(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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Celot posted:Then the theory has no predictive power. this is the most breathtakingly brainless thing i've ever seen.
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May 18, 2021 20:12
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the fun thing is that i'm pretty sure marxist analysis of the middle east around 2011 did in fact predict the rising power of fundamentalist religious groups. i don't have any such predictions on hand but i distinctly remember reading them at the time edit: should clarify that I don't think this was some amazing feat of clairvoyance, they just looked at the previous thirty years of the West financing hardline fundamentalist Islamic groups and the situation that was being created in the destroyed puppet Iraq and saying 'yeah any idiot can see what's going to happen here' John Charity Spring has issued a correction as of 20:17 on May 18, 2021 |
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May 18, 2021 20:13
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i'm honestly coming around on celot's example. 1917 russia was very different from 2003 iraq BUT insofar as both were poor, war-torn, and preyed on by the west, both DID give rise to reactionary religious movements that competed violently against secular (or at least ecumenical), socialist elements. the balance of forces and various other factors were pretty different so you saw different sides ultimately winning out but this seems like a win for materialism from where i'm sitting
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May 18, 2021 20:15
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btw I took that posters advice and am currently sitting outside reading Stalin. Thank you Comrade
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May 18, 2021 20:17
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Marxism predicts capital will continue to exploit the working class and further immiserate its opponent class in the pursuit of profit, which as conditions deteriorate becomes harder and harder for them, leading to ever deeper exploitation. If I wake up tomorrow and the billionaires are still at the commanding heights of power and the working poor are still being ground into a fine red paste I'm going to declare Marxism both true and sufficiently predictive. Sorry but that's just science.
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May 18, 2021 20:17
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If my ear infection clears up by tomorrow I will renounce anarchism and worship Marx as my personal idol and adopt dialectical-homoepathy as my worldview
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May 18, 2021 20:21
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John Charity Spring posted:the fun thing is that i'm pretty sure marxist analysis of the middle east around 2011 did in fact predict the rising power of fundamentalist religious groups. i don't have any such predictions on hand but i distinctly remember reading them at the time Wouldn't just about any analysis conclude "the currently ongoing rising power of fundamentalist religious groups in the middle east will continue"?
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May 18, 2021 20:22
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Jon Joe posted:Wouldn't just about any analysis conclude "the currently ongoing rising power of fundamentalist religious groups in the middle east will continue"? predicting the future by using the past? sounds pretty sus to me, tbh
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May 18, 2021 20:23
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Jon Joe posted:Wouldn't just about any analysis conclude "the currently ongoing rising power of fundamentalist religious groups in the middle east will continue"? yeah, hence my edit
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May 18, 2021 20:24
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Jon Joe posted:Wouldn't just about any analysis conclude "the currently ongoing rising power of fundamentalist religious groups in the middle east will continue"? Sudden negative changes to living conditions and the displacement of a powerful religious faction resulting in that religious faction's leadership using the poor conditions of the lower class to instigate violence in the name of religion is exactly what the Orthodox church did in response to Peter
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May 18, 2021 20:25
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John Charity Spring posted:yeah, hence my edit Didn't see that, mb
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May 18, 2021 20:30
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Ferrinus posted:that doesn't follow. if a theory makes different predictions for different situations, isn't that more reasonable than it making the same prediction for different situations? is the theory of gravity invalid if it makes a different prediction for a ball which is held in the air and released than it does for a ball which is sitting on the ground? The difference is an ad hoc prediction for every individual situation instead of finding classes of similar situations and finding a general rule. With gravity we don’t have a different prediction if the ball is a different color, for example. We care about its mass, the mass of the earth, the density and viscosity of the air, the elevation above ground level, and the density and shape of the ball. It is several things, but it isn’t, “every situation is totally unique” either. If Marxism has predictive power, we should be able to pick out the relevant elements of a situation and make a prediction. Situations where those elements are similar should give a similar prediction. But we don’t have that with Marxism.
