It’s destabilized Europe on the specific issue of whether to decouple. Finland, for instance, is all-in on US partnership.

Europe is also basically unified around hating Russians at the moment, so there’s that

Orange man bad

Pinging @FlakesBongler@hexbear.net - got any Troy McClure content?

Looking for music recs for frustrated / angry moods

Quick summary (watch at 0.5x)

• Hegel came up with dialectic as thesis–antithesis–synthesis
• Marx stole the dialectic from Hegel except in a way that lets him be anticapitalist
• Society is in a class war between bourgeoisie and proletariat
• DSA is the premier Marxist organization in the US (:yea:)
• Workers not owning the product of their labor is like a surgeon demanding to own the artery she repairs, or a teacher owning the knowledge inside a student’s head
• Some misdirections where Marx’s economic insights are turned into an existentialist search for meaning
• Communism is good in theory but bad in practice (:it-is-known:)

I stopped watching, maybe finish later. In general he’s saying facts in sPoNgEtExT and hoping you don’t notice that Marx’s ideas are cool actually

You guys just beat the Russians into submission and are now going to extract all their resources at a discount. The Americans and the EU just won this conflict. Cheap gas is back on the menu.

Not following this part. How have the Russians been beat into submission? They’re getting sanctions removed, selling not just to the US but on the global market, during historically high fuel prices due to the war on Iran.

His and Cottrell’s attempts to empirically prove the law of value always seemed a little fishy to me, but I never put in the effort of figuring out what my problem is with it. I guess it’s incompatible with my understanding of Marx’s value theory. It’s likely to lean on a physicalist interpretation of value which is usually coming from a neo-Ricardian bad interpretation of Marx.

Real vanguard wouldn’t compromise silently. They would publicly expose the problems and corruption and demonstrate to the public just how limited even an NYC mayor is, how capital and the state force anti-democratic policy. A vanguard would be willing to take short term failures for a long term strategy by capitalizing on the cause of the failures, not out of ultraleft defeat-fetishization but because obviously this shit is going to take more than a few pothole initiatives to fix.

I see where you’re coming from and I agree that many bad Marxists read only volume 1. Though, I don’t think the German Ideology is the right pedagogical starting point. In a sense it is the logical starting point, because it summarizes the basic principles of M&E against their peers. But it is an esoteric text nonetheless. The average communist need not read about the history of German Idealism. I say that, keeping in mind what you say about the importance of that text for Marxism as a whole; I agree with that. But there are different roles of communists. The majority are not intellectuals and are not interested in being intellectual Marxists. They need only the essentials for their practical circumstances. It’s only the party cadre who needs to understand Marxism thoroughly, to trace the history of socialist theory through the twists and dead-ends, to have a complete understanding of dialectics. There’s a reason that Marx did not directly mention dialectics in Capital despite “coquett[ing] here and there with modes of expression peculiar to him” (Hegel). It would have made the text inaccessible to the masses. Moreover he and Engels were more than happy to leave “to the gnawing criticism of the mice” the manuscript that we know as the German Ideology, so it’s hard to conceive of it being essential if they did not think so.

The problem of ultraleftists being poor Marxists is more like someone quitting piano lessons too early and developing poor habits as they continue. The problem is not the order of the lessons, nor the essentials as such, but the lack of guidance throughout the training.

Reading this back a little bit, I should say that I also agree strongly that dialectics cannot be sacrificed or diminished. They are essential to Marxism. But what I mean to say is that conscious study of dialectics is a bit too advanced for introduction.

I think it remains a very well written pamphlet, written precisely for someone interested in communism. The opening paragraphs are excellent. The later sections about concrete proposals, yeah those are dated, but that’s not til after the evergreen parts.

People curious about communism need to be informed of two facts, firstly class society, secondly the historical fact of class society. Those points also haven’t changed so… I don’t think it needs to be modernized.

