at the data center, data center
shriekingviolet posted:my little red book is a cold war era american printing with a preface written by some jingoist like the blurb back of an RL Stine novel about how the spooky contents will chill and thrill you. it rules
mao wasn't serious about communism, he just loved shooting guns and hiking
tears posted:paul feyerabend's against method,
i finished this and would recommend it to anyone interested in countercurrents in philosophy of science away from positivism, empiricism and the like. i did find it hard going even with a fair bit of history of science knowledge but it is rewarding and you dont have to read all the extensive footnotes to understand his theories
im now reading jung's "psychology and alchemy," i tried to read this before and never got very far but it is actually very easy reading (paging the dream thread)
shriekingviolet posted:my little red book is a cold war era american printing with a preface written by some jingoist like the blurb back of an RL Stine novel about how the spooky contents will chill and thrill you. it rules
"Now you may think this Mao character is alright but wait until you see what he keeps under his bed!"
The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have been tested and classified as potential money-makers or power-holders. No one is given tax funds for the leisure in which to educate himself or the right to educate others unless at the same time he can also be certified for achievement. Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. A degree always leaves its indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world which puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. In each country the amount of consumption by the college graduate sets the standard for all others; if they would be civilized people on or off the job, they will aspire to the style of life of college graduates.
cars posted:/rupture
this sort of thing was cool two decades ago
GOOD-BYE TO A TOOTH
You were, my friend, hard and unyielding ;
Not like the tongue, soft and stretching.
The bitter and the sweet we have shared to this day,
But now each of us must go his own way.
one translation i saw had the last line as something more like "You go east and I'll go west" which is funny
tears posted:reading ivan illich talking about school theres some kooky stuff but some of it is gold
finished, better than a lot of stuff I have read on education
I also read Kalinin's On Communist Education, his collection of speeches on yep, you guessed it, communist education, mostly in relation to the komsomol and many during the period of the war. a lot of them are pretty funny since he stands up and goes "I hadn't intended to speak but look ive been pressed into it, so i'll make this short, listening to your speaches it strikes me that you are all fucking boring idiots, wheres you passion, wheres you critical thinking, wheres the emotion, wheres your fire, why were there no opinions, why did we not have a huge argument instead of a list of facts and figures? (rapturous applause, shouts of "kalinin, kalinin")"
now im reading some boring stuff about gramsci and education - i haven't read much original gramscian material but it strikes me that there may have been some academic revisionist recapitulation of gramsci at a chomsky tier of "radical education" - what i have read keeps going on about neoliberalism as if state education in the global north was all great until thatcher got her milk snatching hands on it and now here's some gramsci to back that shit up.
i want to read cool stuff like vygotsky and piaget but instead here i am with my head in the sewer yet again
lo posted:i'e been reading a few bill bland articles where he talks about the revisionist takeover in the ussr. it seems like his position is a bit different from someone like grover furr in that he(bland) thinks that as early as the mid 30s actual marxist-leninists might have been a minority in the party, rather than that being something that only really happened after stalin's death.
that sounds like it sidles right up to the third-periodist take vs the popular front, which iirc holds that stalin himself was doing well up until the lead up to WW2, where he went revisionist — or rather was largely forced to by the conditions of retreat that impelled an alliance with bourgeois democracy for survival. and that move, so it is supposed, destroyed the revolutionary core of the CPSU and likewise allowed the further degeneration of western communism, and ultimately collapsed the revolutionary project of the comintern via conciliation, retreat from the seizure of power by military force, further emphasis on "national roads to socialism" discourse, etc
i haven't been able to find a whole lot laying it out elaborately; does Bland argue that? or does anyone know of anything else detailed in that vein?
Edited by Constantignoble ()
Acdtrux posted:I hate it when the introduction to a book makes a terrible critique of the contents:
this is from the preface to Benjamin's Illuminations
i remember reading this and scoffing pretty hard. fortunately, literally every time, it's someone like this:
Wieseltier says the magazine will contain zero images or ads and will be stuffed exclusively with essays aimed at accomplishing his singular mission: “the rehabilitation of liberalism.”
