lenochodek posted:

They didn't accomplish their mission of gathering info about the other dutch Maoist parties because those parties distrusted MLPN for never participating in actual actions and mass work.

loling hard at a project founded on the fundamentally flawed premise that maoist parties would ever be friendly with each other. 22 years of expertise and resources dedicated to an obviously stupid idea

shriekingviolet posted:

wait the search function does something other than allowing goatstein to shut down the site at his leisure ??

several days ago i used it to find all the hoxha jokes made by posters of past ages, so it seems to work well

Constantignoble posted:

spiders

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/



argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal Cognition, that a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.

This would make the web a model example of extended cognition, an idea first proposed by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998 to apply to human thought. In accounts of extended cognition, processes like checking a grocery list or rearranging Scrabble tiles in a tray are close enough to memory-retrieval or problem-solving tasks that happen entirely inside the brain that proponents argue they are actually part of a single, larger, “extended” mind.



http://www.entsoc.org/PDF/2010/Orb-weaving-spiders.pdf



As an interagency team with expertise in arachnology, urban entomology, and structural pest management, we were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three-dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility's cavernous interiors. Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was nothing less than astonishing.

...


based on numbers of individuals from volumetric (flange columns) and laminar (ceiling sheet) webbing samples applied to an estimated 4,162.14 m3 of volumetric webbing and 8,922.42 m2 of laminar webbing.

...


Since increased foraging success appears to be the evolutionary driver for much of spider sociality (Whitehouse & Lubin 2005), it is unsurprising that local prey abundance frequently appears to be the basis for facultative aggregating behavior by otherwise non-social species, although several factors relating to conspecific attraction may also be responsible...

Inasmuch as typical orb webs are famous as solitary constructs that achieve their purpose with a minimum of time, energy, and material (Shear 1986, Foelix 1996), it is somewhat incongruous that species such as L. sclopetarius and T. guatemalensis are capable of collectively producing massive outputs of shared, three-dimensional silk that are the exact opposite of the spare, planar, radially-symmetric orbs these spiders create as individuals in most circumstances.

...

The “Back River Arachnotopia” (as we referred to it in our educational material furnished to the plant managers) thus highlights the utility of aquacentric structures as accessible research sites where the dynamics of predictable spider hyperabundance can be closely examined under relatively comfortable conditions.



miles and miles of spiders

there's a genus of jumping spider called Portia that exhibits advanced learning and problem solving behaviour on the level of some vertebrates, they're really cool

Petrol posted:

Here is a pompous article by a wobbly who thinks antifa is liberalism, and a rather good response from an anarchist I respect.

Seems like they're both wrong. Since they can't imagine a party which is capable of systematic change and preventing fascism through its presence (for example in Greece where the longtime strength of communism has made universities a stromghold of leftism and enshrined that right in the constitution) they instead defend policies they know are incomplete. The first guy basically argues for reformism and dismisses the reality of fascism as merely symptomatic. That's true in a sense, if the communist party was powerful in student unions fascists would never show their face on campuses without the need for "antifa" organizations, but without that his solutions are basically praying to the state and vague feel-good statements like "community empowerment."

The other guy is right that fascusm is a particular movement which sometimes opposes the liberal state, which can be used to suppress it concretely instead of as mere symptom. He's also right that antifa does real things and has real accomplishments. But these are the hallmarks of anarchist liberalism. Once the possibility of systematic change is foreclosed, the "practice of "everyday life" becomes an end in and of itself, unaware that not only does liberalism compete for the same ground with infinitely more resources, this NGOization of politics has already devoured that strategy decades ago. The response in the comments is right, beyond the concrete limitations of antifa the anarchist guy promotes "awareness" since there combatting of structural problems is not actually linked with antifa in any way (the word used is "promoting" which is telling of the strategic linkage between antifa organizational forms and anarchist concepts of political work).

lo posted:

there's a genus of jumping spider called Portia that exhibits advanced learning and problem solving behaviour on the level of some vertebrates, they're really cool

last year i read a science fiction book called children of time that was about an accidentally uplifted species of portia spiders. was definitely a little hacky in the way science fiction often is, but it was cool and i liked it. there was a whole sideline about what a gender liberation movement looks like when you're a member of a species where one gender traditionally devours the other that was pretty well done, and it had a good ending

