discussing actual trading.<br/><br/>There is not much linear programming involved so I do think it warrants separate thread from dickblast. whatdoyathink?
No.580630
<a onclick="highlightReply('4805', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4805">>>4805</a><br/>Do it, I may be able to participate with stochastic discussion but I'm by no means an expert.<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4804', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4804">>>4804</a><br/><span class="quote">>I'm tired of struggling to understand what I'm reading. </span><br/>Kek I've had this, origin of family is a good book to relieve that. I've always hated fiction also. Zizek's more normie targetted books are good too.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4783', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4783">>>4783</a><br/>I'm okay. Very anxious to start uni again. Hope you're good comrade.
No.580632
<a onclick="highlightReply('4809', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4809">>>4809</a><br/>Thanks for the recommendations. Which are zizek's normie books? Sublime Object of Ideology?
No.580633
<a onclick="highlightReply('4808', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4808">>>4808</a><br/>It's the year of the ox, so I'm hoping to get a cow gf if I can<br/><br/>Ngl it ain't looking good so far
No.580634
<a onclick="highlightReply('4811', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4811">>>4811</a><br/>I haven't read that one, I dunno how much it assumes knowledge of Lacan/psychoanalysis but it's definitely one of his most important works. 'Violence' and 'Virtue and Terror are good intro texts. The latter (he writes the preface* to a collection of Robespierre works and Zizek's analysis is far more interesting imo) is the first thing I read by Zizek, it's good and short just read it and see if it's your thing to be honest. 'Living In The End Timer' is also great, very large but it's almost like a collection of short stories about culture and relating these things to communism/psychoanalysis/philosophy, so you can pick it up and put it down without having to really follow a coherent 'story'. I'd recommend googling terms you aren't familiar with (objet petit a and so on) but not dwelling on this too much because you will come to understand these concepts and the way Zizek thinks through osmosis.<br/><br/>*He did a series of prefaces with Verso books, haven't read any others but I imagine they are all quit normie friendly, I'm sure there will be one on a topic you're interested in.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4812', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4812">>>4812</a><br/>Will pray for you comrade.
No.580637
<a onclick="highlightReply('3025', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#3025">>>3025</a><br/>Lovely sentiments. I applaud your choice of Against the Grain, especially.<br/><span class="quote">> 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.</span><br/>I relate deeply to this.
No.580639
If I want to truly understand the liberal mindset, who do I set out reading? <br/>Locke and Rousseau?
No.580641
is anybody here?
No.580642
<a onclick="highlightReply('4847', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4847">>>4847</a><br/>sure, yeah
No.580643
<a onclick="highlightReply('4845', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4845">>>4845</a><br/>Those and Adam Smith, if you want Classical Liberalism. You could read some sections from Wealth of Nations (no need to bother with the whole thing) and Theory of Moral Sentiments
No.580644
I'm an ex-/pol/tard, currently anarchist, please recommend me a book or two.<br/>I am not really interested in becoming a leftist, but I wanna know what socialism/communism really is.
No.580647
Trying to read all the books on the /read/ reading list and I've finished reading The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism by Lenin. It was shorter than I expected at only 5 pages and its like a short and sweet recap of what I've read in Socialism Utopian and Scientific. Overall it was an enjoyable read and my first introduction into Lenin's work. <br/>I also read Principles of Communism too which was another good short read and reads like a FAQ, I liked that it was written in easier to understand english than other works by Marx and Engels. Sometimes it would take reading a page twice to understand what was being said by them
No.580648
<a onclick="highlightReply('4874', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4874">>>4874</a><br/>What a nice post to read. <br/>:) have a good day anon.
No.580649
<a onclick="highlightReply('4875', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4875">>>4875</a><br/>Thanks! I hope you have a good day too
No.580651
<a onclick="highlightReply('4874', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4874">>>4874</a><br/>/read/fag here. Glad to see people are making good use of our reading list. We made it public in the first place so that people outside the group could also benefit from it. If you have any questions or comments about any of the books, feel free to join our chat. We also recently started a new reading group for new members, which is something that might interest you. Check our thread for any info you might need, <a onclick="highlightReply('4899', event);" href="/edu/res/3624.html#4899">>>4899</a>
No.580653
<a onclick="highlightReply('4917', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4917">>>4917</a><br/>Check out this thread:<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('4337', event);" href="/edu/res/4337.html#4337">>>4337</a><br/><br/><br/>I bet there are people willing to pay a premium to have someone else buy an e-book for them and pirate it.<br/>I can't seem to find a specific e-book online for free. I'm hesitant to buy it because it's like 30 USD and it'd only be for me. If I do buy it, I'd hate for it to be only for me, I'd rather share it. But I'm not skilled enough to cover my tracks, so I'd rather not do it.
No.580656
Just passing by, but I was wondering what would be a good way to develop myself philosophically and economically in a communistic way?
No.580660
<a onclick="highlightReply('4975', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4975">>>4975</a><br/>Up to around 1933 Carr's History of Soviet Russia is great.
No.580661
Am currently reading Capital vol I., together with Harvey's companion, frenchies' Reading Capital and Heinrich's Introduction to 3 volumes of Capital.
No.580662
<span class="heading">i'm from a poor family of brown mud people how do i become educated enough to slay the wh*te bougie menace with a flick of my tongue</span><br/><br/>I just got done reading Wage Labour and Capitol over the course of a week on my lunch breaks at work, might have to read it again as Marx is pretty obtuse at times.<br/><br/>I think I would benefit a lot from seeing the things Marx talks about from a different perspective, as what he says in WG&C is pretty intuitively obvious if you've had a job but I can't help but feel everything he asserts is just a bunch of made up bullshit
No.580666
Starting to read Spinoza. Have not really read much older philosophy, but some of the authors I've read have been positive towards him, (ie mark fisher). Anything i should know before jumping in?
No.580667
<a onclick="highlightReply('4976', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#4976">>>4976</a><br/><span class="quote">>The book diagram is nonsense</span><br/>Why? The link is broken for obvious reasons
No.580668
Checking in
No.580670
Just got through "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer (2009). It's one of those books about experiments revealing human biases like anchor values etc. (see also: Amos Tversky, Philipp Tetlock) and he tells some stories about how people decided in life-or-death situations. He makes you second-guess your urges. He also mixes in some "explanations" about what part of the brain apparently does what (based on data from injuries and brain-scan activity patterns). But what am I supposed to do with that information? I can't pull parts out and back in depending on the situation. Still, decent book overall. The writing is easy to follow and engaging. He's like a less hacky version of Malcom Gladwell.
No.580671
Finished "How I Learn Languages" by Kató Lomb, Hungarian polyglot and professional translator sharing anecdotes from her life and tips. She says that you absolutely must dedicate at the very least 10 hours a week to the language you wanna learn. Normie language courses are good but they take forever, so her idea is you should just lie about your skill level and do a ton of extra learning in addition to the course. Rather unusual advice by her is to start reading books in the target language fairly early on. Just annotate the shit out of what you read… I don't know what to think about that.
No.580672
<a onclick="highlightReply('5918', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#5918">>>5918</a><br/>I've read this. I remember the anecdotes being fun but the actual advice wasn't anything new. Well, it's an older book so I can't blame her.
No.580673
Finished "Sugar" by James Walvin (2018). Walvin is a historian and his big thing is slavery. Sugar played a huge role in that, not only because of the slaves directly involved in the sugar sector, but also by boosting demand for chocolate and coffee. The book also covers the 20th century and the current obesity crisis. It's an important topic and I'm sure the author did thorough research, but I found it tedious to read. He often talks through numbers and more numbers showing development of trade patterns and what have you, when he could and should have just used some charts instead.
No.580674
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.
No.580675
I'm currently reading your mind<br/><br/>DUDE WTF is your problem, You want to do what with my cock?!??
No.580676
<a onclick="highlightReply('2940', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#2940">>>2940</a><br/>visiting /edu/ again, just saying hi<br/><br/><span class="spoiler">currently doing Operations Research, thinking about how to build better shelves</span>
No.580677
<a onclick="highlightReply('6210', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#6210">>>6210</a><br/><span class="quote">> It really is a book written only for people who live in the US.</span><br/>I'm sick of this shit, I was thinking of just not reading books written by Americans but on some topics it is hard to find pirate-able alternatives in languages that I understand.
