jansenist_drugstore posted:reading bruce cohen's "psychiatric hegemony: a marxist theory of mental illness". really well done and goes beyond the normal critique of the mental health industry by discussing it as a direct arm of neoliberal power, rather than the more common, safer critique of the industry being some vague and autonomous corporate apparatus that profiteers off of itself and happens to be oppressive. he is not a mental health worker, which helps the book, as most criticisms that i have read have been written cautiously from within the so-called field. he also still refers to all psychiatrists as alienists lol
not able to find a version online, but if anyone's interested, i recently learned that one of the university libraries here has a book scanner, so i could make a digital version
It's on libgen.
serafiym posted:serafiym posted:I'm reading Tucker Carlson's "Ship of Fools" and it's white supremacist propaganda. It's like if you read Settlers, but you thought degenerately selfish white society and ethnic cleansing for better wages was an actual good thing.
In other news on this glaring and dangerous success at agitprop against specifically nonwhite immigrants, Wikileaks and Ro Khanna signal boosted it because it had a barely anti-war section that Carlson posted on "The American Conservative"'s website. But we need to be "class-first" obviously and not be so sectarian.
it's very calculated, mainstream outlets have been climbing over each other to position Carlson's personal brand of fascism as 'Anti-Capitalist' and making direct comparisons to the DSA lol cementing once and for all their Strasserist cred
railroad has been good so far. it honestly portrays the American slave industry, fills me with hate towards nearly every white character, and fully recognizes it protagonists as subjects of a monstrous system that wasn't just 'normal', but actively lauded and beloved by it's benefactors. the prose is austere and effective, matching the conditioning the slaves must take into themselves to survive their environment.
also it just had a section that describe how in other cultures, the type of men who became slave-catchers (the embryonic form of the American cop) would've been viewed as disreputable thugs, but thanks to america's peculiar institution a socially lauded use was found for them, and they could become quite beloved by the slaveownwer patrons.
i found on practice/on contradiction immediately useful for helping me organize my thoughts and even understand what political/socialist practice even looks like. 'to investigate a problem is to solve it' is such a clear crystallization of how work is accomplished that i feel like i've been given a new pair of glasses and had my vision cleared up. (thanks guyovich for the rec in the sa lf thread!!)
Installed in January, the new regime marks a more radical break with the era of the PT than the managers of Dilma’s ouster, their own parties severely depleted at the polls, ever imagined. Central to its composition is the return of the armed forces to the front of the political stage, thirty years after the end of the military dictatorship. No institutional adjustment was required. In the 1980s, Brazilian democracy was not wrested by popular revolt from the generals, but passed back to parliament by the generals once they considered their mission – eradication of any threat to the social order – accomplished. There was no settlement of accounts with the conspirators and torturers of 1964-85. Not only were they ensured immunity from prosecution or absolved by law from anything they had done, but their overthrow of the Second Republic was given constitutional sanction with the legalisation of their rulers as regular presidents of Brazil and the acceptance of legislation introduced by them as normal juridical continuity with the past. In all cases, the South American tyrannies of the 1960s and 1970s made an amnesty for their crimes a condition of withdrawing to the barracks. In every other country these were partially or completely annulled once democracy was consolidated. Uniquely, not in Brazil. In every other country, within one to five years a Truth Commission was set up to examine the past. In Brazil it took 23 years for one to be approved by the Chamber of Deputies and no action was taken against the perpetrators it named. Indeed, in 2010 the Supreme Court declared the amnesty law nothing less than a ‘foundation of Brazilian democracy’. Eight years later, in a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the constitution enacted after the generals had left, the president of the Supreme Court, Dias Toffoli – former legal errand boy of the PT and arguably the most despicable single figure in today’s political landscape – formally blessed their seizure of power, telling his audience: ‘Today I no longer refer to a coup or a revolution. I refer to the movement of 1964.’
Caesura109 posted:edit: removed the DRM, but dunno how to upload to libgen lol
http://libgen.io/librarian/
Login: genesis
Password: upload
Godspeed, goon sire
serafiym posted:I'm reading Tucker Carlson's "Ship of Fools" and it's white supremacist propaganda. It's like if you read Settlers, but you thought degenerately selfish white society and ethnic cleansing for better wages was an actual good thing.
