#17241

thirdplace posted:

i'm reading an article on the web site of the the us naval institute arguing that the us should issue letters of marque against chinese shipping


this is incredible lol

#17242

thirdplace posted:

sovnarkoman posted:


https://www.sproutdistro.com/2019/11/22/new-zine-always-against-the-tanks/



trotzine sounds like a patient medication but its actually this web page informing me of stalin's devastating invasion of afghanistan

#17243
edit: i , like the chump i am, made a stalin invading afghanistan joke without clicking through to see the next page first
#17244

vimingok posted:

John Smith posted:

The trillions they spent after 2007-8 bought another decade of zombie-like life for their vile system. This time they will be lucky to get 10 months, or even 10 weeks, before the explosion phase of the supernova begins.



every once in a while you get these THIS IS IT, THE BIG ONE, IT'S ALL GOING TO COLLAPSE takes, usually from doomsday people but this guy seems to know his stuff so idk. are we really looking at some super disaster within a year?

#17245

Synergy posted:

vimingok posted:

John Smith posted:

The trillions they spent after 2007-8 bought another decade of zombie-like life for their vile system. This time they will be lucky to get 10 months, or even 10 weeks, before the explosion phase of the supernova begins.

every once in a while you get these THIS IS IT, THE BIG ONE, IT'S ALL GOING TO COLLAPSE takes, usually from doomsday people but this guy seems to know his stuff so idk. are we really looking at some super disaster within a year?



i have never trusted westerners' doomsday projections. i guess it s because they compare any situation they find themselves in to the US or some other first world shithole in the 50s-60s and find that everything decayed so much to the point of brink or collapse. as someone from the semi periphery i cant even say "welcome to our reality loser" to these people because the situation doesnt seem even that bad to warrant that

#17246
civil wars where millions die can’t compete in most Westerners’ minds with vague fantasies of change in their everyday lives. They have little idea how much of life during a genuine social crisis is the same sort of day-to-day grind as it is before or after.
#17247
after being exposed online to complaints about the housing market and how high rents are and shit (david harvey repeatedly mentions the rents in NY as to why we need communism) for years and years a few days ago i decided to check homeownership rate in the US and turns out it s 65%. so a situation quite often presented as a huge looming social crisis is actually incredibly better than the vast majority of the world. either the stats are wrong or i am not understanding them correctly but the most likely thing is that this is just another instance of westernitis lol
#17248
The statistic is a bald faced lie. It is a measure of the status of property, not people. Homeownership rate counts the number of homes which are owned by an occupant, not the portion of people or families that own homes. Most critically it counts everyone on a 30 year mortgage as a homeowner from day one even though they will be in debt slavery to the banks for th rest of their lives. Home ownership in the US is intended mostly to move people from short term leases to a lifelong financial contract to guarantee their long term servitude to their boss and savagely punish job mobility.
#17249

MarxUltor posted:

Most critically it counts everyone on a 30 year mortgage as a homeowner from day one even though they will be in debt slavery to the banks for th rest of their lives.



okay that s fair but foreclosure rate is also very low so mortgage payments dont seem like the massive problem the internet hype makes it out to be

#17250

sovnarkoman posted:

MarxUltor posted:


Most critically it counts everyone on a 30 year mortgage as a homeowner from day one even though they will be in debt slavery to the banks for th rest of their lives.



okay that s fair but foreclosure rate is also very low so mortgage payments dont seem like the massive problem the internet hype makes it out to be



good point. i've never been legally evicted so generally the institution of renting is not a big deal like internet hype would have you believe. i'm very happy with the state of housing and there are no problems with my living conditions because i manage to pay my rent every month.

#17251

sovnarkoman posted:

MarxUltor posted:

Most critically it counts everyone on a 30 year mortgage as a homeowner from day one even though they will be in debt slavery to the banks for th rest of their lives.

okay that s fair but foreclosure rate is also very low so mortgage payments dont seem like the massive problem the internet hype makes it out to be


the banks don't want to own houses or be in the business of selling them, they just want you to give them money for the rest of your life. banks still take mortgage debts and collect them and sell a stake in the combined debt as an investment, so they have a clear motivation to keep the actual foreclosure rate low to maintain the appearance that those are viable. so there's a lot of tricks they can use to hide the foreclosures, like refinancing or putting a gun to your head and saying sell the place in the next 2 weeks.

no one gives a fuck about renters and the landlords are mostly all financed to hell and paying mortgages too, so a rental tenant not paying is an immediate existential threat. the landlord also can't actually see your bank account balance at all times, or prioritize the timing of your payments so that they get paid first and everything else bounces.

e: also, obviously

Edited by MarxUltor ()

#17252
https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/plan-a-for-the-coronavirus-7db3997490c1

idk why i'm compelled to read nascent technofascist trash.. but here's yarvin encouraging 'startup dictatorship' to solve crisis of capitalism.
#17253
the fucked up thing about yarvin is that while everything about his online presence screams "mouthy shitposter who can probably be ignored" he actually is part of a network of influence that includes some very powerful people (Peter Thiel, net worth 2.3 billion) and which is working on developing the tools of the future fascist state explicitly for that purpose
#17254

thirdplace posted:

i'm always forgetting this


oh

#17255

thirdplace posted:

Peter Thiel


uk gov just handed over confidential patient data to palantir. i guess this will be the case for all their data generally with leaving eu, but it's not being delayed until then.