“The errors and the failures of the liberal order … need to be acknowledged, but they do not need to be exaggerated,” Wieseltier told Airmail, subtly skirting the allegations that cost him the critical acclaim of his decades-long career. In a 2017 essay for Vox, Sarah Wildman documented her experience working at the New Republic, detailing how Wieseltier, then literary editor, once “cornered” her in the bathroom and kissed her against her will. Her account came at the heels of a flurry of allegations against the figurehead. According to the New York Times, multiple former staffers said they’d been kissed by Wieseltier without their consent. One former colleague recalled him writing a note thanking a staffer for wearing a miniskirt to the office.
Whatever else he was aiming for, Leon delighted in making young women sexually uncomfortable.
Constantignoble posted:lo posted:
i'e been reading a few bill bland articles where he talks about the revisionist takeover in the ussr. it seems like his position is a bit different from someone like grover furr in that he(bland) thinks that as early as the mid 30s actual marxist-leninists might have been a minority in the party, rather than that being something that only really happened after stalin's death.
that sounds like it sidles right up to the third-periodist take vs the popular front, which iirc holds that stalin himself was doing well up until the lead up to WW2, where he went revisionist — or rather was largely forced to by the conditions of retreat that impelled an alliance with bourgeois democracy for survival. and that move, so it is supposed, destroyed the revolutionary core of the CPSU and likewise allowed the further degeneration of western communism, and ultimately collapsed the revolutionary project of the comintern via conciliation, retreat from the seizure of power by military force, further emphasis on "national roads to socialism" discourse, etc
i haven't been able to find a whole lot laying it out elaborately; does Bland argue that? or does anyone know of anything else detailed in that vein?
Edited by Constantignoble (today 10:54:43)
i'm not really familiar with the take you mention but i don't think bland is really arguing that. he regards stalin as a staunch antirevisionist right up to his death(which i assume is the hoxhaist position generally). the focus seems to be more on the revisionists(open and concealed) in the party getting closer and closer to assuming power by various political stratagems, which culminates in stalin's death, after which they do assume power and get rid of any remaining antirevisionists like beria. he explicitly talks about them actively trying to do this in the 30s prior to the war. i actually think that he puts a bit much emphasis on what individual revisionists were doing rather than what was going on on a broader level but i think part of that is that he's arguing against 'standard' accounts of soviet history and that includes the motivations and actions of individual party members and officials.
The false peace with the nazis was both expedient and revisionist. It created this situation where every European communist party knew they should be destroyed, having already fought them in Spain, but had to adopt a neutral stance. Over a two and a half year period the parties flipflopped from "fuck the nazis" to "don't get dragged into another inter imperialist war" to "fuck the nazis" again and that was extremely damaging to their reputations.
Postwar it's correct to say that they pushed the european parties into essentially social democratic, non revolutionary positions. Like the first war the powers had sat down and decided who gets what countries in their sphere of influence. If you were in americas back yard you got told electoralism is the way to go, even if you were in France or the Netherlands and had a significant armed presence when Hitler ate a bullet.
If you look at the CPGB's modern continuation, the CPB, they still wave about the "British road to socialism". It's a party platform which liquidated any communist activity or mass programs in exchange for attempting to form some sort of one sided coalition with the labour party, whereby communists are expected to merely campaign on their behalf and hope they get some sort of karmic favour in return. If you think that sucks ass don't worry, a guy with sandals and a gray ponytail will be happy to explain to you that this program was approved by Stalin himself, comrade.
If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end. In time we will come to regard pigs, cattle, and chickens as things for us to use, no matter how strong our compassion may be; and when we find that to continue to obtain supplies of the bodies of these animals at a price we are able to pay it is necessary to change their living conditions a little, we will be unlikely to regard these changes too critically. The factory farm is nothing more than the application of technology to the idea that animals are means to our ends.
The last sentence should be "The factory farm is nothing more than the application of our current mode of production to the idea that animals are means to our ends", ie capitalism's implementation of speciesism. One of the most frustrating things I see anti-animal leftists trot out is that the current conditions of non-human animals in factory farms is reflective of some euro-amerikan cultural deviation. There is a clear progression with how animals have been treated that corresponds with a certain mode of production. The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams describes 4 stages:
New naming is required to identify the recent developments in the way animals animalize protein. Since World War II, a new way of treating animals has evolved that is named in euphemistic terms, “factory farming.” I suggest we consider the development that incarcerates animals into these misnamed factory farms as the fourth stage of meat eating. Th e fi rst stage in the development of people’s meat eating was that of relying predominantly on vegetarian foods, and what little meat (from small animals or bugs) consumed was acquired with one’s hands or sticks. The first stage of meat eating met Plutarch’s “do-it-yourself” standards for eating animals described in the previous chapter.
