now i'm reading asimov again for the first time in more than a decade and he still owns.
The acclaimed actor makes his fiction debut with this enthralling urban fantasy in which a holy warrior must convince a doctor with no faith to help stop a powerful demon and his minions from succeeding in creating hell on earth—a thrilling adventure of science and faith, good and evil, damnation and salvation.
i did not see this coming
the same standards which would attribute a total failure to the development of maoism in peru would have written off what we now see as preferable models at various points in their history. gonzalo was unquestionably and clearly more successful than any of the comparably foundational leadership surrounding naxalbari
i mean ultimately the current vitality of people's war outside peru are basically relative to their own organisational histories. as significant as they are, neither of them approach the relative political strength that the development of the people's war in peru did at its height. let alone reaching near that point in similar positions within their own timelines of armed struggle
the pcp were the single largest political organisation in peru prior to their collapse. at their height, membership in the pcp was estimated at 60-110,000, achieving progressive growth rates in spite of casualties in the tens of thousands, with political sympathisers reported in the millions. they had an active presence in almost the entirety of the country, in all but 2 of peru's provinces, and were recognised as having de facto control over a third of the country as a whole. a significant number of outside observers and intelligence, as well as even the civilians of peru's urban areas, were convinced of the likelihood of a pcp victory. this is ultimately the most successful effort of maoist organisation internationally and the mark it set has not been reached by efforts elsewhere
for that reason it absolutely needs to be taken seriously. we live in an era of blackest reaction our theoretical models largely have to be the product of relative rather than absolute degrees of practical success, and there are very few figures you could see as comparable to gonzalo in that sense. i vaguely agree that investigating current developments is likely more vital but reading 80s back issues of party journals is going to be nowhere near as useful as reading gonzalo from the same period, unless you're conducting some specific historical investigation.
also gonzalo's theoretical heterodoxy is largely just rhetorical imo and not indicative of any substantial distinction from the views of maoists internationally now or at that time. maoists in india criticised gonzalo's more novel concepts on a formal level but never disputed the content of his theoretical grasp of people's war, it's not comparable to something like prachanda path. the cpi(maoist) and its predecessors have always seen sendero's contribution as hugely informative and significant in terms of deepening their own understanding and application of people's war
i think president gonzalo's poetic mariateguist valorisation of everything is great but obviously unnecessary. of course any western invocation of it is idiotic larping and violence fetishisation however.
babyhueypnewton posted:Why do you think they collapsed?
mostly the policy of relocating political leadership to urban centres alongside the military advancement from the countryside. this was an insane security risk which led to the capture of a huge number of key organisational figures in the absence of protection offered by revolutionary base areas. obviously president gonzalo was a victim of this decision. the crisis of leadership caused a stagnation and decline in military advance and the incarcerated leadership forwarded a line of advocating peace accords in order for a new party congress could be organised. no agreement with the state was reached but the fujimori dictatorship publicised such efforts in order to undermine the perpetuation of armed struggle
this led to a factional split where sectors of the party either advocated for a political solution of amnesty for political prisoners or continued to advance the military solution. the militant line however also faced internal struggle between factions those who accepted the legitimacy of the effort toward peace talks and pursued military action a response to their failure, those who accepted the authenticity of the peace effort but as a response rejected previous leadership as traitors, and those who regarded the peace effort as inauthentic and either hoax or the product of duress. this political crisis occurred in the face of a continued genocidal counterinsurgency campaign so the remaining strands were just further picked off and decimated
roseweird posted:its annoying that a lot of people seem uncomfortable treating a computer like a mindless servant, on the basis that it is not a sentient human being, because most people treat a lot of human beings like mindless servants
These techno-fetishists are really trying to turn a calculator into a mirror of a human being but in the process turning themselves into mindless calculators. Like no shit "AI is possible" if you train yourself to have the brain of a rodent and a simple Thumbs Up icon with a count number next to it gives you a jolt of serotonin. I have been actively avoiding reading anything about it because i think it's a massive "co intel pro" emphasis on the Intel. Any decent psychologist is probably shitting themselves at the prospect of how much a generation raised on instagram is capable of being manipulated into any mindset The Babysitter promotes on everyones thought feed
Edited by parabolart ()
roseweird posted:its annoying that a lot of people seem uncomfortable treating a computer like a mindless servant, on the basis that it is not a sentient human being, because most people treat a lot of human beings like mindless servants
i feel bad for clippy "two balls". all he wanted to do was help and then he was forced into a sex change operation and people still hated xhim.
Lukács discusses his experiences during the years of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic
Int: Comrade Lukács, I think that a long time ago, even before 1956, you told the story that you always visited the kitchens at the front.
G.L.: On my regular trips, I would stop the car two or three kilometres from the front, conceal it behind a convenient bush and appear unexpectedly among the troops. I always make a bee-line for the kitchen and made them give me whatever they were cooking. The cooks were always terrified of me: since they could never be sure when I would turn up in the kitchen, they were never able to cover things up.
Int: At divisional level that is the practical consequence of materialism; you have to start in the kitchen.
G.L.: Two things were uppermost in the minds of the men. One was the kitchen, the other was the mail, I did not think myself an outstanding military organizer, but on these two points I made sure that everything worked properly throughout the division. The soldiers were given decent food and their letters arrived every day.
the communists joined a whole series of units as political commissars. I volunteered for this job and was sent to Tiszafüred, where we found ourselves on the defensive. The defence of Tiszafüred had been grossly mismanaged because the Budapest Red Army units ran away without firing a shot. The two other battalions, who would have been willing to defend Tiszafüred, were thus unable to maintain their positions, so that the Romanians penetrated their lines and Tiszafüred fell. I set about restoring order as energetically as I could. That is to say, when we crossed the river to Poroszló, I set up a court-martial and had eight men belonging to the battalion that had run away in panic shot in the market-place. By these means I more or less managed to restore order.
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3283-georg-lukacs-during-war-and-revolution
Bob: You see, I'm everything, hun. I can everything. And I'm everything else, too. Period.
Alice: Your balls mean nothing to me (echo) to me... to me... to me....
Your timeline has now been blessed by mpreg Clippy pic.twitter.com/Hcgepu2v83
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) April 21, 2017
What are some examples of how this plays out with specific policies?
glomper_stomper posted:that looks like a getfiscal sincerepost but also like an extremely refined parody of a getfiscal sincerepost
i feel a parody probably wouldn't miss ending the post with an absurd facetious claim so it can close on a getfiscal brand joke, an objective winner of a technique