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May 18, 2021 20:33
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Ferrinus posted:i'm honestly coming around on celot's example. 1917 russia was very different from 2003 iraq BUT insofar as both were poor, war-torn, and preyed on by the west, both DID give rise to reactionary religious movements that competed violently against secular (or at least ecumenical), socialist elements. the balance of forces and various other factors were pretty different so you saw different sides ultimately winning out but this seems like a win for materialism from where i'm sitting You don’t see it as a problem that you can use your theory to predict A and not-A?
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May 18, 2021 20:34
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code:
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May 18, 2021 20:34
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Raskolnikov38 posted:cross out islam and yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hundreds The answer is actually no. The mass movement was communism, and they established a secular state.
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May 18, 2021 20:36
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Celot posted:The answer is actually no. The mass movement was communism, and they established a secular state. do you think ISIS is a mass movement
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May 18, 2021 20:37
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Celot what are your thoughts on nickola tesla
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May 18, 2021 20:38
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Celot posted:The answer is actually no. The mass movement was communism, and they established a secular state. Now explain away Pugachev's Rebellion
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May 18, 2021 20:39
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Good Soldier Svejk posted:Now explain away Pugachev's Rebellion What about it?
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May 18, 2021 20:45
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Celot posted:What about it? Good Soldier Svejk posted:Sudden negative changes to living conditions and the displacement of a powerful religious faction resulting in that religious faction's leadership using the poor conditions of the lower class to instigate violence in the name of religion is exactly what the Orthodox church did in response to Peter
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May 18, 2021 20:47
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Celot posted:You don’t see it as a problem that you can use your theory to predict A and not-A? congrats on destroying quantum mechanics i guess?
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May 18, 2021 20:48
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Brain Candy posted:congrats on destroying quantum mechanics i guess? QM predicts a probability distribution. Can Marxism? Like half the time there’s a mass religious fundamentalist movement and half the time there isn’t?
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May 18, 2021 20:53
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Celot posted:The difference is an ad hoc prediction for every individual situation instead of finding classes of similar situations and finding a general rule. hi fishmech, how's it going?
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May 18, 2021 20:53
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Celot posted:The difference is an ad hoc prediction for every individual situation instead of finding classes of similar situations and finding a general rule. to continue your analogy, the fact that the predominant religion in the middle east is islam while the predominant religion in russia is christianity is akin to the color of the ball. we expect the ball to have a color. there are some principles governing how that color behaves (optics, study of the wavelengths of light), etc. we expect that color to persist through the ball's motion. depending on where the ball's motion brings the ball, the ball's color might appear to change (i.e. the ball falls somewhere dark or rolls into a place where it then sits and gets bleached by the sun) separately, there is a force pulling the ball down. that force exists whether the ball is resting on the ground OR whether the ball is in the air (and doesn't care whether the ball is currently ascending or descending). the force does not explain literally everything about the ball (gravity won't tell you why the ball is red, or why it's made of rubber) but is indispensable in predicting the ball's motion. in this analogy gravity is akin to the class struggle the relevant forces to the rise of ISIS in modern day iraq and the black hundreds (and equivalent groups) in 20th-century russia were such things as western imperialism, local government collapse, etc Celot posted:You don’t see it as a problem that you can use your theory to predict A and not-A? i don't get what your A and not-A are. it seems to me that if "A" is "worsening material conditions coupled with foreign oppression giving rise to reactionary fundamentalist religious movements", A happened in both cases
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May 18, 2021 20:54
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Celot posted:QM predicts a probability distribution. Can Marxism? Like half the time there’s a mass religious fundamentalist movement and half the time there isn’t? i swear to god if you're a stemlord who has never set foot in a social science class
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May 18, 2021 20:55
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Raskolnikov38 posted:i swear to god if you're a stemlord who has never set foot in a social science class here we can see the beginnings of religious fundamentalism in response to material conditions in this very thread
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May 18, 2021 20:56
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Jon Joe posted:here we can see the beginnings of religious fundamentalism in response to material conditions in this very thread not for no reason are male engineers the demographic most vulnerable to radicalization into ISIS
