#17081
http://eregime.org/index.php?showforum=719

If anybody remembers revleft, a terrible forum, I've been reading Ismail's answers on his new forum about the USSR and "ask him anything." There's some dumbass will keeps trying to debate but Ismail is old internet and answers them anyway, I skipped most of those and read the history posts.

He's no longer the Internet's premiere Hoxhaist, now he's a Brezhnevite who thinks Khrushchev made improvements to socialist democracy and the cultural revolution was an ultraleftist exercise in futility against the level of productive forces. I also thought he was like 60 years old, turns out he's my age and has been a Marxist for about as long. But he's knowledgeable and there's an internal logic to his beliefs though I will admit I was disappointed I didn't get the collected works of Hoxha as an answer for everything.
#17082
he keeps rambling on reddit about how marx wrote letters to lincoln or whatever for quite some time now, it was very sad to see lol
#17083
been reading the MIM theory journals, it is really fascinating how even though they are like 20-30 years old that they correctly analyzed a lot of the trends of 90s capitalism compared to their contemporaries. is there any interest in a discussion thread on them?
#17084
yes please
#17085

babyhueypnewton posted:

http://eregime.org/index.php?showforum=719If anybody remembers revleft, a terrible forum, I've been reading Ismail's answers on his new forum about the USSR and "ask him anything." There's some dumbass will keeps trying to debate but Ismail is old internet and answers them anyway, I skipped most of those and read the history posts.

He's no longer the Internet's premiere Hoxhaist, now he's a Brezhnevite who thinks Khrushchev made improvements to socialist democracy and the cultural revolution was an ultraleftist exercise in futility against the level of productive forces. I also thought he was like 60 years old, turns out he's my age and has been a Marxist for about as long. But he's knowledgeable and there's an internal logic to his beliefs though I will admit I was disappointed I didn't get the collected works of Hoxha as an answer for everything.



I think Ismail went downhill when he started posting those Soviet polemics againt the Mao-era CCP. Obviously Hoxhaism has its own issues with the GPCR but it felt really unprincipled for him to do it

#17086
it's sad to see all our online antirevisionist heroes ultimately becoming enamoured with the Fucker Krushchev
#17087

lo posted:

it's sad to see all our online antirevisionist heroes ultimately becoming enamoured with the Fucker Krushchev



Really disappointed to see that the next Grover Furr book is a cookbook titled Khrushchev's Pies

#17088
If you’re not an hoxhaist when ur young, you have no heart.

If you’re not a marcyite when ur old, you have no brain
#17089
definitely make a mim theory thread, ive read bits and pieces of that and would like dive in deeper

here s the sick cover of mim theory 4:
#17090
just remembered the 90s, wow, totally forgot about them
#17091
https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/donald-hughes
#17092
#17093

winebaby posted:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/donald-hughes


I love Donald, as we all do, and that was a well-written article, and it is correct, but I have to wonder what the point of it is.

#17094
surely the editors at the Jacobin are aware they have invited a scoundrel, a pernicious troll who has been banned multiple times from a Legitimate Forum In Good Repute to write articles in their midst??/
#17095

Petrol posted:

winebaby posted:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/donald-hughes

I love Donald, as we all do, and that was a well-written article, and it is correct, but I have to wonder what the point of it is.



He should get out there more, professionally. Become to the nation what he is to us and to twitter. I think his serious writing has yet to achieve its final form. (The point is for him to cash checks and move out of his parents' house.)

#17096

winebaby posted:

his serious writing has yet to achieve its final form


And this... Is... to go... even further beyond

#17097
Reading about Stephen G. Gould and science communication makes me wonder what the socialist ethics around pop science actually are. Apparently a lot of Birkenstock-wearing nerds get mad if you write a lot about their research projects because it diminishes the control over information people think they deserve with rank elitism. For a layman/brainlet like me, Mismeasure of Man was a great primer into a field that's mostly dominated by lying eugenicists now. Today, you can only really get good non-shit "pop" in small bits and pieces like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Medium article about IQ (https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39) which is a short analysis of the stats. I fricking love science.
#17098
Mismeasure of Man is a real good book not just on its topic but for teaching readers about a model of pseudoscience that governs some of the most well-funded and influential disciplines in contemporary society, not just in the “sciences” but also business, advertising, marketing, etc. The general idea being, if you can set up a complicated-looking equation that solves for X, then X is something in the real world. Apply that to a lot of “economics” in the saltwater/freshwater sense and it dissolves like a pulp novel in the rain
#17099
http://jacklynch.net/Texts/hive.html

