found these at a goodwill store this weekend. psyched to check em out
We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. And the truth is simply this:
If there is going to be a war with Russia, then the United States will most certainly be destroyed, and most of us will end up dead.
A worthwhile endeavour?
(I was, uh, reading about them and there does not seem to be another appropriate thread discuss this)
maybe we could crowdfund it lol
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/what-happened-to-the-facebook-killer-it-s-complicated
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28882042
The main question imo is whether it's a good use of energy and resources to try to create communal clones of capitalist services in the first place
littlegreenpills posted:you have to compete in a capitalist marketplace on a capitalist playing field while suffering significant handicaps (access to credit, marketing technology etc) and everyone who does things for you has to do it for the Love so im not sure how it wd work any better than like an anarchist restaurant or whatever. mind you i suppose one difference is how it could be basically self sustaining with no money input after the actual product is built and devliered
maybe we could crowdfund it lol
despite the internet seeming like a fancy decentralized platform in theory, you actually need massive amounts of capital to run anything like that using the current server-client model. unless you design an alternative social network in a very specific way (basically like a combination of freenet/tor and kazaa/napster/etc) it is not self-sustaining at all, facebook uses tens of thousands of servers at minimum and consumes massive amounts of bandwidth. they lost tons of money for years and only late did they figure out how to resell user demographics, behaviour data, and advertising enough to break even and then profit.
twitter, i think, still has never made any profit? or maybe they just have recently.
that "specific way" is basically making all the data in the system replicated over every user's computer enough to make sure it always exists somewhere and is reasonably quickly accessible. you can't really do that without a special local installation of some software. the web as it is exists now is designed for data to be requested from some remote system and then interpreted for display -- browsers have no provision for local persistence, sharing things between users, etc. so, good luck getting everyone to install Anarchist Opera or whatever the hell alternative browser that would help make something like this. open social networks like this have been attempted -- and they get like 2000 users and languish for 5 years and then disappear.
getfiscal posted:Which doesn't mean it can't happen, I just mean the coding part is the easiest piece (assuming you underpay people), Facebook has thousands of Filipinos who comb the website to make sure people don't post child pornography and shit, that's the sort of thing which can't be crowdsourced in an effective way probably.
This is a serious logistical challenge to proposing a cooperatively run major internet platform. Facebook (among others) succeeds by being extremely exploitative of its workers incl no mental health support for people who are exposed to horrific things on a daily basis (iirc an article I read many years ago claimed that some places actually offer fictitious mental health services and just fire anyone who requests them.) Like most other modern businesses, they couldn't succeed if they were offering their workers anything close to ethical working conditions.
Attempting to 'community police' social platforms of similar scale even with unpaid volunteers would be a doomed and extremely irresponsible endeavor without somehow getting them access to a very specialized and pricey support infrastructure.
Also I said clone but of course they wouldn't really be the same just they'd be operating in the same spheres as present 'sharing economy' entities.
Lenin criticised social democrats for hippy dippy coop ideology of theirs pre revolution but in successful socialist countries from Soviet union to Cuba they encouraged cooperative development... so that says to me such endeavours are OK to build up even in our capitalist society while we organise to take it over.
Some of these odd think tanks like the peer 2 peer foundation say the way forward is multi stakeholder (producer, consumer, worker, community etc) coops which focus on creating the commons is the way forward.
One challenge is how to turn that theory into a successful working model.
Another is the consideration whether we should do this at all or would our energy be better put elsewhere
e:
xipe posted:Lenin criticised social democrats for hippy dippy coop ideology of theirs pre revolution but in successful socialist countries from Soviet union to Cuba they encouraged cooperative development... so that says to me such endeavours are OK to build up even in our capitalist society while we organise to take it over.
The order here is important though, you need to defeat capitalism before you can properly encourage healthy cooperative development
It's pretty galling - I remember reading Fanshen and just being amazed at the cruelty of the rural landed elites and the incredible poverty that was the precondition for their wealth.
