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a book that ive been reading that is somewhat relevant to the China discussion and probably a good resource for anyone hesitant on the matter, who wants to learn about how 'intellectuals' and other authoritative opinion makers in the west have always been in the service of coming up with explanations as to why non-westerners don't deserve to rule themselves is Contending Visions of the Middle East. its not a marxist text and (obviously) its focus is on the west's treatment of Islam, but it goes into covering the far east and how orientalism and the idea of the essentially innate essence of the west being 'liberty loving' and the not-west being 'authoritarians and their servile peoples' started off as greek chauvinism that had little basis in reality and then was transmogrified thru the ages into the theory of modernization in the Cold War, which said that the only way to ensure that the "third world" could "modernize" is to be loyal pawns of the United States and never threaten its national security interests and capital. I'm only partway thru it and its probably repeating themes from Said's book on orientalism but its nice for getting a sense of how utterly skewed the perspective on the east has been and how "human interest" has always been a mask for imperialist interventions. Also, tons of mind boggling hypocrisy (theorists waxing about how "traditional" societies hate free thought and liberty, when writing about post-coup, pre-revolution Iran) and how academia let itself be used as a tool to justify US agendas.
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Mar 14, 2021 08:40
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Brain Candy posted:you need something, some lever to get people with power to do what you want. karening only works if the people on the other end care that you are complaining. nominally this is a comedy website so being funny was a valiant effort, but in the QCS thread HF was banned for making a joke i think the selection process of having to shame mods into recompense, and that mods select new mods, eventually ends up with a staff full of shameless dunderheads or people who get way too invested into their forums position. burnout claims everyone else, not counting those who are sane enough to never accept the position in the first place. it also doesn't help that while there's people who gives sane feedback, there's absolutely ludicrous people that form stalking clubs over getting dinged at all which also plays towards filtering any given moderation team to dysfunction. there was a series of interviews done with the mods at r/askhistorians where they talked about people sending them like, eight hundred threatening messages over deleting a pun (and ten times worse if they're outed as not a cishet white guy). it seems like a remarkably unpleasant gig and its probably not conductive, systemically, that it is treated as vital enough to imbune with expectations of trust and duty but also something you expect done for free.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:11
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Fortaleza posted:Yeah, “rich soil”, oof. Hope they temper their expectations and make a good go of it. Looks like they got a pretty solid source of fresh water at least. infra-materialist thought will make the soil rich e: poo poo this is the thread i just lurk in not shitpost in, and at a real cool time, great, cool. real embarrassing. Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 07:52 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 07:45
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My own comprehension of dialectical materialism that its akin to something like understanding what a computer program is doing; you have a button on screen and you press it and it plays a ping noise. But that's not really what it is doing, you have to peel it back and look at the code; it has calls and functions that draw things on your screen and plays a sound file when a click is noted in a specific screen area. But that is also not what is really happening; you peel it back more and you're dealing now with memory locations being accessed, with how the entire operating system actually works, what the lowest levels of the computer's brain are doing, then the material reality of the computer being a bunch of magnetic bits being fliped via an array of nand logic gates and even then you can get into the physical properties of the need for copper and silicone and electricity all to describe exactly what happens to cause you to think you're clicking a button and playing a ping noise. It's not that this results in some understanding more true than just going "well you click a button and it goes ping", but if, for instance, the program has some bug in it that makes it break, or perhaps is doing something nefarious and hidden, then the only way you could hope to discover the actual truth of what this thing is doing is to peel back those layers and then put them back on with a new understanding. Surface appearance ⤍ hidden essence ⤍ truth behind the surface appearance then becomes Machine that goes ping ⤍ code that does a lot of fucky things without telling you ⤍ Machine mails your porn to all your peers and goes Ping The other half of my understanding of it is the epistemological notion that the answer to the whole ship of Theseus problem is to go "there never was a 'ship of Theseus', you just thought there was". I understand it this way because I'm philosophically illiterate, and its totally wrong so if someone could rework it to be actually accurate I'd be appreciative. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 15, 2021 09:53
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apropos to nothing posted:marxism is like a computer dont ever program, it makes you dumb as hell (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 15, 2021 11:31
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