The way this is usually presented is as someone who foreshadowed Malthus' arguments about the consumption of the unproductive, but it's actually quite hilarious and a good satire of bourgeois society

edit the following morning: I just finished Joseph Massie, who I made the mistake of not including on my blog reading list. Wow. I'm really impressed with this one. Gets interest right unlike Locke, as seeing it as part of profits, and has the First reference to the phenomenon of the falling profit rate I think

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Massie_(economist)

The only reference on his Wikipedia page is to Marx lol

Edited by marlax78 ()

#17100
Im reading "late victorian holocausts"
#17101
same
#17102
:hi5:
#17103
everyone at work discussing the wheel of time like its 1995
#17104
What are they saying about it?
#17105
im in an intense period of self-reflection so i'm rereading my kanadian 8th grade (so like nov 2008, just before the last crisis) textbooks for geo and history (which are spectacular in terms of revisionism as a historical school) but also my 11th grade econ class reports on simon kuznets and milton friedman. it might be frontpageable but i think it's mostly plagiarized off then's wiki. the gold might be in my forecast for the following year which i remember being hie-larious when i was at my mom's last

Edited by Bablu ()

#17106
chuang volume 2 *dons flame shield*
#17107
reading attention merchants, its about the science and sale of attention/advertising over time. nothing really new if you've read literally any book about advertising
#17108

elias posted:

chuang volume 2 *dons flame shield*


why have you got getfiscals flame shield haha

#17109

c_man posted:

What are they saying about it?



that it is long and also that the audiobook is long. im pretending that i have not read it

#17110
Been reading a bunch of papers as preparation for another bad podcast where I talk with random academics about their papers.

Finished a big long one on slave hounds as biopower in the crossnational imperialist project of coercion and control over black bodies. They bred the dogs, the most formidable of which was called the Cuban Bloodhound,from a mixture of pitbulls, mastiffs, etc. and had them raised under constant beatings from the black slaves, so they would learn to hate the slaves, and when given the opportunity to attack or chase them down, do so viciously: https://academic.oup.com/past/article/246/1/69/5722095
#17111
double post so I'll say I'm starting to read these book called La Deuxième Gauche (The Second Left) which is about the CFDT, the reformist union movement in France, Parti Socialist etc. "soft left" - sure it'll be informative but let's see if it mentions anything about CIA funding. In The Politics of Heroin Alfred McCoy talks about how in Marseille the CIA funded the Parti Socialiste and members of the Corsican milieu to break the Communist Party there and prevent them from coming to power all over France.

Edited by Parenti ()

#17112

babyhueypnewton posted:

I thought it was acceptable to let Dengists exist because both Maoist and Dengist politics are minor in the first world (luckily, the latter has no political practice outside of China by definition) while using Maoism to criticize Chinese "imperialism" and "fascism" can have a huge negative influence given that imperialism does not need active support, merely acquiescence and confusion within the minority that resists. But I was wrong, Dengism carries its own ideology which, in time, will lead to its own version of support for capitalist-imperialism. I've defended Marcyism in the past as a pragmatic compromise that neutralizes the first world petty-bourgeoisie but Marcyism itself is collapsing, being pulled apart by Marxism-Leninism on the one side and Dengism on the other, and I doubt either the WWP or PSL will survive the crisis. Not really sure what to do or if anything can be done, I suppose I'm having the exact opposite crisis as red dread.




...

https://www.cpi-usa.org

#17113
this lovely little book is getting some notice on twitter so i decided to read through it

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/09/25/why-does-he-do-that-domestic-violence/why-does-he-do-that-domestic-violence.pdf

notable:

"How can an abuser gain such insight
into his feelings and still behave so destructively?
And how does real change happen?