Interresting that the unabombers "Ship of fools" story is potentially less problematic
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-ship-of-fools
Ruzbihan posted:Romance of hte 3 kingdoms
nice, i want to read that someday when i have the fortitude to go through 4000 pages of old timey china dudes
ultramega posted:tears have you watched embrace of the serpent?
that film looks good; maybe ill break months of not watching screen and watch that film
>zhuge liang
the fuck? his name is even a byword for being intelligent.
Anyway, I'm stuck between rereading apocryphal works of Aristotle on my phone and the Spring and Autumn Annals of Lv BuWei. I bought a really nice copy of the Zuo Zhuan, though, and want to read it as soon as I am finished.
ultramega posted:lo posted:
Ruzbihan posted:
Romance of hte 3 kingdoms
nice, i want to read that someday when i have the fortitude to go through 4000 pages of old timey china dudes
read water margin instead.
to be clear, i want to read all four of the great classics of chinese literature
while doing a doctoral thesis in anthropology on Ashaninca ecology in 1985, Narby took Ayuhasca and it kinda broke his fragile western mind, so he then spent a lot of time interviewing shamans in communities living in peru. then he spent 10 years trying to figure the fuck out. i wrote in my notebook that if even a fraction of what is in this book turned out to be correct it would topple the central dogma of biology. like tople it off and smash it to concrete dust. its a pretty far out synthesis of a whole bunch of ideas of which the central and guiding theme is that if you listen to what the people say, rather than anthropologising them, you might learn something. in narbys own words "as if there were times when one had to believe in order to see, rather than the other way round." the theologists amoung you will notice the similaritiy to anselm's well known lines in proslogium "for unless you beleive, you will not understand"; the psychiatrists will note that's like... textbook psychosis
the book gets wilder an wilder until you get to the payoff: life on earth is, and i do not exagerate, not only directed panspermic (i.e. seeded) but is machine-artificial in originl; DNA is the cosmic serpent which we can communicate with, it will tell you things that cannot possibly originate from within your own head - it communicates by low level photon emission. If you've ever looked at a picture of bacteriophages and been unable to shake the thought that they look just like a tiny robot then this is the book for you. Narby's overall proof: what if when you took DMT... it was real.
10/10 would smoke weed again
tears posted:book review: the cosmic serpent, Jeremy Narby 1995.
while doing a doctoral thesis in anthropology on Ashaninca ecology in 1985, Narby took Ayuhasca and it kinda broke his fragile western mind, so he then spent a lot of time interviewing shamans in communities living in peru. then he spent 10 years trying to figure the fuck out. i wrote in my notebook that if even a fraction of what is in this book turned out to be correct it would topple the central dogma of biology. like tople it off and smash it to concrete dust. its a pretty far out synthesis of a whole bunch of ideas of which the central and guiding theme is that if you listen to what the people say, rather than anthropologising them, you might learn something. in narbys own words "as if there were times when one had to believe in order to see, rather than the other way round." the theologists amoung you will notice the similaritiy to anselm's well known lines in proslogium "for unless you beleive, you will not understand"; the psychiatrists will note that's like... textbook psychosis
the book gets wilder an wilder until you get to the payoff: life on earth is, and i do not exagerate, not only directed panspermic (i.e. seeded) but is machine-artificial in originl; DNA is the cosmic serpent which we can communicate with, it will tell you things that cannot possibly originate from within your own head - it communicates by low level photon emission. If you've ever looked at a picture of bacteriophages and been unable to shake the thought that they look just like a tiny robot then this is the book for you. Narby's overall proof: what if when you took DMT... it was real.
10/10 would smoke weed again
tears you're reading some seriously insane claptrap.. and i'm loving it
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15947466 posted:Forsch Komplementarmed Klass Naturheilkd. 2005 Apr;12(2):84-9.
Spontaneous ultraweak photon emission from biological systems and the endogenous light field.
Schwabl H1, Klima H.
