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THS posted:it’s okay to drunk post imo but not if you’re an angry drunk like this gently caress you
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 18:32 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:13 |
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isnt this guy the actual russian opposition leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Zyuganov
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 18:36 |
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lumpentroll posted:isnt this guy the actual russian opposition leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Zyuganov Admittedly, Zyuganov hasn't seemed interested in challenging the post-1991 system since 1996. It goes back to the age on the issue in the former Soviet Union where an independent left doesn't really exist beyond what have essentially become pensioner parties and that has allowed (often far-right) liberal nationalists or "strong men" to dominate political discourse. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Aug 20, 2020 |
# ? Aug 20, 2020 18:40 |
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lumpentroll posted:gently caress you rude
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 18:43 |
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looking for books on the USSR to read (that are available on Kindle) I came across The Soviet Century. anyone have any opinions on it?
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 21:30 |
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Ferrinus posted:marxism is the science of political economy and class conflict, while leninism is specifically the science of proletarian revolution which springboards off those two other things. marxism IS falsifiable - there was a good revleftradio or maybe red menace podcast about this where brett listed a few things that would instantly disprove marxism or at least demand an enormous rework of marxism's base assumptions, like really-existing anarchocapitalism or a liberal state which was able to indefinitely resolve class conflict and didn't generate fascist undercurrents This makes a lot of sense, as I struggled with the idea of marxism as "science" as I come from a history background. Knowing exactly how the historical record is generated means I don't think I can ever accept it at science, but that doesn't bother me because I don't need it to be, because various historical methodologies not being scientific doesn't mean that we can't make empirical claims about history. Dreylad fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Aug 20, 2020 |
# ? Aug 20, 2020 21:57 |
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Dreylad posted:This makes a lot of sense, as I struggled with the idea of marxism as "science" as I come from a historian background. Knowing exactly how the historical record is generated means I don't think I can ever accept it at science, but that doesn't bother me because I don't need it to be, because various historical methodologies not being scientific doesn't mean that we can't make empirical claims about history. this is a good way of putting it imo
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 21:59 |
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Blarghalt posted:If you're going to treat Marxism or socialism as a science, the basic test you can put those things to is, how good is their predictive power? it's not hard to beat explicitly elevating arbitrary axioms above empirical evidence; the trick is to avoid doing so implicitly which can be a bit more difficult
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 22:02 |
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Dreylad posted:This makes a lot of sense, as I struggled with the idea of marxism as "science" as I come from a historian background. Knowing exactly how the historical record is generated means I don't think I can ever accept it at science, but that doesn't bother me because I don't need it to be, because various historical methodologies not being scientific doesn't mean that we can't make empirical claims about history. yeah, what historians study isn't the past (since we don't have time machines), but the empirical evidence of the available in the present in various forms ranging from documents to oral history. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Aug 20, 2020 |
# ? Aug 20, 2020 22:07 |
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Hodgepodge posted:yeah, what historians study isn't the past (since we don't have time machines), but the empirical evidence of the available in the present in various forms ranging from documents to oral history. as I used to tell my students, "history is a series of arguments about the past"
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 22:15 |
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Dreylad posted:as I used to tell my students, "history is a series of arguments about the past" old pics; flame wars
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 22:19 |
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indigi posted:looking for books on the USSR to read (that are available on Kindle) I came across The Soviet Century. anyone have any opinions on it? I thought Magnetic Mountain by Kotkin was better if you're looking for a more ground level view of life under the Soviet system.
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# ? Aug 20, 2020 23:00 |
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/174Y2CYVVaMumINW1ApKRO5DiC7JOyCI8/view i’ve posted it in here like five times now but this is a really interesting ground-level look at how the ussr worked and how decisions were made. it’s by... a british visitor, tasked to make a pamphlet explaining the soviets to british citizens back when the two states were still allied. like ~70 pages iirc but not that dense
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 00:05 |
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indigi posted:looking for books on the USSR to read (that are available on Kindle) I came across The Soviet Century. anyone have any opinions on it? it’s been years since i read it, but fwiw the lingering impression is of chagrin at all of the axes the author had to grind, page after page. (i would still love to find a good single volume history of the soviet union that isn’t plagued by anti communist polemic to an absurd degree.)
