blinkandwheeze posted:drwhat posted:- it sounds like nomogenetics despite its outsider reputation is not actually that controversial in the modern context? environmental pressures and limitations on an organism cause pressure on its evolution and direct it in certain ways?
this is mostly what i'm interested in, i find the idea of recuperating von baer and lev berg more compelling than the introduction of semiotics to the field or whatever. i just have no knowledge in this area so i can't evaluate whether this is worthwhile independently. do you know of any modern biologists who have discussed nomogenetics or are you just extrapolating this from the current state of the field?
just extrapolating. seems like one of those things where i wouldn't be surprised if people who do know the term (i didn't) think of it as "lmao old crazy soviet shit" but if you explained the concepts would accept it as completely sensible and essentially matching current thought. sort of like when you poll people about most leftist things
i totally agree with chickeon that evolutionary biology is becoming dialectical (though without awareness of the word or process), so the time is probably perfectly ripe for what you're thinking about.
All of the old International Publishers stuff is great too. Amazing how they centered black struggle instead of resenting it eh. https://www.intpubnyc.com/browse/
drwhat posted:it's been recently discovered that actually, DNA is not read only at all. we inherit immunity by incorporating pieces of pathogen DNA into our own so we and our descendants recognize it in the future. iirc this was only published properly literally a few weeks ago.
huh thats interesting thinking of it in context of the growing popularity of the theory that the base of the trunk of the tree of life, the organisms that were the ancestors of what pre-cladistics kingdoms treated as bacteria and archaeans, shared genetic material fairly freely... the idea that the concept of genetically distinct species is a relatively recent innovation of life on earth and that because of those earlier organisms' relative simplicity and similarity an adaptive trait could propagate itself across different types rapidly through simple proximity and chemistry and that was really the norm for much of the history of life on the planet instead of mutation/selection confined within species branching out in isolation from a common ancestor. so maybe some aspect of that is not so distant from the current moment, it might make the people who argue for that idea pretty happy
chickeon posted:cheers ive only r ead kaufmann's stuff on Nitch this is good
Yeah Kaufmann is great. Seems like he has been forgotten for some reason. Such a clear thinker. He actually has a whole book on Hegel I have queued up.
E: after looking I found this
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/marxs-ghost-9781845205546/
I'll let u know how it is though I'm still open to recs
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
This work started as a small brochure containing only hints about possible connections between Marxism and the Satanist church.
No one had ventured to write about this before. Therefore I was cautious, even timid. But in the course of time more and more evidence has accumulated in my files, evidence I hope will convince you of the spiritual danger part and parcel of communism.
Marxism has governed over one-third of mankind. If it could be shown that the originators and perpetrators of this movement were indeed behind closed-doors devil-worshipers, consciously exploiting Satanic powers, would not such a startling realization require action?
If some were to reject my thesis out of hand, it would not surprise me. Science and technology advance at a rapid pace because we are always ready to scrap obsolescent machinery in favour of new conveniences. It is quite different in affairs of sociology or religion. Ideas die hard, and a mindset, unlike a computer chip, is not easily altered or replaced. Even fresh evidence may fail to persuade. The doors of some minds have rusty hinges. But I offer credit e proofs to support my thesis, and I invite you to carefully consider them.
The Communists certainly took note of this book, which has been translated into Russian, Chinese, Romanian, German, Slovak, and other languages, and was smuggled into Iron Curtain countries in great quantities. For instance, the East Berlin journal Deutsche Lehrerzeitung, under the heading “The Killer of Marx,” denounced my book vehemently, calling it “the most broadly based, provocative, and heinous work written against Marx.”
Can Marx be so easily destroyed? Is this his Achilles’ heel? Would Marxism be discredited if men knew about his connection with Satanism? Do enough people care?
babyhueypnewton posted:Does anyone know a good book on Marxist archaeology? Like an overview of pre-marxist idealist theories, the intervention of Childe and Soviet archaeology, and the subsequent adaption to and bourgeois reaction against (I presume in the form of postcolonialism) Marxism? Obviously a Marxist perspective on the author's part is preferable. Not trot is even better but I know that's a lot to ask of Anglo-American academia.