No.580678
I'm thinking that DiaMat is bullshit for the most part except as a tool for historical, sociological, anthropological, geneological analisys.<br/>By this I mean if you wanna understand something look at the material/economic base of it.<br/>The reason why we eat with fork and knife has a material basis. <br/>Superstructure doesn't influce the base, just enforces it and validates. Focault is right in his analysis if you consider his work as analisys of the superstrucure.<br/>The history of european Anti semitism has a material basis.<br/>But contradiction, stages and prediction are just gnosticism for atheists
No.580679
I'm listening to Adam Tooze's The Deluge and it's pretty cringe. Can anyone recommend some based historians?
No.580680
trying to learn to code something
No.580681
<a onclick="highlightReply('6533', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#6533">>>6533</a><br/>What are you trying to code?
No.580682
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.
No.580684
I been contiplating why I always seem to get stuck on learning a new language. I think I understand now why after having been reading through a book I recently picked up. Fluent Forever it was called, and since it was an ebook version I was about to read it for a few hours be realizing I what I had been doing wrong. I wasn't making the language stick because our brains have these filters out any foreign words that it doesn't deem important.<br/><br/>That's when I realized that I wasn't making the progress I wanted because first I was forgetting everything. I wasn't making memorable and meaningful connections to the words. I was also trying to just translate everything rather than actually learning. It also showed that I should try and learn how to pronounce words properly than to sound like a dumb burger speaking in a broken language. It also I was bored with the methods i was doing as it wasn't engaging and as such well. There are three main languages I am wanting to get a handle on. Spanish. German, Chinese. Chinese of course will the the one to take the most time but is one that is very interesting with its character system. Though its tonal system for speaking is a pain in the ass to do correctly. Spanish mostly LatAm spanish since I am a burger and that is the Spanish I am exposed to everyday when I hear spanish speakers. German well its one of those languages that seems funny having extremely long words to mean small things and I kinda like that about it.<br/><br/>So I plan on learning one of those three first and just stop being a monolingual burger and actually connect with more people.
No.580686
<a onclick="highlightReply('6538', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#6538">>>6538</a><br/>Here's a list of German "sentences" that are one word long: <a onclick="highlightReply('6106', event);" href="/edu/res/6106.html#6106">>>6106</a> I'm building a list of around 600 words that closely follows the list of basic vocabulary from Fluent Forever and will put it in that thread. (I can't make everything what the FF list asks for because some translations just have too much ambiguity and especially the prepositions are hard/impossible to translate.)
No.580688
Just finished <strong>The Governance of China</strong> by Xi Jinping (2014). This is a collection of speeches. Did you know that China has over one billion people? Xi Jinping is here to tell you that. 24 times. He often makes references to various writers from several centuries ago, to folk sayings and so on, and there are very helpful footnotes, but I have to say it's pretty boring overall. There is also an appendix that tells you about his life and that China has over one billion people. He comes across as someone who is serious about fighting corruption (that was also the impression in leaked internal communication of our friends from the American Intelligence community who seemed upset about that for some reason) and someone who cares a lot about how ordinary people are doing. He namedrops Marxism a lot, but whether he has a deep grasp of it I cannot tell on the basis of these speeches.
No.580690
Read <strong>Atomic Habits</strong> by James Clear (2008). He does this usual liberal thing where he talks like believing that half the world's population are business owners, aside from that it's an OK book.
No.580691
Thinking about <a href="
https://sci-hub.do/donate" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://sci-hub.do/donate</a> No.580692
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> No.580693
I want to make Moldova socialist again
No.580694
<a onclick="highlightReply('6682', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#6682">>>6682</a><br/><span class="quote">>unironically shilling TGI</span><br/><br/>confirmed for not reading it
No.580695
<a onclick="highlightReply('6831', event);" href="/edu/res/2940.html#6831">>>6831</a><br/>Uhh what? Chapter 1 of The German Ideology is one of the most fundamental and complete pieces on historical materialism out there. It's on every marxist reading list.
No.580696
Finished The Human Drift (1894) by King Camp Gillette. He's big on the advantages of big-scale production and planning, believing that it would be most efficient to only have one mega-city per continent as a long-term goal, perhaps even only one city on earth. People will only work a few years of their lives. The "job market" will be regulated not by payment differential, but by how long the individual has to work. So positions with few applications will be made more attractive by reducing the amount of required time per person. He wants equality but doesn't want to give people identical consumer budgets, he instead believes that changes in education and culture will be strong enough so that people just taking what they want for free won't cause any problems! (I certainly disagree with that.) There are a few diagrams laying out the structure of city and buildings. There is also a tedious poem in there where Satan represents capitalism or whatever.
How to get to the glorious future? He proposes a big company to suck up all the competition. It's a democratic company because one share costs almost nothing and every shareholder gets one vote irrespective of how many shares they have.
No.580697
>>580693Bazat si rosupastilat
No.580698
Hu
No.580699
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.
No.580700
>>580699Also iirc Erika Doss mentioned this in passing, but during his years in New York City, Benton apparently let the early CPUSA use his loft as a meeting place a couple of times? I'm imagining what could've been had Benton just became a marxist. Perhaps the party's cultural programs would've actually amounted to something during the 'Third Period' and 'Popular Front' years. Not all of Benton's art writings are readily available, but he didn't start to become more like explicitly anti-communist until after receiving word of the Moscow Show Trials. On numerous occasions he just complains about 'totalitarianism' like a big brained centrist; it's annoying. But being 5'2" that's the kind of manlet energy I'd expect.
No.580701
>>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
No.580703
>>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?
No.580704
>>5807027H4Nx 4 p057In9 BR0
No.580705
>>580701Sorry I'm late to reply but Abstract Expressionism wasn't the 'first American style of art'—whatever that's supposed to mean. There were lots of stillborn trends in American Modernism before it, and much more visually interesting than Regionalism imo (one could point to the 'Precisionists' or even CPUSA-adjacent 'Social Surrealists' as immediate examples). I think Abstract Expressionism is important primarily because it signaled American artists' being dragged back into the art market, as FDR's New Deal programs were phased out during WW2. This is why many artists and art critics in the 1950s and 1960s ended up foolishly embracing 'art for art's sake'—it was a doomed rebellion against their surrender to the market, and was supposed to be contrasted with 'art for the sake of exchange-value'. Alas, this turned out to be wholly compatible with the circuit of industrial capitalism by the 1970s. The 1973 Scull Sale at Sotheby Parke-Bernet was the real watershed moment for American art. It's hard to say just how much two decades of covert CIA funding through the CCF really contributed to that. The art 'world' would've reoriented itself to New York from Paris even had they not.
No.580706
>>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.
No.580707
>>580706>imagine being an artistan *American artist, I should say
No.580708
>>580704>7H4Nx 4 p057In9 BR0hello /tech/
No.580710
>>580699Where can I start if I want to understand what the hell modernism is? Can I just jump in with this book or do you have a better rec?
No.580711
>>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.
No.580712
>>580500Thinking about my plan for the day. Nothing recently learned, sorry. Currently reading Mary Beard's China A History Volume 1 and Irish myths.
No.580713
I've read Capital vol. I last week for the 2nd time (1st was over 10 years ago). Took me about 6 months with reading a few pages every day.
Can't wait to start with Vol. II for the first time.
No.580714
Anyone know of any Marxist responses / rebutals to the field of crowd psychology? A rebutal to Gustave Le Bon would be especially nice to see, however I'd be interested in more wide covering of the topic as well.
Don't want to start a new thread, so posting here
No.580715
>>580714Is there anything particularly wrong?
>a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. No.580716
pretty new to reading theory, have read:
principles of communism by engels
dialectical and historical materialism by stalin
on practice and on contradiction by mao
the communist manifesto
socialism: utopian and scientific by engels
any suggestions where to go from here? thinking i should read some lenin at this point, either imperialism the highest stage of capitalism or the state and revolution
No.580717
>>580716Civil War in France and Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx, then State and Revolution by Lenin is a fun little reading list
No.580718
>>580715He also talks about how the crowd is inherintly conservative and seeks authoritarianism, a social group that is akin to a primitive beast which can only respect authority and craves for slavery, only rebeling when their slavemaster looses their power and is seen as too weak. Le Bon in his Psychology of the Crowd comes off as a turbo-reactionary.