#17256
turns out all you need to be a neofascist silicon valley brainfluencer is to say stuff like "you cant handle this truth your not ready for!!!!!" before you say your dumb ideas, and also unironically drop phrases like "proptip" and have sunglasses lowered onto your face by drone as you dispense totally useless trivia to make yourself sound superfluously knowledgeable about mundane things like FDA (NOT "the FDA"!!!!!!!!!)
#17257
[account deactivated]
#17258
i can't stand the faux-folksy from first principles analogical reasoning prose style all of the austrian influenced engineering dorks use. even Nick land was somehow more coherent and readable when he was scrawling speedfreak hermetic numerology compared to his moldbug turn
#17259
I'm sure yarvin prizes himself on how clear and concise he is but it makes my eyes defocus and i wake up an hour later in a cold sweat.
#17260
[account deactivated]
#17261

blinkandwheeze posted:

i can't stand the faux-folksy from first principles analogical reasoning prose style all of the austrian influenced engineering dorks use. even Nick land was somehow more coherent and readable when he was scrawling speedfreak hermetic numerology compared to his moldbug turn


#17262
this guys like "i plumb reckon i got the big plan for the plague yall but first i gotta just say "Hyper-autistic plans for cyclic lockdowns"' LMAO what the hell, how can you not only never log out but spend your whole life stuck on log in
#17263
i dont know who this guy is besides Goatstein talking about him a couple times but I have no doubt he grew up being forced to admit on the first day of class every year that his name was "Curtis Yarvin". kids dont forgive, kids dont forget Yarv.
#17264
[account deactivated]
#17265

toyot posted:



#17266
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-crisis-pt-1/

he's back. and shifting to weekly postings while stuck at home
#17267
Staph in the blood is pretty serious, glad he’s ok.
#17268
State and Revolution, after reading bits and pieces over time, finally got around to reading the whole thing.

man, he really hates Kautsky, lol
#17269
thats bc karl kautsky was a dumb jerk who inaugurated the practice of taking dumps on actually-existing socialism
#17270

toyot posted:

energy is a 1D scalar w/o an absolute reference, only changes thru the passage of time, okay. my crank theory is that the universe doesn't have 3 dimensions, it has 2^3, which are: the metric (whether 1meter=1meter), x, y, z (3 translations), xy, xz, yz (3 rotations), and xyz (time/energy). the 3rd row of pascal's triangle. these are the 8 known things, which can change the distance between points inside 2 solid or elastic bodies, a gravity wave (1), the kinematics (3+3), and stress/strain (1).


"1D scalar" is a contradiction. scalars have 0 spatial dimensions, and dont transform at all under changes of coordinates. also its not necessary to independently introduce rotations or what you are denoting as "xyz" independently from spatial dimensions (x,y,z). they are all constructed from the basic spatial dimensions using vector algebra and calculus, and your intuition about pascal's triangle and these combinations is made rigorous in the theory of differential forms on manifolds and that by taking "outer products", "exterior derivatives" and various integrals as defined in this theory one can transform between these types of constructions so its not necessary to define them independently. in fact the standard stokes and divergence theorems from vector calculus are intuitive and classical results that form the foundations for this field. it is commonly used in the study of classical and quantum gravity and spacetime. the quantum version involves a neat construct called "clifford algebra". i can give you some standard references if you like.

Edited by c_man ()

#17271
[account deactivated]
#17272
2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

It's set in a flooded New York after the two ecological collapses Robinson is almost certainly correct in assuming are thoroughly baked in to our future which is cool because 1: new York as Venice is a fun setting, 2: it helps it's thesis that capital will always, always profit off the disasters it itself creates.

Basically he creates a world where billions have died after two sea level rises but the underlying reality, that society exists as a mechanism of extraction from poor to wealthy, remains unchanged while going into pretty granular level detail on the contradictions leading to collapse inherent in such a system.

Why it's so apt, or useful, to this present moment is the centrality of a credit strike to the plot. In the world of the novel and ours, untold misery is kept wobblingly perpetuated by an utterly false and valueless edifice of hugely leveraged collateralised asset structures propped up by the continued inflow of the exploiteds remittances. Hes aware, and shows that the collapse of such a system is a certainty, so the only sane thing to do is strike.

The idea of a credit strike through the use of community banking, of starving capital of its means of self perpetuation, seems somewhat doable right now. He makes the argument that revolutions have historically only needed around fifteen percent of people to be committed to succeed, and that capital is so rickety it might not even need that much.

He's a pretty utopian writer and I'm sure you guys would find a lot to criticise about the book, but if, like me, you are a huge dumbass and "pretty good sci-fi" is about as clever a thing as you're able to read, this is pretty good sci-fi.

Edited by devscoots ()

#17273
Double post

Edited by devscoots ()

#17274
i like many of ksr's books & value his writings, his mars series was my first exposure to a lot of different ideas when i was in middle school. rip arkady. i read 2140 a couple years ago but i haven't remembered much about it, maybe give it another go when the libraries reopen after the world stops having ended
#17275

devscoots posted:

He's a pretty utopian writer and I'm sure you guys would find a lot to criticise about the book, but if, like me, you are a huge dumbass and "pretty good sci-fi" is about as clever a thing as you're able to read, this is pretty good sci-fi.


everyone can read so called 'real literature' imo, even if you are a dumbass and a failson. you just gotta have some irony and some emotion, and believe in yourself

#17276
[account deactivated]
#17277
i don't really want to get into the debate of what is and isn't "Literature" here because it's usually a very bad and uninteresting discussion but i think it should have been obvious that i meant literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction in that post, and that it does make sense to draw a distinction between these two types of fiction because they're concerned with doing pretty different things mostly. lem is pretty cool i think.
#17278

Real literature is produced by a foreign language press in a socialist country
#17279

lo posted:

everyone can read so called 'real literature' imo, even if you are a dumbass and a failson. you just gotta have some irony and some emotion, and believe in yourself


and be able to read

#17280

pogfan1996 posted:

Real literature is produced by a foreign language press in a socialist country


*anti revisionist voice* thats why they don't make literature no more!