toyotathon posted:shriekingviolet posted:I increasingly lean on that goatstein metaphor of Actual Leftism as a point of no return from which you cannot escape once you've actually hit it, because the more people I meet who claim to have once been leftists (the trot-neocon pipeline, hippies who voted for reagan, university activism tourists) the more I build conviction that those people never, ever, ever actually "got it."
for sure it's like- we have parasite classes on us, they're as real as tapeworms. it's significant on a species-level. how could anybody unlearn a thing like that? deer don't have a couple deer claiming to own the forest, demanding tribute, or a permanent class of deer-thieves, it's just our dumb asses. unlearning class consciousness would be like unlearning that rocks are hard.
edit okay for meta-content: i don't really know how to express this. when i started reading political theory seriously, maybe, 5 years ago, coming off a news-addiction, i had an unconscious belief that there was a canon, which we study, absorb, and someday be done with. like a foot race: a long, multi-year marathon, but there was a finish, and that at the finish line, i'd meet with the other runners, and we'd all talk about the race. that was a naivety, how there's a path and a finish, and a qualification to speak. this is how school's set up, so maybe it was a programmed assumption. study is a marathon, but all there is is pace, and the finish line is death. at a book a week, you get maybe 2000 till death -- and who reads a book a week? there's a pace of study, the route's improvised, and there's a continuous conversation, to reproduce what your eyes read, out your mouth to other ears. now i look to where i want to be, intellectually, and i'm just as far from that horizon as when i started, but i'm trying to keep up the pace, cuz there isn't much of an alternative. stoked to talk around people who've been at it longer than me and probably figured this out a while ago, how it's a team sport, and the rules to it.
i think it's just another chosen identity and nothing that good is coming out of it. look, weve seen it. people are boring, crowds are detestable, socialism is a drag. next!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
"The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India.
...
In early 1974, a National Geographic film crew went to the island with a team of anthropologists to film a documentary, Man in Search of Man. They were accompanied by armed police. When the motorboat broke through the barrier reefs, the locals emerged from the jungle and shot arrows at the boat. They landed at a safe point on the coast and left gifts in the sand, including a miniature plastic car, some coconuts, a live pig, a doll, and aluminum cookware.
The Sentinelese followed up by launching another round of arrows, one of which struck the documentary director in his thigh. The man who wounded the director withdrew to the shade of a tree and laughed proudly while others speared and then buried the pig and the doll. They left afterward, taking the coconuts and cookware."
nice little bit at the end where during a stopover in the far north of canada after his release he met some inuit teens and was like yeah your circumstances are the same
Edited by wasted ()
i'm also currently reading mark fisher, baudrillaart and a bunch of short stories by jg ballard about space.
ilmdge posted:dang I never bought the Ludo Martens “Anotger view of Stalin” book because I didn’t realize Pravda media was run by like 1 dude and he got sick or something so now the site has been down for months. I wanna get that book!
It was actually on sale? Did any copies make it into the wild?
ilmdge posted:I think it was on sale for a reasonable amount of time with plenty of copies shipped (and a badass cover) but note that this is Another View of Stalin, not his later book Stalin: A Black Legend, which I do think may not have ever made it out in English. Last I recall some publisher that didn’t previously exist popped up to secure the rights to that one after everyone else refused it.
i like how they've sort of vaguely made it look like a penguin classic. good job stalin apologia cover designers
This is their last tweet
After his second hospitalization he shut it down to prevent getting too behind on orders because he didn’t know how long he’s be out. We are working on getting it back up right now. Should be up later tonight or tomorrow. https://t.co/LWLHo2Lmky
— Pravda Media (@pravda_media) September 12, 2018
Synergy posted:reading about "uncontacted peoples"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
"The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India.
...
In early 1974, a National Geographic film crew went to the island with a team of anthropologists to film a documentary, Man in Search of Man. They were accompanied by armed police. When the motorboat broke through the barrier reefs, the locals emerged from the jungle and shot arrows at the boat. They landed at a safe point on the coast and left gifts in the sand, including a miniature plastic car, some coconuts, a live pig, a doll, and aluminum cookware.