No.580720
>>580717thanks for the rec! ill look into it
No.580721
I've noticed that my drive to read – seemingly – works in random bursts that last a few day days. Wonder how can i better harness it.
No.580722
Hello, I just came to leftypol to post funny pictures I found real quick, but right now I'm studying C++ with a book (which I've mentioned several times on /games/ and /siberia/).
Despite having above average autism score and being considered smart by many people throughout my life, I've become so slow at reading books and "boring" stuff that I can't stand reading even 1 page a day. I had to force myself to get to the end of each page when I had to read a chapter for homework; this got so bad that I dropped out of uni. However, it's not so hard for me to read this book because I really do want to become a programmer, so reading it makes me feel better. Maybe I'll do a degree in CS or something similar if I make enough progress.
And yes I'll also try reading SICP, I already downloaded it.
No.580723
>>580722>autism scoreI think we need to make a proposal to make an exception to this filter for /edu/.
No.580724
>>580723People on /edu/ should know more than anyone how much bullshit autism score is.
No.580725
>>580724I know, but I think it's better to leave it as IQ because there are serious discusssions about it here (like debunks and such), as opposed to being thrown around as an insult or used by /pol/fags, who never seem to touch this board. If someone wanted to copy and paste an effortpost about IQ on another site, for example, they would have to replace all the instances of "autism score". Anyway, they said they removed the filter for this board.
No.580727
>>580519That sounds awesome. I used to love the library as a kid. I aspire to be a book reader again some day. Thank you bookbros for helping motivate us lumpens
No.580728
>>580519Envious. Mine has barely any, actively discourages book purchase suggestions and is always struggling to get a hold of books I put in ILL requests for.
No.580729
>>580728Unlike most libraries they do offer to wrap hardcover books in plastic for literal pocket change which is nice. Although one of the librarians gave me the stink eye when I handed them my Stalin bio, lol.
No.580730
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 No.580733
>>580730It's been three and a half years
fuck and now I finally have the opportunity to post this screencap:
No.580734
>>580732Direct action gets the goods.
No.580735
Just finished "Codes of the Underworld" by Diego Gambetta (2009). It's a very interesting book about how people in the mafia and prison gangs act and why they act that way (why is self-harm so common in prison, why do ethnic gangs form, and so on). It ends with a funny/creepy essay about how movies are influencing the mafia.
No.580736
>>580735care to post a pdf?
No.580738
Embedding error.
Recently learned about the near-war between France and Brazil… over Lobsters
No.580739
>>580738Lmao, i have a cousin that feels very strongly about this
No.580740
>>580739Really? Relay their opinions m8!
No.580742
>>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?
No.580743
>>580742>why are some Europeans so insufferably snobbish? The same reason any bourg government is, arrogant selfishness. After all the Japanese pulled the same shit on China for decades.
No.580744
Just started reading Endnotes from the beginning. Curious to see their take. We definitely need some properly 21st century theory that isn't just retreading 19th and 20th century projects.
No.580745
"Artificial Intelligence in Perspective" by MIT Press (1994), a retrospective by various AI researchers. The issue was dedicated to Allen Newell (who had died in 1992) and his Soar project, but it's also about other stuff like the medical expert system Mycin. It's written in something pretty close to normal language and there is no mathy stuff or code snippets in there. Instead it's very philosophical.
No.580746
Finished "How to Lie with Maps" by Mark S. Monmoier (3rd edition, 2018). I suppose this has sold well because of the snappy name. Not a terrible book, but it's all obvious if you have half a brain. The author talks about how any flat map must distort the view of a planet, how different choices of threshold values for hues affect the impression of the viewer, and so on. (This irked me a bit: He mentions how Colin Powell used maps with wrong information to convince people of the necessity of going to war with Iraq. The author believes that Powell was mistaken. I believe he was lying.)
No.580747
>>580746Maybe the author would agree with you in private but was afraid of being sued for libel.
No.580749
>>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?
No.580750
Reading Marshall Mcuhan, seems quite interesting, i'm wondering how his technological determinist views can be integrated into marxism.
Also found a funny anti anglo quote in understanding media.
"The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall; "Another damned fat book, eh, Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?""
No.580751
>>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.
No.580752
>>580500i have a fucking headache, and digestion prbolems why am i on here
No.580753
Currently Reading Althusser's Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, i like it although i haven't gotten far. Besides that i am reading Snowden's book, Permanent Record, i also haven't gotten very far into it, so far is a normal autobiography, i guess that i haven't gotten into the good stuff yet.
No.580754
Just finished "Brain-Wise – Studies in Neurophilosophy" by Patricia Smith Churchland (2002). She criticizes modern philosophers for trying to disentangle themselves from scientific developments, talking about concepts like mind and conscience purely based on self-reflection and dialogue with each other and irrespective of the hardware, so to speak. (She probably wouldn't be entirely happy with that sentence since she also criticizes people who talk about brain as hardware.) How different are we from the other animals? She takes clues from just about anywhere: the rough impression you get from looking at the size and shape of brains, MRI scans, various experiments with subjects assumed to be normal / subjects with brain lesions / subjects under the influence of drugs. A lot of interesting experiments with humans, monkeys, rats, and even insects are described. It's a good book, though I'm not 100 % sure whether it's entirely fair to every philosopher who gets dissed in it.
No.580755
>>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.
No.580756
>>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.
No.580757
>>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.
No.580758
i wasted a good bit of the past few years thinking i could live according to philosophy
don't do it kiddos
No.580759
>>580758What if my philosophy is just living my life as i normally would anyway?
No.580760
>>580759that ain't philosophy
No.580761
>>580500I'm thinking about that shitty episode of Cosmos with Tyson where it's chock full of anti soviet/ anti communist propaganda.
No.580762
trotskyists and marxist-leninists are the same
they both have the same core of trying to build a philosophical hermeneutics of marx and lenin (when that’s literally an impossible and pointless effort) that’s used as a kind of justification for essentially utopian, idealist politics
there’s also like the weird implicit belief that the bolshevik accession to power was something that could have been predicted and thus re-applied, and this also carries over into the obsession over having a correct political line, as if that’s what really matters
No.580763
painstakingly tutoring USian leftists into grasping the most basic notions and concepts of das kapital (most of them are grad students btw although at some shithole state uni probably)
No.580765
>>580763Funny, it's usually Americans who've never read Capital who tend to call it "Das Kapital"—like, that's such an easy tell; it's so common lol
No.580766
>>580765i prefer the german title as a reminder of its original context
No.580767
>>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.
No.580768
>>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/ No.580769
>>580768whatever, i just use both interchangeably anyways, i don't really care
No.580770
>>580769And that's fine; I just don't want you contributing to a recurring problem among the US 'left'
No.580771
concept: pink terror
mass political/military terror by centrists/moderates
usually in the context of a popular rebellion against a reactionary government where once the bourgeois wing has gotten what it wants, it liquidates anyone to the left of them
usually not much distinguishable from white terror
No.580772
Someone should write a book called "The Economics of Vulgar Socialism", where they try to put liberals and conservatives understanding of socialism into a coherent ideology and economic model.
No.580773
Im trying to find a youtube video of a history seminar or conference or whatever of a US professor giving a history of the Korean War. This professor was militarily involved in it, not sure to what capacity, it was an hour long. Sorry for the small amount of info, i seem to have lost the link some time ago and suddenly i need it again
No.580775
marxist communism feels a lot like a petty bourgeois democratic movement. even bordiga's supposedly ultra conception of a totalitarian one-party "proletarian" state falls flat hard imo
No.580776
>>580500
> what you're readingprinted my copy of the communist manifesto, have been reading the first few pages
No.580777
Can someone recommend me the best biographies for Mao and Deng respectively?