Author information
Abstract
Still one of the most astonishing biological electromagnetic phenomena is the ultraweak photon emission (UPE) from living systems. Organisms and tissues spontaneously emit measurable intensities of light, i.e. photons in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum (380-780 nm), in the range from 1 to 1,000 photons x s-1 x cm-2, depending on their condition and vitality. It is important not to confuse UPE from living systems with other biogenic light emitting processes such as bioluminescence or chemiluminescence. This article examines with basic considerations from physics on the quantum nature of photons the empirical phenomenon of UPE. This leads to the description of the non-thermal origin of this radiation. This is in good correspondence with the modern understanding of life phenomena as dissipative processes far from thermodynamic equilibrium. UPE also supports the understanding of life sustaining processes as basically driven by electromagnetic fields. The basic features of UPE, like intensity and spectral distribution, are known in principle for many experimental situations. The UPE of human leukocytes contributes to an endogenous light field of about 1011 photons x s-1 which can be influenced by certain factors. Further research is needed to reveal the statistical properties of UPE and in consequence to answer questions about the underlying mechanics of the biological system. In principle, statistical properties of UPE allow to reconstruct phase-space dynamics of the light emitting structures. Many open questions remain until a proper understanding of the electromagnetic interaction of the human organism can be achieved: which structures act as receptors and emitters for electromagnetic radiation? How is electromagnetic information received and processed within cells?
PMID:
15947466
DOI:
10.1159/000083960
Life, to the best of our knowledge, does not spontaniously generate in observable timescales: "prebiotic soups" of all sorts of compositions do not produce life in laboratory conditions. Secondly, all life we know of is DNA based, it appears to be related and come from a single original point. No alternate, non-DNA based life has been found on earth. It therefor appears that Life has only generated once.
There are therefor three possible scenarios for the origin of life on earth:
I. Life evolved when conditions were, in some way we do not understand, more favourable to spontanious generation. COnditions were such that it was highly likly life would generate, those conditions are now gone
II. Spontanious generation of Life is such a rare event that it occured in the past through some remarkable convergence of chance, and it just simply has never reoccured
III. The conditions on earth were never favourible to the generation of life, therefor it came from elsewhere
why consider the panspermic hypothesis? Does this not just move the difficulty of explaining the origin of life away from earth and still not "solve" the issue? Resoundingly no, we must of course look at the example we have, and the conditions we are presented with. Perhaps, if the conditions for the generation of life were never suitible on earth, they may be much more suitible on another planet. We must look carefully at the actual conditions: is it possible for Life to have been produced at the time it was, from the conditions available on earth? That is the question. Thus, until such a point as fundamental questions of the genesis of organic life are solved, the Panspermia hypothesis must be considered as a perfectly viable hypothesis for the origin of terrestrial life.
So what are the options?
Looking at the formation and history of our galaxy, it is quite probable that earth like planets existed in the galaxy up to 6.5 x 109 years before the formation of our planet. Arrhenius proposed that potentially it was some sort of solar drift of radiation resistant bacteria through the void, driven by photon pressure or something. Kelvin proposed that potentially it arrived on earth via a meteorite.
Sagan countered these, correctly, with some objections:
1. even the most radiation hardened DNA based organism would suffer sufficient radiation damage in the journey. [and if i can add: thous any sort of space dwelling "thing" immune to radiation damage would be so alien to our understanding of life that it could not be the evolutionary orign of DNA-Life]
2.The idea of a sufficiently sized mass, with DNA based life, exiting one solar system and entering another then crash landing on a planet, is very implausible.
THus we are left only with one, simple, plausible hypothesis: aliens did it
On the non fiction side of things I picked up Fanshen for like 50 cents at a used bookstore which was a steal.
dimashq posted:Anyone have any suggestions for some good fiction/literature? I’m about to finish War and Peace and I can’t decide on what to read next. Lmk your favorite book, story, tale, or epic. Preferably not too long, I am almost done slogging thru 1300 pages of Tolstoy and want more digestible novels.
On the non fiction side of things I picked up Fanshen for like 50 cents at a used bookstore which was a steal.
what kind of fiction are you 'in the mood' for?
as for the aliens theory: dna, rna, proteins etc have such a narrow region of stability and activity that if brought by aliens, the system mustchave been specifically designed for earth (or earth specifically picked as the ideal candidate for the rna/dna/protein experiment)