E: after looking I found this
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/marxs-ghost-9781845205546/
I'll let u know how it is though I'm still open to recs
i randomly bought a book called "Archaeology in the USSR" by A.L. Mongait i saw for a dollar in a second-hand bookstore. have you heard of him by any chance? it looks interesting, although not what you were looking for. i'm reading a review right now and apparetly the translator "softened" the "ideological bias" 
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
babyhueypnewton posted:
a review chapter:
https://www.academia.edu/944081/Marxism
Belphegor posted:In other words, under strong neo-Darwinism (heavy focus on natural selection), we would expect a lot more offspring to fail, since they are almost certainly 'untested' blueprints for survival.
uhh, i think all of us here at the rhizzone prove this expectation to be true??
blinkandwheeze posted:can any of the STEM ppl here tell me whether the lines gestured toward in this article are compelling or not http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/postdarw.htm
its fairly crankish but mostly in terms of writing style. it seems mostly like notes someone wrote for themselves as opposed to an organized piece for public consumption. its hard to say much about the validity because evolutionary biology is a field that has lots of arguments about mechanisms and has, until relatively recently, been fairly difficult to hold controlled experiments in. even the current high-profile experiments are difficult to get a lot of firm, high-level conceptual returns from. i will say that the understanding of the dynamics of evolution is becoming more and more complex as it becomes more fleshed out (here i'm thinking of things like evo-devo, epigenetics, endogenous retroviruses, genes that directly or indirectly affect the treatment of DNA, etc).
drwhat posted:we inherit immunity by incorporating pieces of pathogen DNA into our own so we and our descendants recognize it in the future. iirc this was only published properly literally a few weeks ago
idk if this is what you were thinking of but things like endogenous retroviruses in the human genome have been characterized for at least a decade
i think i was writing this as en example of how environmental factors can effect stuff on a chromosone/dna level but i forget
and, plants own because they're totipotent and do the polypody thing too, doing Gouldian style rapid burst evolution and make dick dawkins look like an idiot, thanks plants
wat am i taking about woah,
Anyway, since he talks about Engels quite a bit I went and re-read "Origin of the Family..." and was reminded that this is in there:
In earlier chapters we were standing at the cradle of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. Now we stand at its grave. Rome had driven the leveling plane of its world rule over all the countries of the Mediterranean basin, and that for centuries. Except when Greek offered resistance, all natural languages had been forced to yield to a debased Latin; there were no more national differences, no more Gauls, Iberians, Ligurians, Noricans; all had become Romans. Roman administration and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old kinship groups, and with them the last vestige of local and national independence. The half-baked culture of Rome provided no substitute; it expressed no nationality, only the lack of nationality. The elements of new nations were present everywhere; the Latin dialects of the various provinces were becoming increasingly differentiated; the natural boundaries which once had made Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa independent territories, were still there and still made themselves felt. But the strength was not there to fuse these elements into new nations; there was no longer a sign anywhere of capacity for development, or power of resistance, to say nothing of creative energy. The enormous mass of humanity in the whole enormous territory was held together by one bond only: the Roman state; and the Roman state had become in the course of time their worst enemy and oppressor. The provinces had annihilated Rome; Rome itself had become a provincial town like the rest – privileged, but no longer the ruler, no longer the hub of the world empire, not even the seat of the emperors or sub-emperors, who now lived in Constantinople, Treves, Milan. The Roman state had become a huge, complicated machine, exclusively for bleeding its subjects, Taxes, state imposts and tributes of every kind pressed the mass of the people always deeper into poverty; the pressure was intensified until the exactions of governors, tax-collectors, and armies made it unbearable. That was what the Roman state had achieved with its world rule. It gave as the justification of its existence that it maintained order within the empire and protected it against the barbarians without. But its order was worse than the worst disorder, and the citizens whom it claimed to protect against the barbarians longed for the barbarians to deliver them.
Social conditions were no less desperate. Already in the last years of the republic the policy of Roman rule had been ruthlessly to exploit the provinces; the empire, far from abolishing this exploitation, had organized it. The more the empire declined, the higher rose the taxes and levies, the more shamelessly the officials robbed and extorted. The Romans had always been too occupied in ruling other nations to become proficient in trade and industry; it was only as usurers that they beat all who came before or after. What commerce had already existed and still survived was now ruined by official extortion; it struggled on only in the eastern, Greek part of the empire, which lies outside the present study. General impoverishment; decline of commerce, handicrafts and art; fall in the population; decay of the towns; relapse of agriculture to a lower level-such was the final result of Roman world rule.