Least complicit university

Fortunately Carlo Rovelli (the recipient of the letter, known for loop quantum gravity theory) was mad enough to share this on socials

the conservative coffee fantasy is rooted in the association of coffee with ruggedness

I agree with this, this is most of it. Another part is the general suspicion of outsiders and external ideas. To them, it’s just rebranded coffee, coffee being a famously cheap thing. They think that a latte is just an overpriced drip coffee, the same way many users here are suspicious of Apple selling overpriced computers. The more breathlessly you explain espresso to them, the more they think you are blowing smoke up their ass.

Revisionism question aside, I think Capital is still the best explanation of the fundamentals. It remains relevant as an intro text, being written and published for a lay audience, not academics. Certainly Marx did publish lots of esoteric stuff; one can wade into the weeds about Marx’s views on political economy in Theories of Surplus Value or Grundrisse or the 1844 Manuscripts. But Capital doesn’t occupy the same category.

I haven’t seen a summary of Capital that properly captures all of it including the dialectical aspect. Modern thinkers are primed to think analytically rather than dialectically. Therefore many presentations of the concepts have an analytical bent. If someone manages to capture it fully, I imagine it would be just as long as Capital, so one might as well just read the original.

About the physics thing, I think I was unclear. I don’t mean we should teach quantum to high schoolers or something. I mean rhe opposite: if a student cannot make sense of the original paper, they probably don’t have any business learning the “modern” version of the ideas either! But once it is decided to teach someone quantum mechanics, we should ground that in some level of interaction with the literature, not only summary.

Of course there are exceptions, but I have in mind those theories that have a concise original paper, like Einstein’s papers on relativity or on the photoelectric effect. Some other theories are of course built up over decades across many authors and cannot be localized to a single paper. In summary, I think physics students could be better trained to philosophize about physics, rather than being taught the popular interpretation so that they can be rushed into the next thing. Though… we’re kind of in a time where physics training is not valuable at all for getting a job, so maybe none of this matters in the real world…

An unfortunate problem with Marxism is that for some reason we expect people to read the original works of the 1800s. We don’t expect this for any other science.

There is a very good reason that we still read Marx directly: the long and unfortunate history of revisionism among Marxists.

Many important documents authored by Marx and Engels were not published until the mid- to late-twentieth century and these are causing some new interpretations, or at least proving wrong some of the prevailing ones.

Physics is an excellent example of a field in which students ought to read the original papers early on, because the popularization of topics like quantum mechanics and relativity causes no small amount of confusion. Much of the confusion is on the qualitative aspect, the part that requires philosophical rigor; but universities, being diploma mills, try to distill these ideas down to method to be applied. Hence the stereotype that STEM types are terrible at philosophy and “soft sciences” generally; they aren’t usually taught how to think beyond method.

The most important reason we still read Marx is that his explanations remain the best explanations we have to date.

For as long as the West has existed, there has been suffering within its own borders. The question is not how bad does it have to get — that assumes a uniformity of conditions for all people. But the reality is anything but uniform. It can get infinitely bad for the powerless as long as it’s great for the powerful; history proves this.

There is no universal “bad” rating to be ascertained for unequal nations. It is bad for some, but not all.

The task continues to be agitation and organization around a common class interest

deleted by creator

Routine blood donation / letting supposedly reduces concentrations of lead and certain “forever chemicals” too

Finland recently received its first two F-35s from the US (Lockheed Martin). Yesterday, Oct. 1, President Stubb attended a ceremony in Rovaniemi to celebrate the arrival.

• https://yle.fi/a/74-20248612
• https://x.com/usembfinland/status/2105614674788069745

I like my Supernote. The smaller one called Nomad is roughly kindle-size, and the larger Manta is like a Scribe or Remarkable.

• designed to be repairable. You can buy replacement battery, screen, and motherboard. E-waste is a significant problem with kindles and similar devices that are glued together for waterproofing. Downside: Supernotes are not waterproof.
• option to self-host for private cloud backup
• uses the EMR-type stylus that doesn’t require charging
• supports searching handwritten notes
• easily sideload proper reader apps like KOReader
• no front light. This is for better writing feel. In practice I like that it’s old school and forces you to use ambient light, as you would with a physical book
• it is a custom OS built on top of Android, sorry if that’s a deal breaker