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May 18, 2021 20:56
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Celot posted:QM predicts a probability distribution. Can Marxism? Like half the time there’s a mass religious fundamentalist movement and half the time there isn’t? okay, so it wasn't about books and education, but your books and education and we're doing your economics homework
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May 18, 2021 20:56
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Jon Joe posted:here we can see the beginnings of religious fundamentalism in response to material conditions in this very thread lmao
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May 18, 2021 20:57
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The funny thing is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that Marxism isn't a hard science because the conditions are too chaotic and you can't exactly repeat "experiments", but that doesn't means it's invalid for a first pass estimate of what happens. Like even of we argue Russia 17 and Germany 18/19 are literally the same conditions (someone who knows more can say why that's bullshit) then you can just say "they had similar reactions to the conditions but Lenin got lucky and the Germans didn't" and it still makes sense
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May 18, 2021 20:57
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Also isn't a fundamental difference that the conflict that gave rise to ISIS was an external antagonist and the 1917 revolution was citizens against internal antagonists (one of which being the oppressive arm of the Russian Orthodox church itself) How is that in any way comparable
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May 18, 2021 20:57
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Celot posted:QM predicts a probability distribution. Can Marxism? Like half the time there’s a mass religious fundamentalist movement and half the time there isn’t? final exam for New Marxism Thread 101: explain the similarities and differences between 2014 Iraq and 1917 Russia. Use extra sheets of paper if needed.
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May 18, 2021 20:58
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StashAugustine posted:The funny thing is, I'm sympathetic to the idea that Marxism isn't a hard science because the conditions are too chaotic and you can't exactly repeat "experiments", but that doesn't means it's invalid for a first pass estimate of what happens. Like even of we argue Russia 17 and Germany 18/19 are literally the same conditions (someone who knows more can say why that's bullshit) then you can just say "they had similar reactions to the conditions but Lenin got lucky and the Germans didn't" and it still makes sense this is why the sciences i like to compare marxism to are things like astronomy and plate tectonics
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May 18, 2021 20:59
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Ferrinus posted:this is why the sciences i like to compare marxism to are things like astronomy and plate tectonics If I drop a spark into a pile of wood shavings, it may catch fire or it may not but I'm drat certain the more sparks I drop into that pile of wood shavings, the more likely it is to catch fire That's my Marxism
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May 18, 2021 21:01
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When you saw only one set of footprints, It was then that I carried you. That's my Marxism.
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May 18, 2021 21:03
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Ferrinus posted:this is why the sciences i like to compare marxism to are things like astronomy and plate tectonics I always think of it a lot like climate change: you can't really create a lab "experiment" to directly prove or disprove the overarching theory, data is gathered by drilling down into the ice core of history and take a solid guess as to what caused the climate to change and why. Also, capitalists have actively worked to suppress both fields.
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May 18, 2021 21:05
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I do appreciate that we're returning to the kind of dumb slapfight this thread was made for
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May 18, 2021 21:07
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if you have a big lump of uranium, you can predict the rate at which you'll get some nice alpha emissions. it's regular enough that you can use a scale like a clock (half-life) however what you can't do is predict which particular atom will decay. this is not permitted, both practically and fundamentally. the theory predicts both the decay and non-decay of the atoms, but with unequal probabilities. this permits the overall lump to have a tendency that you can describe, radiation in your face a fully deterministic theory would be less sophisticated and more naive Celot posted:You don’t see it as a problem that you can use your theory to predict A and not-A? Celot posted:QM predicts a probability distribution. Can Marxism? Like half the time there’s a mass religious fundamentalist movement and half the time there isn’t? QM predicts that a particular atom will decay and not decay? now that we've moved the goalposts if you're asking if there are Marxists statisticians, the answer is trivially Yes! the first being eponymous
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May 18, 2021 21:09
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Russia went secular.
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May 18, 2021 21:13
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Brain Candy posted:QM predicts that a particular atom will decay and not decay? now that we've moved the goalposts if you're asking if there are Marxists statisticians, the answer is trivially Yes! the first being eponymous Yeah it doesn’t predict whether a particular atom will decay.
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May 18, 2021 21:14
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