The Sentinelese followed up by launching another round of arrows, one of which struck the documentary director in his thigh. The man who wounded the director withdrew to the shade of a tree and laughed proudly while others speared and then buried the pig and the doll. They left afterward, taking the coconuts and cookware."
ilmdge posted:I think it was on sale for a reasonable amount of time with plenty of copies shipped (and a badass cover) but note that this is Another View of Stalin, not his later book Stalin: A Black Legend, which I do think may not have ever made it out in English. Last I recall some publisher that didn’t previously exist popped up to secure the rights to that one after everyone else refused it.
lol ludo martens and domenico losurdo are very much entirely different people my friends =]
elias posted:lol ludo martens and domenico losurdo are very much entirely different people my friends =]
have you ever seen them in the same room together?
but this one was always my favorite, from knossos, "stone cold snake hurling witch w/ cat on head"
your whole history needs to be completly rewritten,
The statuette, which originally consisted of separately-carved components of hippopotamus ivory, serpentine, rock crystal, wood, and gold, with added decoration in ‘Egyptian’ blue, has been painstaking reconstructed from several hundred burnt and broken fragments. Standing 50 centimeters tall, it depicts a male youth, with left leg slightly advanced. However, unlike Archaic Greek kouroi, which hold both arms at their sides, the Palaikastro figure has both arms sharply bent at the elbows and holds its clenched fists before its chest. It also once wore a golden kilt, penis sheath, dagger, and sandals, whereas Archaic kouroi are nude.
The carving of this chryselephantine statuette is extraordinarily fine, surpassing other examples of Cretan Bronze Age sculpture in bronze, terracotta, and stone. Minute details of anatomy, such as subcutaneous veins and tendons as well as muscles and cuticles are rendered with veristic exactitude. The dark blue-gray serpentine head, or more precisely scalp, is meticulously incised, as if to represent shaved hair on the sides and a braided topknot above. Although badly damaged and discolored, it is certainly the most remarkable piece of Minoan sculpture that has survived to this day.
This short, attractive booklet by one of the directors of the Palaikastro excavations presents the statuette in clear, readily accessible form with numerous color illustrations. Brief sections introduce the figure and the site in general; recall the discovery and deposition of the finds; speculate on the identification of the findspot as ‘a town shrine’; describe the statuette, its materials, techniques, conservation, and modern museum display in detail, and Minoan ivory work in general; and seek to identify the ‘kouros’ iconographically. (Unfortunately there is no bibliography beyond citation of an edited volume published in 2000.(1))
Intriguingly, different parts of the Palakastro statuette were found in different locations, and in different condition, which the excavators believe to be the result of deliberate destruction during the late 15th century BC. In the ‘Plateia’ facing Building 5, which is tentatively identified as a ‘Town Shrine’ on account of its finely cut sandstone masonry with double-axe incised marks and other accouterments, excavators recovered the ivory torso and left arm, fragments of gold, and patches of blue pigment. Nearby were the right arm, separately carved ivory feet, and the serpentine head. All were burned. Inside the building, some 10 meters distant, were the figure’s two legs, much more badly burnt and broken (one was reconstituted from 190 fragments), and gold sandals. The excavators believe the distance between the two groups of finds too great to be explained by the figure having fallen from an upper storey (if so, why were some components, including the feet, separate from the legs, found outside the building?). Sackett, rather, suggests that ‘a hostile intruder, whether looter or iconoclast, could have seized the figure by the legs and, as he moved outside but stood close to the door looking inside, could have hurled these into the building. As he did this the figure would have broken and the major pieces would have fallen close by…while others would have bounced back into the Plateia’ (p. 8). This, of course, makes for good reading, but is highly speculative. Likewise, in the Conservation section Sackett observes that the legs inside the building suffered from burning at considerably higher temperatures than the ivory components found outside: ‘Indeed a study of the temperatures which normally occur in accidental house fires, as opposed to those of deliberate arson shows that the rooms where our figure was found had been deliberately filled with inflammable material (such as brushwood)’ (pp. 13-14 italics in original). Unfortunately, no reference to this study is provided, but it seems to be a paper given by T. Cunningham in 2002, published in 2007. There the destruction sequence is reconstructed even more vividly.(2)
Returning to the figure itself, of considerable interest are the materials and techniques of the statue, which was composed, mostly of hippopotamus ivory. Sackett states that large lower incisors were employed, but earlier studies suggest that these straight tusks formed the legs, while the extremely fragmentary face, torso, and arms were fashioned from curved upper canines. Thus the statue might have been carved from the dentition of a single animal. Over all, eight ivory components were joined by wooden dowels (apparently olive), and a central wooden element, now lost, must have connected the torso to the legs. The serpentine head was attached to the back of the face, and rock crystal eyes were inserted in-between. Clothing was added in gold sheet. This assembly is made clear by a cut-away drawing and detailed illustrations of the joins as well as of individual components. The anonymous craftsman employed some 47 drilled and chiseled mortises, circular and triangular in section, far more than necessary to join the components and sometimes overlapping, which indicates that many of the joins were made ‘blind’. Moreover, evidence of surviving tool marks, mostly on the tabs that slotted into the figure’s base and other unexposed surfaces, indicate that in addition to chisels and drills saws, gravers, points, burins, rasps, and knives were also used in the production of the figure, which must have been produced by a master carver trained in wood. (For a boxwood replica of the statuette carved by Mark Moak, who contributed some of the reconstruction drawings in this volume, see http://www.rocky.edu/pdf/alumni-friends/rt/Winter09RT.pdf and http://www.rocky.edu/academics/programs/art/GalleryExhibit.shtml).