No.580781
marx should've been more open about his atheism, and the young hegelians were based
No.580782
I am fully disappointed by the state of the left organization in a post-socialist country, and I have no idea how to even begin organizing without getting my own future in danger. I can only read and not shittalk with other leftist and it's making me depressed
No.580784
>>580782>without getting my own future in dangerWhat kind of future do you think you have?
No.580785
>>580782>without getting my own future in danger.I'm not gonna moralize you since I don't know what kind of danger you think you might be in, but generally speaking this is something that comes with the territory. All organizing is gonna make you a target and set a limit on the kind of carreer opportunities you can aspire to, at the very least.
No.580786
Reading "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisieg, 6th edition (still has the kanji for village and city mixed up) and "Making Sense of Japanese" by James Rubin (written for people frustrated with normal textbooks and somewhat humerous).
No.580787
>>580786I meant James
Heisig, sorry.
No.580788
Art and Production (1926) by the Russian communist artist Boris Arvatov is a rant about which artists and movements suck. (All of them basically. Vasili Kandinsky? Sucks.) There is an introduction by some wanker that goes on forever and my advice is to skip that. Arvatov describes how capitalism has changed art. Art used to be set in specific places and the interactions of the elements mattered (think of what's inside an old church). Sculptures could play a physical role in holding a building together. But now, the person doing sculptures or paintings produces things that can move between people and places, and the artist cannot really anticipate how it will aesthetically work together with other things. Arvatov urges artists to keep track of technical developments, to work together, and to go into the factories.
No.580792
I was just browsing to see what's active here.
What books do you recommend to not-even-socialists? Got a few people expressing a little interest in the things I'm saying. What about Manufacturing Consent?
No.580793
>>580792Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti is supposedly a better book covering the same topic as Manufacturing Consent, but I haven't read it yet. Parenti is certainly a more engaging writer and speaker than Chomsky.
No.580794
>>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.
No.580795
>>580793It's very basic, I don't think it's better than Manufacturing Consent.
No.580796
Finished “Entangled Life”, a 2020 book about fungi by Merlin Sheldrake. He is touching on many different topics, like where does a plant actually end. There are many plants that absolutely cannot live without certain fungi and it is misleading to just say their roots get this or that nutrient when the roots alone can’t get shit done without them. Sheldrake is hyping up the many uses of fungi for making food, medicine, packaging material, and even fake leather. There are also fungi that glow in the dark. What I miss is more precise information. I’d really like to know how exactly the fake leather is made and what exactly its properties are (can you wash it and at which temperature etc.) and how bright the fungi can be (as actual measurements) and how long they can keep glowing and so on. Maybe that stuff could be used to illuminate handrails, but there already are other materials that release light for a limited time after dark, and I’d like to see a proper comparison.
No.580798
Translators of Marx and Engels into English translating the gender neutral Mensch into "man" or "men" was a disaster.
No.580799
man kind and so on
it's normal usage in bonglish
No.580800
>>580500hey, does anyone has a poverty graph of the USSR before the perestroika (in other words 1986) ?.
No.580802
Reading "The Making of the Working English Class" rn. Would recommend, it will instantaneously dispel any crypto-chauvinist myths about "muh evil Anglos".
No.580803
<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.
No.580804
Finished "Who gets what" by Alvin E. Roth (2015), a so-so book about non-market allocation (e.g. assignment to schools and the kidney exchange). It's nice to read, but rather superficial. For most of it you can just go to Wikipedia and follow some links to learn the stuff in a faster and deeper way. But the stuff about how fucked up the American job market for lawyers is was very entertaining! The author has a very incoherent ideology (might be opportunism and not genuine). He points out how markets often suck and shows the alternative of putting things into the central COMPUTERGOD to plan things without use of money, and then he says he is against planning. The methods shown are highly efficient, and because central planning is bad, they can't be really central planning you see, they are akshully the free market, the free market in a big computer that doesn't do money-based calculation…
No.580806
>>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/
No.580807
>>580806i'd like to add it's an essential read for any communist in the "west"
No.580809
>>580808go back to twitter lol
No.580810
>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.
No.580812
Would anyone be interested in a weekly country discussion?
Where every week we pick a country and investigate its history, current conflicts, situation with socialists, major players etc?
I'm very ignorant on most of the world. I sometimes discover new countries I had no idea existed. I think it could be a fun exercise.
No.580814
>>580813god that was so epic
No.580815
I can't seem to will myself to read any theory lately. Instead, I've been reading the Foundation series by Asimov. They are very fun books! Very recommended to any Marxist, and anyone really.
Idk if I'm burnt out of reading theory, I just don't seem to care that much. Two years ago I was really excited to read marx. Not sure what happened.
No.580817
https://www.stallman.org/archives/archive-2001.htmlreading this over, it seems like there was a lot more leftist resistance against the security state crackdown immediately after 9/11 than i thought. kinda feels hopeful in a way
No.580819
>>580816Sounds like a good idea, check this out: >>6832
No.580820
Finding that I read Spanish better when I keep a notebook. On the left side of the page, I write the terms I haven't seen before, and on the right, I write character descriptions and important plot points(this section also being written in my best Spanish for reinforcement). This might be a general reading/language learning technique, but I found it on my own so I guess I can say I did something.
No.580821
Finished "Game Theory - A very short introduction" by Ken Binmore (2007). Well that was pointless. Once again, it's one of those books that don't do anything for you if you have already skimmed Wikipedia on the topic. The author loves to sniff his own farts and makes extremely broad statements about things he knows nothing about, it's almost unbearable – well, he's an economist, so what did I expect.
No.580822
The First 20 Hours–How to Learn Anything… Fast by Josh Kaufman (2013) is one of the less creepy self-help books (no diet that puts you in the hospital or anything like that). There are a lot of activities that have a steep learning curve and instead of dreaming about just knowing how to do it well, Kaufman says you should dedicate 20 hours of serious learning and after that you are through the most frustrating and boring shit (probably) and can decide whether it is fun now. You can get over a lot in just 20 hours if you use methods with rapid feedback like flash cards. He shows how he went through learning the basics of a couple things like using a different keyboard layout (for that he uses a program that directly measures what keys you suck at and throws them constantly at you). He also learns to play the Ukulele. It's an OK book.
No.580826
>>580822Is it exclusively about physical skills? I have found that a ton of these books about learning are actually only about a very limited set of well defined activities and don't generalize well.
No.580827
>>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)
No.580828
>>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. No.580829
>>580826The author does the 20 hours with Yoga, some basic programming, touch typing with Colemak layout, the game of Go, ukulele, windsurfing.
No.580830
>>580829Oh right it even claims to be about "skill acquisition". I just wish it did not have "Learn Anything…" in its title when it obviously won't help you with something like ornithology.
No.580831
I came here looking for that one really bad introductory philosophy book peterson published just before his benzo addiction got him in a coma
Anyone remember/have it? It's important I drag his name through the mud.
No.580832
adorno was right
>>580831just look up his bibliography
No.580833
>>580832Can't find anything on that, either I was wrong that it was jordan's book or the web got scrubbed
No.580834
>>580831Are you sure you are not confusing it with The Art of the Argument?
No.580835
>>580834YES, thank you, I was indeed confused
No.580836
>>580834I saw a clip of a Stefan Molyneux video a long time ago and it struck me how awfully bad faith he was for such a self-labelled rational intellectual. This was before I started "arguing" with /pol/yps and the like.
No.580837
Finished No Bosses, 2021 book by Michael Albert. It's about Participatory Economics or Parecon for short. Very vague, not a single algorithm in sight. He's saying exactly the same stuff as ten or twenty years ago. No revision of basic concepts is what I expected, but I couldn't even find a single new tiny thing. There is no reason for this book to exist.
No.580839
>>580838Some retard a little while back came here posting /webm/s like this to epically own the commies and unmask the Marxist conspiracy, and the vids were just some snotty-nosed kid reading 4chan tier schizo theories and highlighting the word "ANTI-FASCIST" to prove than the literal anti-fascist brigades in Donbass are part of the great shadowy Antifa organization. It's the most hilarious shit, I never get tired of it lmao
No.580840
>>580838>>580839 (me)
Here are the webms in question, saved for being absolutely hysterical lmao. This is what rightoids actually believe
No.580841
>>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. No.580842
Hope's a bitch, and that's why i can never get enough of it.