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 01:25 |
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Nude Hoxha Cameo posted:(i would still love to find a good single volume history of the soviet union that isn’t plagued by anti communist polemic to an absurd degree.) there's this book that I'm trying to read from a French economist who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 60s to get an impression of what their planning methods were like and it's so tedious to get through because he has a lot of hangups like "this would be better if they were in a market economy" or "all the architecture is so drab" or "the people all wear the same gloomy clothes" or "there aren't enough cars"
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 01:39 |
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what's the book called?
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 04:06 |
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It's called your posts
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 04:09 |
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Finicums Wake posted:what's the book called? Planning in the Soviet Union by Philippe J. Bernard
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 04:17 |
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right on cue for the discourse on science/falsificationism/etc, here's a short essay just posted today on exactly that
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 04:26 |
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Aeolius posted:right on cue for the discourse on science/falsificationism/etc, here's a short essay just posted today on exactly that solid the conclusion makes a good tlrd; quote:Unfortunately, one of the things we often want the category “science” to do for us is to distinguish between scientific and unscientific claims. What is the status of the Long-Term Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, is it science or pseudoscience? Notice that this same anxiety is never expressed about theories like the Big Crunch hypothesis. Those who seek to refute the Big Crunch hypothesis give reasons to find it objectionable or implausible. They try to set up experiments that might work as analogous cases. Adjudicating what belongs to the category “scientific claims” is not how science proceeds — it only cares about true and false, possible and impossible. In order to do science, we must resist the temptation to do philosophy of science, to step outside the game and call time out. Let the dead bury the dead. i think the anxiety around religion is less about what religion has been historically, and more about two things: a eurocentric model of what religion is which is itself just as complicit in imperialism as christianity (and which is inextricable from christianity), and the very real problem of what religion is or can easily become at the present historical moment (and the japanese experience makes it clear that the western conception of religion is in no way uniquely vulnerable to this). i personally like taking religious people on their own terms. for example, i don't think any political movement offers a greater hope of living a truly christian life than communism. and i don't think this is possible under capitalism, while fascism is an explicit rejection of christianity and im glad to point out that fascism is riddled with literal satanists and occult practices which are legitimately satanic from the point of view of any sort of sincere christianity. local political conditions are such that it is possible to break through the talking points and have a real conversation if you take a totally unexpected approach. i'm not optimistic of the immediate applicability of this approach to the shitstorm that is america, though.
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 06:57 |
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not super happy with the magical turn of some radicals recently, not gonna lie
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 07:46 |
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pomeroy or w/e rules
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 09:26 |
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Pomeroy posted:You're not worth an answer, just cower and shake where you stand, you loving poodle impersonating a man. this is an insanely good post and they shouldnt have been probed for a week for it
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 09:28 |
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V. Illych L. posted:not super happy with the magical turn of some radicals recently, not gonna lie Magical thinking is a common coping strategy for dealing with powerlessness
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 09:37 |
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Finicums Wake posted:this is an insanely good post and they shouldnt have been probed for a week for it actually agree, a sixer might be worth it to make them go to bed or something but it's a pretty creative and evocative turn of phrase
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 09:49 |
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Mr. Lobe posted:Magical thinking is a common coping strategy for dealing with powerlessness powerlessness in general tends to lead to a mindset with an external locus of control. this is simply an accurate assessment of the nature of reality living with poverty, etc. reclaiming some sense of personal and collecive power is inseparable from fighting for real power over the material world, whether revolutionary, reactionary, or simply for personal advancement if that is a possibility for the subject in question. however it tends to be a coping mechanism a great deal of the time yeah
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 09:54 |
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Aeolius posted:right on cue for the discourse on science/falsificationism/etc, here's a short essay just posted today on exactly that This is a bit funny, because it ends up at a position I've seen a bunch, essentially that perhaps science should just be considered a kind of materialistic ethos, without citing any sources for that. It's popular especially for marxists in a colonial context: science not as something that some Enlightenment Europeans brought or even could bring them, but as a indigenous process that chose to integrate useful European observations into it. Had the essay been consciously inspired, it wouldn't have merely observed that modern science came from religion, but also that religion comes from science, that there might be unity of opposites. (Although the mention of protestantism comes close.) I've also seen people who I've seen go full unity of opposites route (crosshistorical struggle between materialism and idealism) make an interesting division between materialistic (scientific) and idealistic (religious) *superstition*. Materialistic superstition is basically belief in unseen forces of nature that can and should be consciously understood and manipulated through various rituals, but are obviously falsified from a modern perspective. Idealistic superstition is belief in thinking, judging beings that are above human manipulation and have an independent existence from the material world. The spirits of materialism were like straightforward forces or really special animals, while the spirits of idealism are metaphysical beings. What made the former still proper scientific hypotheticals is that their existence was supposed to be proven in practical encounters with the consequences of their existence and the effects human behavior had on their behavior. There was no meta-space for them to exist in and do things without ever affecting people directly. They had to be taken into account for the same reason bears or hurricanes need to be taken into account. Like the essay concludes, the science-as-ethos perspective is still left with a task to differentiate between proper science and pseudoscience (superstition) in a way that has nothing to do with religion. Organic food believers are a good example of a modern materialistic superstition that works much like belief in animal spirits: the evidence is supposed to be scientific and apparent in people's everyday lives, too bad it's cherrypicked and unreliable. So the essay doesn't conclude the debate on here: marxism still needs to be concerned with a practical concept of either verification or falsification and how it should be applied.