Hunting is the second stage of meat eating. When meat is obtained through killing animals who are not domesticated, there is little reliance on feminized protein. With the second stage, implemental violence is introduced, as well as the selection of some members of a community to be hunters. Distance from the animal is achieved through the implements used to kill the animal as well as from the division of a culture into hunters and nonhunters.
The third stage of meat eating is the domestication of animals, providing them with the trappings of care and security while planning their execution. With the third stage, meat consumption increases because meat is now from domesticated, easily available, animals. Domestication of animals provides another food resource: feminized protein.
The fourth stage of meat eating involves the imprisoning of animals. In the fourth stage we fi nd the highest per capita consumption of animalized and feminized protein: 60 percent of the food Americans now eat is provided by the meat, dairy, and egg industries. Animals are separated from most people’s everyday experience, except in their fi nal fate as food. With the fourth stage, we have started thinking in terms of how much meat or dairy products we need, rather than how much protein we need. This is because, for several decades in the mid-twentieth century, animalized protein and feminized protein made up two out of the four basic food groups. Seventy percent of protein for Americans is derived from these two food groups; in contrast, 80 percent of the protein in the Far East is from vegetable proteins
I think this is why the Marxist left has such a disdain for animal liberation, most of the writing and activism done on it today is entirely within the liberal ethical framework. For example, Singer frames the entire basis of animal liberation on reducing suffering as the ultimate good in the world, and exploiting animals causes suffering.
It's not even something that I will take seriously until its advocates are serious people. When asked how meat can adequately be replaced, the militant vegans are happy to link videos of buddhist warrior monks and claim that vegan food gave them their extreme physical fitness, while irl those same monks are eating meat at the village at the bottom of the hill every day. It's impossible to respect any movement when it's adherents are indistinguishable from the morgellons people, which is a shame because "not being cruel to animals" isn't otherwise a hard sell.
Horselord posted:I have a general disdain for animal liberation because the people who are into it frequently make themselves ridiculous (yelling at people that they are eating "diseased rotting corpses" almost a century after the advent of frozen food) or offensive to the moral decency they claim to be the peak of (inane comparisons to auschwitz and slave plantations).
It's not even something that I will take seriously until its advocates are serious people. When asked how meat can adequately be replaced, the militant vegans are happy to link videos of buddhist warrior monks and claim that vegan food gave them their extreme physical fitness, while irl those same monks are eating meat at the village at the bottom of the hill every day. It's impossible to respect any movement when it's adherents are indistinguishable from the morgellons people, which is a shame because "not being cruel to animals" isn't otherwise a hard sell.
there's a couple things here. like every radical movement in the imperial core, its full of liberalism and identity politics where people are acting as though their consumer choices are the ultimate level of political expression.
on the other hand, what you're saying has been said about every single radical movement, that the movement is full of crazies who just need to be more calm and reasonable in order to get more people on their side.
If it is something you're honestly want to know more about (especially on the nutritional side), I can recommend some resources, but I don't think you're approaching this in good faith. There are serious, scholarly examinations of basically every counter-argument against animal liberation but when you're dealing with structural oppression that doesn't work at getting people to do something.
I'm not going to entertain any argument that equates an oppressed group with animals, or liberation movements with animal activism. Comparing for example, black people, to cattle is a revolting idea.
I'm entirely open to serious examination of the subject, but I'm only willing to approach it for the benefit of humans and any human equivalent aliens that might show up later. I don't believe I owe animals anything morally, because they don't owe each other that either, but I do believe intentional and unnecessary cruelty is a symptom of being a fucked up person.