No.580843
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.
No.580844
>>580843Consider posting this on cybersoc if you haven't already.
No.580845
>>580844>>580843don't, they'll just call you a retard and spam you with "cope" the moment you offend them in any way
No.580846
engels sucks ass
No.580847
>>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
No.580848
Finished "Getting to Yes" 3rd edition, a supposed classic about negotiation, and "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss, another negotiation book. GtY was extremely boring and I didn't learn anything, NStD has the most gripping anecdotes (the guy dealt with hostage situations) and I also didn't learn anything from that. GtY is written from the point of view that you might meet again and again and that your reputation follows you, NStD isn't and so is much more aggro in what it recommends. All the "tricks" presented are banal in my impression, but perhaps people who are a bit Aspie-ish can benefit.
No.580849
>>580848holy fuck /edu/ has been full of brainlets recently, is it the russia shills
No.580850
>>580849I was already here when /edu/ was /freedu/, son. What's your problem, you believe reviewing mediocre books is not allowed here?
No.580851
>>580850/freedu/ was such a cool board
No.580853
Finished "Maphead" 2011 book by trivia king Ken Jennings about geography geeks: the map collectors, geo-quiz champs, geocachers, and also the author himself. I somehow expected to find some tricks for memorizing some geographic facts in it, but that never happened. But there are some interesting things here and there and the occasional sensible chuckle to be had. Have you ever heard of Mayda? – The story of a little island on old maps that wasn't found by the people using those maps so it moved a bit on the updated maps and then it wasn't found by the people using the updated maps, so there was another update… and this went on and on for several centuries until it finally vanished for good.
No.580854
today I learned of Serge Voronoff and his monkey testicle surgery as a male enhancement during the 1920s and 30s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Voronoff No.580855
What are people's opinions/recommendations on classical Greco-Roman texts? I'm probably to read Thucydides "The Peloponnesian War" after my current book. Are there any Marxist commentaries on some of these ancient works?
No.580856
>>580855I have a good list of primary sources for Greco-Roman texts but you'll have to wait a bit, I've got a ton of work to finish before tomorrow
No.580857
>>580856NTA but I'm curious too
No.580859
Today I'm reading The Country Under My Skin, a memoir by Gioconda Belli, a former member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. It has me feeling like I did when I read Jakarta Method, which is to say going from hopeful to mournful and back again.
No.580860
Finished The Microfoundations Delusion by J.E. King (2012), a very thorough compilation of economists being stupid about this one particular thing, perhaps too thorough. Within the first fifty pages or so he convinces you that requiring microfoundations for macroeconomics is pointless and that there have been many economists shilling for that wrong idea over the decades, then come a hundred more pages, and another hundred pages after that. Not only does he distinguish between authors for and against microfoundations, but he distinguishes between being against it out of practical concerns while supporting it in principle and being against it because one believes this sort of wholly one-sided causation direction doesn't exist out there in the real world, and he tries to tease out how strongly held this or that belief is; and he doesn't just tag the life output of an economist as belonging to one position, he tracks how the writings change over time, comparing different works and even different editions of the same work. And he also points out when economists in his view misrepresent other people on that topic. (It's so thorough it borders on creepy. How much time did he spend on this?) He also looks at the idea of building from micro to macro in other contexts and criticizes Richard Dawkins.
No.580861
Just got around to read The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Very short work with very general advice.
No.580862
So I snagged this book, Dušan Čalić: Actual problems of the development of the self-governing society in the SFRY and I'm seriously considering that ultimately, no matter how you work around it, insufficient material forces will lead to a collapse of any self-declared socialist state. I'm becoming an unironic dengist, bros, and I don't feel guilty. Seriously, it reads like some Stalin's apologia about the state of affairs in the USSR after they claimed to have built socialism.
No.580863
>>580862Oh and, if anyone's wondering, it's in Serbo-Croatian and there's no copies or pdfs online.
No.580865
Read Losurdo's Opera interview
https://archive.ph/ZLmI6 No.580866
ASB military is a good source on gab on Ukraine conflict
https://gab.com/ASBMilitary/posts/107949096229117807 No.580867
>>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.
No.580868
>>580867Based and thanks. Losurdo is really underrated on this site.
No.580869
>>580865Really nice read. Thank you for sharing.
No.580870
Not sure what to read next.
I want something light but also engaging.
Any recommendations?
No.580871
>>580870Well. Might get Liberalism by Losurdo, or Washington Bullets by Prashad.
And I'll make a thread about Losurdo, hopefully soon. Anything worth mentioning?
No.580874
>>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.
No.580875
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
No.580876
In Angela Nagle's book kill all normies she says: "The obsession with decline found on the alt-right today comes from a long conservative line of thought, who regularly drew upon books like Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century text that tied Rome’s
collapse to sexual decadence" What scholar elaborates on this? I want to read more about the obsession of the right about moral decay.
No.580877
>>580876Marx in the festo
No.580878
I first saw the triad Universal Particular Single in a Zizek book, and it looks like psychoanalysis, critical theory, and other modern kinds of studies use this triad, but i was reading a Claes Ryn book and he talks about Universal and Particular as a dyadic combo which goes back to Plato.
Anyone know when or from who this triad emerged? Before the singular/individual was what was meant by Particular, and universal was the sort of general category. I was reading the Ilyenkov essay on the Universal and he brings up all 3, but mainly keeps to a Universal-Particular thing. Is this a marxist thing or what? If anyone has any clue i'd be happy to hear it
No.580879
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.
No.580880
Is piracy praxis
No.580882
I just remembered about an anon talking about the old European nobility "buying in" to capitalism as it formed to maintain much of the class power they had under feudalism, anyone got book recs about this?
No.580883
>>580882Civilization and Capitalism mentions this
No.580884
Started reading Davies and Wheatcroft's Years of Hunger—any other recommendations for books on the Ukrainian famine?
No.580885
>>580884Fraud, Famine and Fascism by Douglas Totte.
No.580886
Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. The advice: Look at each sentence in isolation. Avoid passive formulations. You don't need to throw in buts wherever something contrasts and therefores whenever it connects. Trust the reader to have some sense of contrast and connections. Trust your intuition when something feels weak. But Don't trust what your intuition produces. That stuff is stereotypical. Keep sentences short. Name the things precisely. Consult the fucking dictionary, even for words you already know.
No.580887
I started reading Middlekauf and Kennedy's entries in the Oxford History of The United States(still need to get to Zinn though) and wondered if anyone else had book recs on US History.
No.580888
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.
No.580890
Finished Ciber-comunismo by Paul Cockshott and Maxi Nieto (2017). It's arguing the usual points from TANS and against Austrian economists, but in Spanish.
No.580891
Trying to become a mini-Michael Roberts or Cockshott and become a respectable Marxist economist. Beyond finishing Capital and Theories of Surplus-Value(along with ABCs of Communism), what else should I read to reach this goal? Yes, I'm aware that economy without political education is a slippery slope, and I hope that your recommendations will also accommodate for that as well.
No.580892
Hello. Does anyone have a link too Ismail's book suggestions that are on available on the internet archive?
No.580895
Which, out of the various philosophy threads in here, count as the general one?
No.580896
>>580894Thank you. I always forget to bookmark this eregime page.
No.580898
i'm the retard who was asking about what the deal was with universal(or general)/particular/singular division
i'd seen it in a way where singular seemed to take on the meaning of particular, and particular taking a more specific meaning at a higher order of categorization than singular. Anyways i was reading grundrisse and saw marx use the triad, and how he used it was keeping general and particular as they're known, and referenced singularity in regards to the unity of the two. I don't have my notebook or book rn but i think the phrase went smth like "blah blah is the general, blah blah being the particular, and blah blah being the singular which brings them together"
In case anyone also had this question. Now it's answered.
No.580899
Reading Thomas Pikkettys Capital and Ideology. The writing is refreshingly clear and to the point compared to 19th century French philosophy.