Also Wilfred Burchetts catapult to freedom which has got me reading all sorts of war stuff, couple of short works by Giap, Mao, Engels. Engels was a big fan of reading about war, writing about war, thinking about war, he studied war as much as marx studied economics and wrote a fair bit too: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/war/index.htm
this is what im now "in to": war reading, reading about war, posting about war. Just started Carl von Clausewitz's "On War", probably gonna read a bunch of books with "war" in the title. war.
that might sound uncomfortably close to whatever fascism says about it, but i never came to care much for that bullshit. i mean, you can talk all about the materials that the vietnamese were getting from the socialist countries, which was certainly crucial and deeply appreciated, but if they weren't properly motivated, by correct policy and Marxist thought, how could they have stood up to the onslaught as long as they did?
i dunno, it's just a thought I've had, that sustains me..
tears posted:anyway, i read it and it got better, managed to overlook the irritating writing style and even interested in reading on of his followups: the entropy of capitalism
Also Wilfred Burchetts catapult to freedom which has got me reading all sorts of war stuff, couple of short works by Giap, Mao, Engels. Engels was a big fan of reading about war, writing about war, thinking about war, he studied war as much as marx studied economics and wrote a fair bit too: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/war/index.htm
this is what im now "in to": war reading, reading about war, posting about war. Just started Carl von Clausewitz's "On War", probably gonna read a bunch of books with "war" in the title. war.
i think i have a interview between burchett and ho chi minh, i can transcribe it in a bit...
Me and my work mates used to sit in behind this very carousel for a cigarette and feel disgusted by the filthy beds that Aerocare workers had set up to sleep in. Everyone knows you just do it in your car.
Anyway now it's national news, even though stuff like this is common knowledge at any workplace of this kind.
Edited by Gibbonstrength ()
Louis is equally angry about what he sees as the “global fascination with the extreme right” that has hijacked the news agenda and made everyone a prisoner of the far-right discourse. “Even the most ridiculous thing said by Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage makes headlines, while anyone who is young, who is trying to invent a new discourse, is ignored. It’s a shrinking democracy: the right speaks to the right, the left speaks to the right, where is the left’s discourse? What’s even more dramatic is that the whole world is speaking the language of the extreme right; Marine Le Pen is imposing the language, the subjects we talk about.
“My friends go and debate with the FN on television, but I say no. I will not legitimise their issues by responding. Twenty years ago nobody listened to them or their views because they were considered so outdated.”
He adds: “Silence has to be a part of our progress. We have to put silence at the centre of politics today. Stop responding to the questions, stop letting them control the language, the debate, the agenda. I hear some argue it’s better to be open about these things. If you are racist and hide your racism, then you’re a hypocrite. I say no, it’s better you keep quiet.
“To me, democracy is not about saying everything. Some things, like racism, antisemitism, shouldn’t be issues, they shouldn’t be talked about. Some subjects should be considered obsolete, and yes, let’s shut down the debate because they are obsolete. I grew up as a queer child in a small village. Lots of gay children in this situation suffer the same things: being threatened, beaten up. When I published my book in Paris, some said, ‘Well, if you’d grown up in a bourgeois milieu, people would have thought the same thing, they just wouldn’t have hit you.’ Are they joking? I would rather that, than being constantly beaten up for being queer. Of course I’d rather people weren’t racist or homophobic, but if they are they can keep it to themselves. Just shut up.
“And if they don’t and won’t, we need to start redistributing shame, making people feel ashamed, so when they repeat what the FN is saying, we reply, ‘Quelle honte!’ . That would be progress, that would be democracy, not letting people say what they want, not giving their racist, homophobic views the same value, the same credibility as other propositions. Not giving those stupid, unacceptable propositions weight and currency by responding to them. This has been the great tragedy of recent years in literature, the press, intellectual life, this ideology that in a debate all views have the same weight, that we can debate with the FN, with the extreme right. That’s wrong.