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 10:53 |
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V. Illych L. posted:actually agree, a sixer might be worth it to make them go to bed or something but it's a pretty creative and evocative turn of phrase I actually did lol at that post, but they also went on an extended meltdown itt and were unnecessarily hostile to people so it was more that I picked that one out of the reports really.
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 14:21 |
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I'm looking for a PDF of a book someone posted earlier in this thread. The author of the book was an English liberal writing a primer on the USSRs system of government during the WW2 alliance. Does anyone know the title of the book I'm referring to?
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 17:28 |
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Dreddout posted:I'm looking for a PDF of a book someone posted earlier in this thread. The author of the book was an English liberal writing a primer on the USSRs system of government during the WW2 alliance. Does anyone know the title of the book I'm referring to? it's me, i'm the guy. "Two Commonwealths (part of the Soviets and Ourselves Series)" here's the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/174Y2CYVVaMumINW1ApKRO5DiC7JOyCI8/view did i already post this on this very page? yes, and i'd do it again
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 17:32 |
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the Soviet Union was a land of contrasts, it seems like
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 18:40 |
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uncop posted:So the essay doesn't conclude the debate on here: marxism still needs to be concerned with a practical concept of either verification or falsification and how it should be applied. though the trick to it is that those practical needs prove ultimately a much more prosaic and contingent question than they're often framed; if some piece of the methodological apparatus stops working, we refine it or replace it until circumstances change to warrant a revisiting, etc. all of this moves us far from the Decisive Pronouncements of people who want to define some territory as Science (Sacred) and then consign Marxism to the excluded (Profane) spaces. inasmuch as that sort of thing still does happen (and it does quite a lot in my experience), then I'd say it remains a useful intervention, even if not fully conclusive to the preceding
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 18:47 |
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Yeah, I agree it was useful, except I'd argue that it really intervened against marxists who desperately want to present marxism as part of the sacred realm. After all, it has no hope of convincing mainstream scientism to just stop and reconsider its stances. It wasn't supposed to be the last word on the debate here - it was a tool to take it to a new level.
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 19:13 |
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halfway through October and Kerensky seems like a real fuckup
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 22:44 |
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indigi posted:halfway through October and Kerensky seems like a real fuckup The Bernie Sanders of his time. The moderate compromise.
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 22:47 |
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T-man posted:Cspam suxs
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# ? Aug 21, 2020 23:42 |
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https://twitter.com/NicolasMaduro/status/1296806558895157250?s=20 ahhh, the annual tradition of Maduro posting in commemoration of Trotsky's death, and get trashed in his mentions for it
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# ? Aug 22, 2020 00:01 |
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it seems like everyone in charge on either side in Russia in 1917 was wrong about everything
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# ? Aug 22, 2020 02:48 |
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https://twitter.com/UserConspicuous/status/1297165340850429958?s=19 Look i dont know which book it is whose cover is just a photo of zizek but i gotta have it
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# ? Aug 22, 2020 16:51 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:13 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Look i dont know which book it is whose cover is just a photo of zizek but i gotta have it Every page is also a photo of zizek, barring the final page which is a miniature essay against the worship of false idols.
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# ? Aug 22, 2020 18:20 |