Horselord posted:The difference is that if say, the black human rights movements are called crazy people or the suffragettes are called crazy people, I can go directly to them and see and hear that they are coherent, rational, and worthy of support, and then draw the conclusion that what I read about them in The Daily Hitler newspaper is slanderous. Meanwhile the only animal rights people I'm ever made aware of are not the subject of any serious sustained propaganda push and make themselves ridiculous by their own deeds. I've never had a gay rights guy tell me heteros are possessed by demons, but I have been told face to face by an actual group of sign waving vegans that refrigeration is a myth.
animal liberation activists have absolutely been subject to massive propaganda, cf. literally any depiction of animal rights activists in popular media for the last 50 years. and funny you should mention gay rights, because I've never had a vegan tell me refrigeration is a myth, but I have had a gay rights activist tell me that age of consent laws are heteropatriarchal oppression and that they should be repealed and pedophilia should be destigmatized.
I'm not going to entertain any argument that equates an oppressed group with animals, or liberation movements with animal activism. Comparing for example, black people, to cattle is a revolting idea.
I'm entirely open to serious examination of the subject, but I'm only willing to approach it for the benefit of humans and any human equivalent aliens that might show up later. I don't believe I owe animals anything morally, because they don't owe each other that either, but I do believe intentional and unnecessary cruelty is a symptom of being a fucked up person.
this is just idealism. humans are animals too; what is it exactly about non-human animals that means you don't owe them anything?
filler posted:this is just idealism. humans are animals too; what is it exactly about non-human animals that means you don't owe them anything?
humans have this thing among themselves called society, an innate connection where we recognize ourselves in each other and form cultural and economic relationships on that basis. it's very different to animal social structures because of our great ability for abstract thought and the ability to communicate those thoughts. that lets human beings have beliefs and principles like "killing another human is bad" and name the bad activity murder. you can murder a person because both you and they are, if everything is going properly, capable of knowing what murder is.
animals don't have abstract concepts like that. when a lion is hungry it finds a pray animal and kills it without regard to suffering and then eats it while the blood is still warm. they dont have morality or the mental capacity to form one. Neither the lion nor the antelope knows about the concept of murder. You can claim that you've murdered a cow down at the ranch today and submit yourself to revolutionary justice but the other cows will never understand the concept. They eat and breed and shit and die without morality.
Edited by Horselord ()
Horselord posted:In order to defend a belief system that lowers actual oppressed people to cattle, you just described whats very obviously a pedophile as a "gay rights activist".
I called him that because I knew him as literally a gay rights activist, ie was a member of a gay rights org, participated in protests, waved signs (though not about the myth of refrigeration admittedly), etc. Regardless, I apologize for not being more clear that he was a pedophile, yes.
humans have this thing among themselves called society, an innate connection where we recognize ourselves in each other and form cultural and economic relationships on that basis. it's very different to animal social structures because of our great ability for abstract thought and the ability to communicate those thoughts. that lets human beings have beliefs and principles like "killing another human is bad" and name the bad activity murder. you can murder a person because both you and they are, if everything is going properly, capable of knowing what murder is.
animals don't have abstract concepts like that. when a lion is hungry it finds a pray animal and kills it without regard to suffering and then eats it while the blood is still warm. they dont have morality or the mental capacity to form one. Neither the lion nor the antelope knows about the concept of murder. You can claim that you've murdered a cow down at the ranch today and submit yourself to revolutionary justice but the other cows will never understand the concept. They eat and breed and shit and die without morality.
there are plenty of humans who don't have an abstract concept of death or murder. Ricky Ray Rector, the man who Bill Clinton famously suspended his presidential campaign to go execute, didn't eat the piece of pecan pie provided with his last meal because he was "saving it for later". Was his death A-OK because Bill had an abstract concept of execution but Ricky didn't?
and like lo said, do we actually know animals don't have an abstract concept of death or murder? the antelope sure doesn't let the lion kill it willingly, plenty of species mourn their dead, plenty of species will remember individual humans who've hurt or killed other animals, etc etc
filler posted:there are plenty of humans who don't have an abstract concept of death or murder. Ricky Ray Rector, the man who Bill Clinton famously suspended his presidential campaign to go execute, didn't eat the piece of pecan pie provided with his last meal because he was "saving it for later". Was his death A-OK because Bill had an abstract concept of execution but Ricky didn't?
Ricky is a person because he belongs to a species where, when things are going properly, a member of it has that ability. I wouldn't describe massive brain damage from a gunshot wound as "things going properly", so he still has personhood without that ability.