I felt very much the same reading this. Even more amazed that this was decades after independence. Comparing India vs China today is like the perfect object lesson on the successes of Communism in the 20th century - and makes one more sanguine about the post-Mao reform era - for all it's faults. In fact, in the early post-colonial era India and China pursued development strategies that were very similar in many important ways with one crucial exception – Land reform.
It was the rural elites and a new middle strata who gained the most from state largesse during the dirigiste era of Nehru and, in turn, the liberalisations that followed once that growth strategy had exhausted itself. And it's this class that forms the main layer of support for Hindutva and the BJP today.
It's the human cost of this legacy that Sainath's book documents. The tragic, the peevish, the absurd.
Development schemes that don't develop anything. Forced displacement of millions for the benefit of multinational corporations. Schools with no books, or no lights, or no teachers, or no students, or no buildings. A colossal public health crisis. Millions of Indians enslaved as bonded labourers. Alcoholism, Usury, desperate labourers working grueling hours to live in grinding poverty, and the intense caste discrimination that sustains it all.
Some #quotes
“If we were to define a sleeping bag as a house, India would move swiftly towards ending her housing shortage. A shortage of nearly thirty-one million units. Accept this definition, and you could go in for mass production of sleeping bags. We could then have passionate debates about the drastic reduction in the magnitude of the housing problem. The cover stories could run headlines: ‘Is it for real?’ And straps: ‘Sounds too good to be true, but it is.’ The government could boast that it had not only stepped up production of sleeping bags but had piled up an all-time record surplus of them. Say, thirty-seven million. Conservatives could argue that we were doing so well, the time had come to export sleeping bags, at ‘world prices’. The bleeding hearts could moan that sleeping bags had not reached the poorest. Investigative muckrakers could scrutinise the contracts given to manufacturers. Were the bags overpriced? Were they of good quality? That ends the housing shortage. There’s only one problem. Those without houses at the start of the programme will still be without houses at the end of it. (True, some of them will have sleeping bags, probably at world prices.)”
--
'Every third human being in the world without safe and adequate water supply is an India. Every fourth child on the globe who dies of diarrhoea is an Indian. Every third person in the world with leprosy is an Indian. Every fourth being on the planet dying of water-borne or water-related diseases is an Indian. Of the over sixteen million tuberculosis cases that exist at any time world-wide, 12.7 million are in India. Tens of millions of Indians suffer from malnutrition. It lays their systems open to an array of fatal ailments. Yet, official expenditure on nutrition is less than one per cent of GNP.'
Lots has changed since he wrote the book - for the worse. There's a pretty good lecture by him here on that, he's a great speaker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdYqbQzPqM8
And another when he spoke at JNU during the recent student protests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3dq6pApmhk
My only real problem with the book was that since it's just a collection of articles, there's no real overarching narrative weaved together so it's just one vignette after another – which can feel a bit plodding after a while.
Moving onto some other books about the Maoists and the BJP now that I've finished this.
This book is so fucking good I understand why it's never been translated to english
Fuk translating is hard
Edited by EmanuelaBrolandi ()
swampman posted:All sci fi is bad. Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. Great - yet bad. Asimov Rendezvous with Rama. Bad bad bad. Lesabéndio a bad asteroid novel is bad
stanislaw lem is Good.
roseweird posted:it's: "History and Myth: Demonization and Hagiography in the Interpretation of the Contemporary World from Stalin to Gorbachev: How an Empire Ends"
Lol fuk I got acabal and empezal switch up cuz I was drunk when I translated that tho idk how I coulda thought it was the start of an empire when it's about Stalin Gorbachev lol. That n I haven't read spanish in a while. But the rest was intentional on my part - I've been accused of translating too liberally but tbh I wouldn't use the word hagiography so id just translate it as the construction of a sainthood myth
Edited by EmanuelaBrolandi ()
EmanuelaBrolandi posted:I wouldn't use the word hagiography so id just translate it as the construction of a sainthood myth
whats the difference?