No.580900
I'm going to read Moby Dick
No.580901
History Anon here, I guess I've made progress; I pined a bit more through Vol. 1 of Carr's Soviet History, same with Years of Hunger, and I'm just starting Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Rothstein's history is fun to read, and adds a few more tidbits to the way that R. W. Davies and Alec Nove would cover collectivization. I'm certain, by the time this is over the average r/historymemes user will disintegrate at my touch.
Apart from that, I'm relearning the Piano.
No.580902
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?
No.580903
>>580902The passage is about
society-wide changes.
No.580904
Hey. I'm just here to say hi.
No.580905
Just remembered a pdf posted on this site, something about the USSR being close to radically altering its approach to labor time? I think the introduction talked about political and foreign relations reasons ultimately stopping the project from being implemented, anyone got it?
No.580906
>>580500reading a history of libya atm. Writer is a liberal, but he keeps mentioning the lack of domestic expertise as a hindrance for the development of gaddhafis libya, and its ability to expand beyond a simple oil producing state. Question is, why didn't the Soviet Union take advantage of this? I know the pan arabists were anticommunist in speeches; but this didn't stop cooperation between Abdelnasser and the Soviets, even as he arrested Communist activists domestically. What prevented the Soviet Union from pulling Gaddafi, who was relatively isolated, especially as Egypt's revolution is betrayed by Sadat, into the Soviet sphere?
No.580908
is
>How to argue and win every time
a good book about how to argue ?, if not is there others.
one i'd like is how to combat sophistry, because right winger and right-wing adjacent like breadtubers and their fans love it.
No.580909
The arch-typical capitalist story features a guy who starts with nothing but an idea, an idea nobody else has, and then this marvelous guy (who is a fusion of entrepreneur and engineer) is the first to bring the idea to market and is justly rewarded with fabulous riches. The Box by Marc Levinson (I read the 2nd edition, 2016) is not such a story. It's about the development of container shipping. And it's not really one thing, but an interlocking system of parts that must be compatible to bring the big savings. It did not take off earlier because of multiple reasons like anti-monopoly regulation standing in the way of one firm controlling several parts and making them compatible and transport fees depending on the particular goods (since you can't look inside containers, the default was to charge the highest fee!), and last but not least, unions being afraid of losing jobs (and with good reason).
It's a good book but drags on a bit.
No.580910
>>580500is there a book talking about this guy ?.
Molotov has more books about him.
No.580916
Reading a bunch of essays by Otto Neurath atm. It's all so very sensible and agreeable I feel I have never at any point in my life not agreed with any of it, so I'm afraid I'm not getting anything out of it – except the rhetoric!
No.580921
reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine. with the queen dead his anti-monarchy arguments feel more relevant. this shit based af
No.580922
finished capital vol 1 today. first bit was engaging, got real boring in the middle and finished strong. I'll probably read something by lenin next
No.580923
Read Cities of Salt some weeks ago, it's about how the discovery of oil changed a fictional, unnamed Arabian country. Excited to pick up the next two books in the trilogy which I assume will delve even more into class conflict, possible civil wars and national liberation.
Also found a pdf of some guide to dumpster diving on laincha, unfortunately, the author is an annoying right-libertarian and you can really tell
No.580924
Starting Economics of Location/Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft by August Lösch.
No.580925
Finished Marxist Glossary (2nd edition, 1947) by Llewellyn Harry Gould. It's a mediocre ML work, containing exactly what one would expect from that time: okayish description of Marxist concepts mixed together with random REEing at Anarchists and Trots. (Did you know that "Philistinism is another agency of Trotskyist provocation"? Riveting stuff.) I don't know why I bothered with it.
No.580928
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.
No.580929
comrades, does anybody have some good resources/starting points about the land back movement?
is it mainly a US/Canada movement or something prevalent in LATAM too?
No.580930
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.
No.580932
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.”
No.580933
>>580931thats so fucking cool, thanks for sharing it
No.580934
Picked up a book about church property and Mexican reform between 1856-1910 at the bookstore today, so happy to learn about that. Also found a book published in 1943 from a set about Mexican antiquity at my grandma's house. I hope I can read it, comprehend it, and maybe talk to her about it (it's in Spanish)
No.580935
Tell me more about the idea that the only way to get ahead in Soviet Russia was to screw people over. Reading recommendations, possibly?
No.580936
Finished A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I by Augustus De Morgan, a mathematician collecting crank theories in math and physics (zero times zero is one, the sun is made of ice, and many others). Certainly enough stuff in there for a fun blog post or two, but as a whole tedious because he had a massive collection and did not prune the list for a best of the worst. So you get a torrent of people with wrong values for pi. There is also religious stuff that kinda blurs together in my eyes as I am both uninterested in those controversies and ignorant of where exactly the crankery stops from the author's point of view (he was some type of Christian).
No.580937
>>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.
No.580938
>>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).
No.580939
Finished A Square Meal (2016) by the couple Jane Ziegelman & Andrew Coe, a book about eating habits and food-provision policies during the Great Depression. Meh. Not much thought went into the presentation. The chapters don't even have names. They mention the rumor that British pilots ate carrots in WWII to improve their night sight, but not that it was actually Brit propaganda to troll the Nazis, tsk. They go on for too long about what happened in the kitchens of President Hoover and President Roosevelt. I expected to read about at least a few food-poisoning scandals, but no.
No.580940
>>580500ive been thinking about leftist ethical realism
does it exist?
if so i really need some resources
books videos anything
(preferably not christian nonsense)
No.580941
what books exposes liberal notions of democracy and electoralism as being wrong ?.
No.580942
>>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.
No.580944
Just finished The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman, a book about the legendary mathematician Paul Erdos for a general audience. Many, many weird anecdotes. I knew he was weird, but goddamn. The author also manages to squeeze in anecdotes about Russell and Ramanujan and others.
No.580945
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west#toc1Does anyone have any recommended readings on the first point in this article, on the construction of the so-called Western civilization and how it was in reality? Graeber is just dissing some retard here.
No.580946
Z library is fucking dead
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
No.580947
>>580946Isn't Z-Library mirrored on other sites (ex. Libgen)?
No.580948
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?
No.580949
Finished How to Bake Pi by Eugenia Cheng (2015), an OK book explaining math and category theory in plain language using cooking metaphors (not that much about pi though) and just started reading another book by her.
No.580950
>>580949Where do you find these fascinating books? Do you just browse randomly in your local bookshop?
No.580951
>>580947Some part of it, yes, but not all of it, based on my own experience.
No.580952
>>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/ No.580953
My memory is awful, I can read a book today and barely remember it in a month.
It's kinda disheartening
No.580954
i was thinking, how can you make Tanks and Anti-Air equipment when you are just a guerrilla and not an nation ?.
No.580955
>>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
No.580956
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. No.580957
>>580956I'm not an expert on integrated stress response, but don't you want that most of the time
No.580958
>>580953Read what books are important to you, and then after reading it, reread it later. Highlight or make sticky notes of important passages so you can find them easier later.
No.580959
>>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.
No.580961
>>580960Can you write more about the book, anon? I remember wanting to read Ellul, but dropped it because I considered thought that his work will be lot of theoretical stuff and thus will be pretty hard and boring.
No.580962
Reading some essays by Otl Eicher on design (written in the 1980s). Never heard another soul hating a particular fork or a chair with this intensity. On the question of how artsy design should be vs ergonomics and economics, he judged almost everything as too artsy-fartsy, even Bauhaus! Still he stopped short of saying aesthetics shouldn't count at all. Politically he was apparently some greenish liberal humanist oddball. He hated big institutions, whether state or private. He wanted to have the boss and designer and engineer discussing ideas together at one table, and he believed that cannot ever happen when you go beyond a certain size (sampling though?).
No.580964
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 No.580965
>>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.
No.580966
what the fuck I wasn't expecting Foner's Reconstruction to be like 600 pages
No.580968
>>580967OK but you still need some kind of review at the end, right? No matter how cool the experiment design is if you fuck up its execution.
No.580969
>>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).
No.580971
This may be a strangely specific request, but does anyone know any works that describe the origin of the word "comrade" in relation to communism and socialism?
No.580972
>>580971Didn't Jodi Dean write a book about the word "Comrade"? I did not read it so I have no idea if it actually contains what you are looking for or if it is just the usual Lacanian hogwash.