“We should say to the FN and far right: just shut up. Keep your stupid, nasty views to yourselves. This shame business is quite important.
hmmm...
his idea of "shaming" seems to be a much more modest one where fascist platforms aren't even entertained so focus can be placed on serious political work instead
not feeding the trolls is a good strategy up to a certain point. the traditional antifa strategies are also worthwhile for a variety of reasons, and will continue to be, but i don't think they are effective at stopping larger scale, more serious fascism once it has reached this level. at the end of the line, we do know something that works, which is crushing them under the weight of the red army at a cost of millions of lives, but obviously it would be better if it never comes to that. in a sense that's what just happened with isis on a smaller scale.
there just never seems to have been a good strategy developed for combatting fascism at this stage in its development under these conditions. i don't have one and i've yet to come across anything that seems effective
Edited by solzhesnitchin ()
Petrol posted:i.e. obviously debating fascists on tv is bad but the problem now is the prevalence of mainstream media providing a platform for fascists and ignoring that or trying to tut-tut it away isn't going to undo the validation and reinforcement the fash is now receiving.
well no but he's clearly not saying that. his point is that these things can only be solved by taking political work "seriously" which involves directly organising with the concerns of workers with the real weight of the struggles they face. he's not suggesting that a process of shame is in itself a solution to the problem of fascism. but that this offers a way to focus on developing the discourse and discipline necessary for the left to address these issues on their own terms and not in frameworks borrowed from the right
he's also very directly pointing out that the discourse of the liberal milieu falls short of leftist discourse and the latter needs to be fostered to address these shortcomings. i'm not sure where you are getting the opposite point from
blinkandwheeze posted:he's not suggesting that a process of shame is in itself a solution to the problem of fascism.
true, but he does put a lot of emphasis on it having that sort of function and you are giving him a pretty generous reading, while petrol is leaning the other way
one of the things that struck me about this guy is that he has a sort of anachronistic working class liberal, likely catholic, ethos. he doesn't fall neatly into many categories because of the inherent contradictions of working class liberals, and we're not used to seeing many of those any more
blinkandwheeze posted:i don't think it's an overgenerous reading when he is directly stating that the left needs to engage with the concerns of these communities with the cognisance that these are questions of life and death. i mean that's presented as his central conclusion and prescription.
i didn't say you were overgenerous. and it is just a transcribed interview, not a dissertation. you've schematized it in one (good) way, but there's no need to jump down someone's throat just because they took something a bit different away from it.
solzhesnitchin posted:blinkandwheeze posted:he's not suggesting that a process of shame is in itself a solution to the problem of fascism.
true, but he does put a lot of emphasis on it having that sort of function and you are giving him a pretty generous reading, while petrol is leaning the other way
yeah. blink, is there a reason why you're reading so much sense into what this guy is saying? is it other stuff he's said elsewhere, are you a fan of his? i honestly have no idea who he is and taking this interview at face value basically none of what you're suggesting is there. he talks about "the left" having abandoned the working class, but he's clearly therefore talking about the bourgeois left, and it seems to me that's his intended audience, since he wants to 'give a voice to' the working class, and so on. i'm not seeing anything about real political work, certainly nothing as explicit as what you're getting out of this.
Petrol posted:basically none of what you're suggesting is there.
i'm not sure how you can interpret his demand for the issues of these "invisible" communities to be taken as a matter of life and death as anything but a demand for a serious politics?
engaging with and listening to these communities, from a frame determined solely by the left, and with life and death severity is a demand for serious political work imo. i do think it's ambiguous beyond that general plea but that's all in there
Petrol posted:he talks about "the left" having abandoned the working class, but he's clearly therefore talking about the bourgeois left, and it seems to me that's his intended audience, since he wants to 'give a voice to' the working class, and so on.
well yeah, but he's specifically speaking to the absence of a non-bourgeois left on any kind of significant scale that is addressing this issues. the bourgeois-liberal left is "the left" as such when it is a sole dominant tendency. we all do this when talking about the left in the developed world today. when people decry the lapse of the u.s. left into liberalism or whatever it's not a confusion of categories, it's just colloquial rhetoric
he directly states that this bourgeois-left milieu is his audience, but he's chastising them for their failure at creating a leftist discourse
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