The closest parallels for the style and technique of the figure are the ivory components recovered by Sir Arthur Evans from the so-called ‘Treasury Deposit’ at Knossos, and by Sinclair Hood in later excavations along the ‘Royal Road’ at the same site, but Sackett rightly notes the ‘astonishing sophistication of our craftsman in representing the human form, its bone structure, muscles, tendons, and veins, and especially details of hands and feet that can stand up to the critique of a modern expert in human anatomy’, and he seems to approve of the suggestion that such detailed carving is based on observation of a live human model, or even that the Minoan artist might have gained anatomical knowledge from dissection, a practice first attested in Hellenistic Alexandria (pp. 20-22). Elsewhere, however, he repeats earlier observations that the figure’s proportions seem to be based on a variation of the First Egyptian canon, making the figure taller and more slender, and that some of the anatomical details, though carefully carved, are not entirely accurate (pp. 23-24).
the headline is trash, but the funny thing is that the CIA put bin Laden's library on their website so you can read all of Blum's book about how trash they are straight from OBL's copy https://t.co/GFcLX8pjEF
— CSPAM2 (@cspamus1) December 12, 2018
but then again, that was nearly a decade ago; couldn't tell you how i'd feel reading it today because i dunno where it went
Edara holds to a "restricted" interpretation of Marx that limits the superstructure specifically to politico-legal institutions, argued to be consistently applied from at least the 1859 Preface until the end of Marx's life. above all, the author seems to maintain that base and superstructure should not be read as totalizing concepts in the analysis of society; that is more the role of the mode of production. however, the growth of base/superstructure into a synoptic construct essentially infringed on the conceptual space of the mode of production, and the two gradually came to change places -- the latter taking on a more purely technical, "base" understanding -- in the subsequent century
the style of exposition feels very dissertation-y (and was indeed written in pursuit of a phd at the university of hyderabad), but the content seems very strong so far. i read Sayer's book a few months ago and found it persuasive, but i have a feeling this one will supplant it and draw me back in the other direction -- partly because the resulting constructs feel more consonant with an understanding of stratification i've found fruitful elsewhere
Edited by Constantignoble ()
Bablu posted:are quasi pop science ppl like kahneman worth reading?
it really depends on what you want out of it. the important thing to know about them, imo, is that those books are all designed to be read by businesspeople on plane flights or whatever. they have some interesting bits but all of the interpretation done by the author is going to be framed as something thats valuable for Making Important Decisions, or as why their field should be funded.
gyrofry posted:the latest Sam Kriss piece
elias posted:ilmdge posted:I think it was on sale for a reasonable amount of time with plenty of copies shipped (and a badass cover) but note that this is Another View of Stalin, not his later book Stalin: A Black Legend, which I do think may not have ever made it out in English. Last I recall some publisher that didn’t previously exist popped up to secure the rights to that one after everyone else refused it.
lol ludo martens and domenico losurdo are very much entirely different people my friends =]
good call 
https://www.levada.ru/2018/12/19/nostalgiya-po-sssr-2/
Edited by Parenti ()
The use of the trope of the Tyrant was fascinating (may write something more about this), as well as the comparison that could be made with The Count of Monte Cristo as far as the basic narrative (imprisoned man out for vengeance, but with very different results in each case) goes.
cars posted:someone forwarded me the Wikipedia article on the Taft-Katsura Agreement, which is now my new favorite example of exactly why and how Wikipedia is bad
ahahaha what a bunch of credulous dweebs