No.580973
>>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.)
No.580974
>>580970Aveling could read German and Engels had a good opinion of him, however there is more material of Marx available today than back then. The guide was written before the publication of Capital III. The guide closely follows the order of the text in Capital, which it summarizes. So you may read the guide's intro before starting with Capital, and then read a chapter in Capital and then the chapter's summary from the guide, then the next chapter in Capital and so on. (Making instead an ad hoc decision after each chapter whether to consult the guide or not can be a bit irritating because Aveling got some quirks of notation and abbreviations which are only fully transparent if you read the guide in order.)
No.580975
<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.
No.580979
>>580977skip it, esp if you hang here you probably already have many elements of context
No.580980
posted for the first time here. probably gonna get run off the forum for my takes on covid but that's fine ty
No.580981
A glance at the titles of the chapters and I knew I struck gold. My Lunches with Orson is an entire book of Orson Welles talking shit about people. So, what /edu/cation you got out of it? Erm I suppose you learn tiny bits here and there about making good movies. Today, hundreds of millions of kids have the tools to make movies. So you will make a movie, anon? Hmmm no.
No.580983
Reading Afropessimism and it's essentially a manifesto for ethnocentrism of "Black people" (not just in the Americas, but elsewhere too I guess). Frank Wilderson is sort of like a "Black" (burger) Alain de Benoist with a degree in post-1968 critical theory buzzwords.
No.580984
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Dirk-Pons-2142361922When there's revolution in New Zealand (laugh it up, i know), remember Dirk Pons as an intellectual who will be valuable to the organization of socialist society and materialist physics!
No.580987
<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.
No.580988
Can anyone give me a list of history books of socialist nations ?, want to make a reading list.
No.580989
>>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
No.580990
>>580989How could someone repeat what you have said without actually paying attention to what you have just said?
No.580991
>>580990It shows you pay at least a minimum amount of attention, but it doesn't show deep understanding.
No.580992
>>580991Is it because it shows no deep understanding that you consider it annoying?
No.580993
>>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.
No.580994
>>580988can anyone answer my question here ?.
No.580997
<A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location “Right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear.” Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.
That's an example of people switching off their brains because they are following an expert, from Influence (5th edition) by Robert B. Cialdini. This book is a classic about the simple mental heuristics we use to judge quickly and how sales people trick these heuristics, using among other things contrast effects and fake scarcity. The author not only has a background in psychological experiments, but also went undercover to learn the ropes of selling people crap. He writes in a humble style and shares anecdotes about himself getting tricked. Readers of prior editions share some anecdotes as well. He also got permission to republish some on-topic newspaper cartoons (most dull parts of the book IMHO). Good book with a massive source list.
No.581000
>>580500Hello Comrades. Am currently reading The manifesto, and then anti-durheing. Communism will win
No.581001
>>580570Update on this. Forgot I posted it. I passed the bar exam. I’ve been a lawyer for 2 years. I stopped writing. I finished infinite jest. If I wasn’t phone posting I’d write a longer post.
No.581002
>>581001Congrats, brother. Why did you stop writing? Too busy with law work?
No.581003
>>581002The writing was mostly a cope with lockdown. It was fun and explorative. I suppose I stopped because of a few things. Lawyering takes up quite a bit of time and when you are done for the day, it's so much easier to consume media than it is to create. The same kind of difficulty between reading and endlessly scrolling. I also think I didn't get much feedback on what I wrote. Unlike music or drawing which feels good as you do it, I think writing is much more like cooking in that it's an interesting process but the end result should be enjoyed by other people. I don't think I got enough feedback or proof others liked what I was doing to keep going with it. If I can barely get myself to read, how am I to write?
No.581005
>>581004Marx bless, queen, this is just what i needed
No.581006
Been reading through Capital, but haven't read any recently, unfortunately. I'm just terrible at sticking with things. Still, I managed to get to Chapter III, which I'm quite proud of. I've also read most of State and Revolution, a bit of the German Ideology, and probably half-read some other things I can't remember.
No.581008
>>581004 (me)
Highly recommend this PDF instead because the original, clearly formatted for a pamphlet, is unbearable to read. picrel
No.581009
>>580988You're making a reading list on something that you're not even familiar with the literature on? Do you mean you want someone else to make a reading list for you?
No.581011
Having hard time reading capital II.
No.581012
>>580585>be a rightoid>instead of reading books you burn themLike pottery.
No.581013
I was heavily drinking at a bar and at the open mic was a gentlemen that was basically a well educated schizophrenic. Talked faster than I ever have (I’m known as a fast talker) and I couldn’t completely process what he said. He at some point said ‘okay Hegel’.
I don’t know if I was just too slow to understand him or if he was actually mentally Ill. It’s strange because it was the first time in a long while I felt like I was challenged.
No.581014
>>581013Whether or not he was mentally ill is besides the point. You have already established that you were too slow to understand him. Try practicing listening to podcasts on 2x speed and maybe next time you'll be able to keep up.
No.581015
>>581014I already listen to audio books and podcasts at 2.5 speed. This guy was like auctioneer fast about the rebirth of Christ and shit.
No.581017
The bourgeois is the revolutionary subject in the class war.
Capitalism created the contradiction of The bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. The Bourgeois develop the productive forces utilizing the Proletariat towards the point of the proletariat being replaced by automation, through technological automation the proletariats position is replaced as laborer (No more wage for the prole). The bourgeois starve them out through various methods until the proletariat is liquidated (in the sense the Nazis used the word). With the Proletariat liquidated the class position of the bourgeoisie disappears as no proletariat means no bourgeoisie, the class contradiction is dissolved, capitalism is abolished, and the ex-bourgeoisie inscribe on their banner "each according to their ability, each according to their need!", thus automated luxury communism is established.
I don't believe this but I'm pretty sure Bill Gates and his neoliberal friends implicitly do. this is why he talks about population control for the third world so much, less proles.
We've actually been doing socialist construction for the last couple 100 years, just not for the proletariat to inherit.
No.581018
I'm thinking about coffee
I'm reading nothing currently but I am gonna pick something up this week outta my library
I learned that we have a lot of cool threads here and in hobby
anything
hi
No.581019
>>580733are you still with us 1 and a half years later? lol
No.581021
Broke: Using Assimil courses to self-learn with
Woke: Looking up Foreign Service Institute courses to self-learn with
No.581022
Finished Expecting Better and Cribsheet by Emily Oster, about pregnancy and the very early life of your child, respectively (both on libgen). Oster is a burger economist and carefully reads all studies she can get her hands on. Both books are structured in the same way: The chapters are a mishmash of Oster almost live-blogging her own experiences with pregnancy and motherhood and getting bombarded with contrasting advice from friends, family, media, and doctors (she started writing EB during her first pregnancy). She summarizes her findings at the end of each chapter, so you can just read those bits if you want and only go to the reasoning if you have doubts. If you still have doubts after that, you can check the massive list of sources at the end.
No.581023
>>581022Is this topic relevant to your life or were yiu just curious?
No.581024
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.
No.581025
>>581024Most arguments against marx can be won simply by quoting him because marx opponents can’t read.
No.581026
>>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.
No.581027
>>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.
No.581030
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
No.581031
I seriously need to stop drinking and consoooming screens in my spare time. I haven’t finished a book in months.
How am I supposed to become the best in my field if I’m not well read? How long will these shelves of unread books watch over me in disappointment? Reading gets rid of impostor syndrome, right?
No.581032
>>581028Apparently the author wants to drive the point home that 'IRA worked with Qaddafi, who were both radical nutjobs who blamed poor Britain and European Imperialists for the state of their country!' The guy who had it before me kept underlining every line that has to do with Qaddafi or Islam or something in it, so I don't feel confident about the target audience.
No.581033
>>581032I might have spoke too soon, giving that the author is giving credence to the idea that Qaddafi was responding against genuine CIA threats. I'll keep on.
No.581034
>>581033Did they underline that part?
No.581035
>>581034The person who had it before me didn't actually.
No.581038
>>581030Did you start using a proxy? Could also be a dynamic IP address.
>>580952Wind in your back, lads. Wherever you go!