TISM posted:

All lives have to die, of that there's no help
My favorite way to end 'em
Is the orb-weaver spider's, whose pedipalp
Enters the female's pudendum

Then dies on the spot, his corpse there still stuck
Left for his rivals to curse it
He would rather die than not get to fuck
Personally, I reckon it's worth it

babyhueypnewton posted:

The first guy basically argues for reformism and dismisses the reality of fascism as merely symptomatic.

I think what underpins her article is maybe even a little worse than that. Up until extremely recently, it's been the ruling ideology for years among the sub-bourgeois, university-educated classes in the West, and especially among white, "polite" company in the West, that violent, deliberate, self-aware racism is nothing more than a fringe problem to be exploited on the margins for illustrative purposes, as a story about, for instance, the dubious hobbies of conservative politicians, or as a counterpoint to the self—a rickety psychological self-defense against those classes' own precarious economic positions. The wise college-educated liberal bows their head and says, "My racism is so deep within me, no one can tell I'm racist at all until I explain it to them."

In this view of the world, the "real" problem of racial and ethnic oppression is "systemic" (sans system), invisible, unconscious, communicated in classroom thought exercises about standing in line to buy fast food; it is nothing so crude in 2018 as a white nationalist army blasting Arab and Muslim people to pieces with bombs and bullets, white supremacist terrorist cells growing on military bases both in the West and abroad; it's nothing so "individual", so personal, as white police clocking time raping and murdering black children, then framing them with planted weapons to cover up their crimes before heading to the local KKK rally, while their military counterparts match them step for step, day after day, overseas. And it was a pretty easy sell, that level of denial, until just a couple years ago.

I think one reason that level of violent, "individualized" (read: realized) racism still can't be acknowledged by a lot of people on the academic "left" is because, on average, the more time any one member of those university-educated classes spends in a classroom learning about the superiority of concern for "systemic" racism (sans system, that is, sans Marxism), the more likely that person is to enter into a career of facilitating direct racist violence abroad through the firepower of the state, even if it's just through passing that ideology down to the next batch of students who will take a more direct hand themselves.

If you are reading e.g. a lot of Fanon in grad school in the West, you are—at least in your mind as a student while lying awake at night—probably on your way to a "color revolution"-fomenting NGO gig, a federal position at State or in imperialist "economic development", or down a tenured university track teaching what you've been taught... or, you're headed toward recurrent unemployment and the perceived impotence of day-to-day economic instability. ("Perceived", because in the context of a different class, instability can turn out anything but impotent.) Even when talking in terms of those students living out the lives of refugees from a brutally well-disciplined "white collar" labor market, I'm putting aside how often you see "middle-class" Westerners pulling a few years in the military first and turning it into a poli sci or even "political philosophy" degree, and from there into gunning for a steady writing job in some imperialist liberal outlet such as Vox or VICE.

So when I see a whiffed ball this dire:

Antifa is liberalism insofar as its adherents, through both their criticisms and their tactics, want to draw our attention away from systemic problems and towards individual behavior. It primarily addresses racism in terms of the virulent thoughts or attitudes in the mind of the racist (say, the neo-Nazi), and their aberrant behavior, rather than systemic forms of race- and class-based domination and exploitation.

...it comes across as the incarnate liberal doctrine of the sole importance of pseudo-"systemic" racism, now faced with the evidence to dethrone it—proof in the form of blatant, cruel violence on the street outside—and asserting, in panic, that none of that's real, that it doesn't exist, that it's a sin to even acknowledge it, much less combat it, because that doctrine, the doctrine of the supremacy of "invisible" racism, is a nervous, fretting, uncomfortable, but real class ally of racist violence itself.

tears posted:

that kersplebedeb article where its just a thread of emails between sakai and bromma where theyre chatting shit about imperialism and communism and the general idiocy of rthe imperialist "left"

link me holmes

Synergy posted:

sorry if repost