These are just a very few of the many
confounding questions that face anyone — the
partner of an abusive man, a friend, or a
professional — who is looking for effective ways to
respond to abusive behavior. I came to realize,
through my experience with over two thousand
abusers, that the abusive man wants to be a
mystery. To get away with his behavior and to
avoid having to face his problem, he needs to
convince everyone around him — and himself —
that his behavior makes no sense. He needs his
partner to focus on everything except the real
causes of his behavior. To see the abuser as he
really is, it is necessary to strip away layer after
layer of confusion, mixed messages, and
deception. Like anyone with a serious problem,
abusers work hard to keep their true selves hidden.

i feel like there is an analogy here between abusive men and the "abuser class" of the bourgeoisie - since i often find myself wondering how bourgeois amerikans can believe the ridiculous nonsense, they bring out every day to explain the world!! food for thought... rations for rationality... brains for the brain god

#17114
it's good that at the most recent peak of "squatting" (moving families into vacant homes) as resistance in the public eye, getfiscal put into his jacobin (🧿) article that voting for housing opportunity isn't going to do jack without direct action. also a good in to point out how one of the things that got Venezuelan ex-pats slavering for a coup is how the government redistributed their absentee landlord properties among the people... might be a contradiction revealed or something. don't know where else that should go so i'll put it here.
#17115
[account deactivated]
#17116
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19850621-0

Reportedly the hijacker, who had been drinking heavily during the entire episode, surrendered his pistol to authorities one hour later in exchange for more beer.

#17117
i'm reading 'quando cessarono gli spari' or When the Shooting Stopped which is a history of partisans who liberated milan from 23 april to 6 may 1945. but it's real slow going
#17118

Constantignoble posted:

brendan cooney is pretty cool IMO, he's basically if you sift for the best things kliman tries to get across, then take them out of a querulous pedant and stick them in a laid-back jazz pianist



several years later update: these days he's hosting a mind-numbing podcast for MHI ranting about stuff like the looming threat of Tankies, who love Assad and the butchers of the Shining Path, and are Kinda Like Trump If You Think About It

problem with being an acolyte is that sooner or later you absorb sempai's worst bits, too

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#17119
Parenti on China, for anyone whoever wondered. The last section concerns China circa 2007.

http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
#17120

cars posted:

Mismeasure of Man is a real good book not just on its topic but for teaching readers about a model of pseudoscience that governs some of the most well-funded and influential disciplines in contemporary society, not just in the “sciences” but also business, advertising, marketing, etc. The general idea being, if you can set up a complicated-looking equation that solves for X, then X is something in the real world. Apply that to a lot of “economics” in the saltwater/freshwater sense and it dissolves like a pulp novel in the rain


oh i missed these. i just made an effortpost on this topic on fb. ill share

if you want to get into the nitty-gritty details of why iq realism is stupid i would uh recommend these posts. if for some reason you hate yourself enough to engage in debates with the lesswrong community about the validity of iq , i will warn you that attempting to cite gould will get you trolled to death and laughed at for being a normie npc libtard or whatever so id recommend against it. their rebuttals do not address gould's points of course and gould makes a really incisive criticism of iq even to this day if you just need to know why its bad. but dont even attempt it in an argument. these links will give you more credibility as in their insane mythology shalizi is a high iq chad that they respect despite being tragically mistaken about his sensitive libtard views that despite how nice they are just frankly dont align with reality or whatever. even then shalizi is unfortunately outdated as he gave up even trying long ago, there are many rebuttals but as with gould they all drastically miss the point. these guys never fucking stop and they are all stupid as fuck and insanely invested in their simplistic self-serving mindset. if you understand shalizi and gould and shit and just idk scientific methodology it becomes easier to critically read the rebuttals if you so choose. we really need another fighter out there whos uhhh shalizi-tier to engage with these dumbasses but currently there is no one and i really dont blame people for not wanting to attempt that important work. but theyre saying this stuff and it all goes unchecked idk anyhow. link http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_iq.html

also, im aware that the lesswrong community are not the kinds of fascists who say npc and libtard and make a pathetic attempt to distance themselves from the ironypoisoned and low-iq groypers who do so. but read this and fucking tell me how its any different lmfao https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k2KwBEq4ToXnvZSbz/on-the-nature-of-agency