No.581040
Is there any long-term value to noting down some individual's ideology, trying to find a common denominator. As a stereotypical board poster my ability to understand people is absolutely garbage, so I don't know if this is doing good at all.
No.581041
>>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 ;)
No.581042
Nuclear power is back in the news again. Feels like things haven't changed in a decade: every degrowth radlib still hates nuclear with a passion, and every STEMfag is smug about how wrong this is. Leftypol falls into the latter group. Any books that just explain why the Silent Spring boomers came to hate nuke power, and why they're wrong? thx
No.581043
>>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.
No.581044
Unto This Last by 19th century art critic John Ruskin is a weird book, supposedly about economics. Got a few good bits against the mainstream economists, but most of it is just pompous words about I don't what. Oh and he is in favor of fixing wages and claims this would lead to people employing them putting a stronger focus on quality so that the people delivering crap quality would soon not be employed in that trade anymore and that would be better for everyone (reminded me of A Market for Lemons).
No.581046
>>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.
No.581047
Finished "Progress and Poverty", the 1879 classic by Henry George which inspired the board game Monopoly. Great rhetoric, bit too pompous at time. My god does this guy have a hate boner for Malthusians. The Malthusian doctrine gets totally destroyed in one big section and after that part comes another part where it gets destroyed again with different arguments.
What I cannot condone is how HG often glues together workers and capitalists as if they were one class when he argues against the landlords.
No.581048
>>580504This still exists wow
I finished these books
No.581050
Where I find reliable socialist(not bourgeois or reformist) news on the Dominican Republic?
No.581052
>>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 No.581053
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
No.581055
I haven't really been able to read about anything other than law recently. Too much work and running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I started reading the annotated criminal code as well as a handful of other books and resources I got from other attorney friends willing to share their research folders with me. It's so wild how most information online is garbage and not very useful, apparently written either by an AI or written for clients or SEO. The real juicy stuff is all in tomes that cost far too much. Pro tip, many law libraries set aside their old copies of books when they get the new year's copy in. My little physical law library is full of one or two year out of date books that cost thousands of dollars new. Also used bookstores sometimes have some good slightly out of date stuff too.
I've also noticed that lawyers really like to reinvent the wheel and focus on 'story telling' and 'psychodrama' and all this other bullshit that Aristotle wrote about in rhetoric 2500 years ago. But I guess that's what you get when you don't standardize undergrad degrees for lawyers. This leads to so many books that are like baby's first public speaking/writing. As if no one was properly trained on how to use a fucking oxford comma, or remove prepositions, or write for clarity. It almost inspires me to start writing a blog or something about being an underpaid leftist baby criminal defense lawyer, but that would be screaming into the void just as much as this post is. Why put in the effort to scream into a void no one will hear when I could be drinking beer or playing video games?
I want to be good at this job. I want to be the guy that other attorneys call when they have a problem instead of the other way around. I keep thinking of cracking open Obsidian and making my own little wiki or even just getting a physical journal and start writing down my experiences lawyering, but there's just so much work to do in front of me and the time I do set aside for myself is spent playing mahjong or drinking beer. I should be going to the gym and reading this huge pile of treatises, but after these 12 hour solo days I just don't have the gumption anymore.
Anyone have any input?
No.581056
>>581055You can't do more than what you can do, if you are working long hours helping people then it's perfectly justifiable to want to chill the rest of the time.
No.581058
>>581055>Anyone have any input?It sounds like you're doing something worthwhile and are in a position to do more with assistance. 12 hour solo days are something that very few people can be productive with in the medium to long term. Maybe take on the responsibility of an acolyte who can learn from you in exchange for performing the more mundane tasks, preserving your motivation for the most important work and maintaining health.
No.581059
>>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.
No.581062
>>581061Absolutely based. Why did my mortician friends not tell me about the now dead love of my life???
No.581065
https://www.youtube.com/live/6HicAVYbuZ0Live now the secretariat of the FPCI
Role of middle powers in a divided world
No.581066
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?
No.581068
>>581066ow anon, my brain liquified
No.581071
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…
No.581072
Marxism is a socio-economical theory. Why arent you studying economics instead of wasting time reading bullshit philosophy?
No.581073
>>581072This but also with economics. Also, the post above you discusses just that
No.581075
https://joshuacitarella.substack.com/p/my-political-journey-n>My guest is a 20 year old Left Communist. He began by exploring 4chan, /leftypol/ and Kik messenger. In 2019, he joined an IRL political organization. We discuss Bookchinites, leftcom killing fields, proletarian discontent, shitposting and animation.
>recorded: July 2, 2020Oh wow
No.581076
Literally just started writing down the shit I needed to get done for work on a notebook and I've got more done today than I have in a week. I use a green highlighter to mark when I finish something. I also add on to the list anything I do that isn't already on there and mark it off so it also keeps track of all the productive things I've done.
Why the hell is this more effective than all the other shit I've tried with note taking apps, to do list apps, GTD systems, CMS processes, etc.? How the fuck does literally just writing shit down solve more problems than all the fucking philosophy and self help I've consumed?
What the actual fuck.
No.581077
>>581075Thank you, have always found leftcom kinda interesting, never met one IRL, and occasionally miss the effortposting leftcoms on here from back in those days. This will genuinely be interesting to listen to.
<t. someone who just wants to uphold the revolutionary communist line whenever it becomes a life-or-death necessity No.581078
>>581076notebooks are nice because they exist in physical space, it commands attention better than anything apps or mental
No.581079
>>581075What unholy fucking podcast is that
No.581080
Does anyone have access to an English translation of Adorno and Honkheimer's Correspondance? Specifically the third volume.
No.581082
>>581081Went to a criminal defense conference this weekend. Got lots of continuing education hours, a number of great articles, and got to see some good presentations. Also got to get shitfaced with old friends. I always feel so overwhelmed when I'm in the presence of such smart and skilled lawyers. Gotta keep pushing through that feeling though, otherwise I'll never git gud.
No.581083
Anyone got anything like Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer, but is quicker and easier to go through? I plan on reading it, I just want something I can more quickly go through right now.
No.581085
>>581084>78 MBwoops lol, mods can delete
No.581087
>>581082think I replied to to one of your posts where you were seeking advice lawyer anon. sounds like the kind of weekend that drives you through the next week. take the acolyte pill, you post like you've got something to offer
No.581088
>>581087Could you define acolyte pill, pls? Like follow all my Senpais and learn from them? Or is there a book/software you’re talking about?
No.581089
>>581088oh, maybe you're not the anon I replied to before. I meant that many people in your position should consider taking on an assistant of some kind, even in the most basic capacity. You get some of your more mundane tasks done, allowing you to focus on more stimulating work, and they get to be around someone productive and learn basic skills.
No.581090
>>581089I am that anon. I can’t afford a real paralegal yet.
No.581091
>>581090Maybe I'm way off base here but I can think of scenarios where a motivated assistant would learn enough so that pay would become secondary, or you could pay something when income justifies it. I benefited from something like this myself without being exploited. You know best ofc.
No.581092
>>581091Oh, I have something like that. A retired family friend helps with downloading discovery and a few other things that can be done at any time of day. I just can’t really rely on them for things that need immediate attention. I’ve realized I’m not the best at letting go and delegating. I’m working on it though.
No.581093
>>581092let me give a scenario. An interested zoomer comes and works in the same room as you for a few hours a week. They do some mundane work you can't face and get to be in a relaxed work environment, also getting to see how someone who has achieved something operates day to day. This would be extremely valuable to many yoots today.
No.581095
>>581093I’m not sure I’m at the point yet for an intern, but I’ll keep an eye out!
No.581097
Are you smarter than this parrot?
If not browse
>>>/edu/ No.581099
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=7321 No.581100
anyone read cutrone's new book? If so, what are the included essays?
No.581101
>>581099I started listening to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and it was pretty interesting. Might be up your current alley.
No.581102
>>581060Aight I finished it a while back, this dude had one hell of a life
No.581103
Excuse 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 bias No.581104
This thread hit the bump limit and is in auto sage.
New thread
>>19860 No.581105
>>581104Who cares, it's a slow board anyways
No.589418
Restored everything except the OP's file and thumbnail
Unique IPs: 291