There was a period in history where some people in power thought that if you lost those mental capabilities you also lost personhood. They were called nazis and when they put their idea into practice it sucked.
If he should have been executed, the answer is uniformly no even before getting into the specifics of his case. The united states shouldn't have the power of execution in the first place.
But that question doesn't link up to what I said anyway, if you're trying to press the issue of his deminished mental capacity into my reasoning that you can't murder an animal, it would be better to ask something like "can the killing of Ricky Ray Rector still be accurately called an execution if he was incapable of understanding it?"
Which would then still be a useless question to ask, because even making an attempt at punitively ending life of a mentally handicapped person makes it clear that everyone involved in the endeavour is a shitty, irredeemable human being. That's the important part of Ricky Ray Rector's death, that the people who did it are cunts.
filler posted:and like lo said, do we actually know animals don't have an abstract concept of death or murder? the antelope sure doesn't let the lion kill it willingly, plenty of species mourn their dead, plenty of species will remember individual humans who've hurt or killed other animals, etc etc
They definitely understand what death is and what killing is, and they have emotions and a drive to survive and reproduce. That doesn't provide any hint that they have the concept of murder, a wrongful killing or the inseparable concepts of fairness, justice or law. Nobody out there studying the bears has found Bear Court.
toyot posted:a lot of these are just non-sequiturs. an animal's capacity for moral or social reasoning, isn't related to its capacity to become meat. children have poor moral and social reasoning compared to adults; it isn't then more okay to eat them as food, nor is it okay to eat human adults who lack moral capacity.
I already covered that re:Ricky Ray Rector
toyot posted:a lifeform's social capacity, is not a common way that people distinguish what to eat from what to keep alive.
On the contrary, it's the most common way people distinguish that. Start from homosapiens and work outwards, immediately we find that the reason you can't find people meat at the deli counter is because they are people. We decided that long before we knew what a prion disease was.
toyot posted:trees that form nutrient-sharing networks by root aren't weighed to be any less morally-fit to become lumber: they're weighed by the pound like the rest. starving a beehive of honey and damning the brood, despite complex bee sociality and language, is perceived as being somehow less harmful than killing megafauna like a cow. and cows herd, unlike cats, but one is meat and the other is pampered. follow your own arguments to the places they lead.
What you find is that these things are heavily related to how we perceive a resemblance to ourselves as people. A tree is an object, cut it down, no problem. A bee is a weird alien thing where most of what it does we don't directly observe in our lives and what little we do directly observe sucks ass like getting stung. So again, no great moral quandry. You look at a dog and you see a friendly creature which is reasonably communicative and affectionate in a way we understand, a lightbulb goes off above your head and then before you know it suddenly there's all sorts of charities looking out for them, an industry making toys and food for them etc.
This is so strong with dogs that you can see an intense negative reaction from westerners towards cultures they perceive as not relating this way to dogs, where any white dumbass with a phone will condemn X asian nationality for eating them by tweeting it out in the line at mcdonalds. Likewise it gets a lot harder to eat beef if you've had a cow rest her head in your lap and demand to be scratched.
blinkandwheeze posted:capacity for conceptual reasoning is a spectrum which exists in primitive forms in insects like honey bees, & doubtlessly to a greater degree in the complex mammalian brains of the animals we use as livestock. i don't think there exists any qualitative break in human cognition, just a more informationally dense and networked connection of these primitives due to our greater reliance on them in evolutionary pressure
The question is if these species are have, or are capable of having, the concept that it's possible to kill another living being in an immoral (or moral) way? Would it's idea of when it's morally right or wrong to kill even remotely resemble ours?
If the answer turns out to be no (I believe it's no, but for sake of argument considering it unsolved), then is it reasonable to think it's immoral for us to kill them? If the animal can't think it's wrong to kill, then for who's benefit do you think it'd be wrong if you killed it?
As far as I can tell, animals don't think about it like this, so they don't have the problems caused by thinking about it like this.
Edited by Horselord ()
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.
What this means for animal liberation I'll leave to others since I don't think it is relevant to the communist movement but let's not get carried away about animal capacity and lose sight of the human species-being that gives it the proletariat the capacity to act as the universal human subject.