DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]

Yes. This. This is exactly what I was talking about in my other comment in this thread, posted before seeing this one. I was calling it scale instead of scope, but this is spot on.

People will pick and choose how things function at one scope and pretend it applies at others. A lot of people, even good well-meaning ones, will do this and fall into this trap, but particularly shitty people will do this as a way to justify their garbage beliefs or justify hurting and demeaning others. Exactly like OP image “you don’t matter 'cause the Earth doesn’t give a shit if you’re here or not as one person. You’re a loser for thinking you matter at all.” FUCK that. You absolutely matter, just not necessarily at the scale/scope of an entire planet orbiting a star, that doesn’t invalidate or make meaningless the just as real scale/scope at which you DO matter. Their application of how things function at scale is always used in whatever way is beneficial to them at the moment or to prove whatever flawed, even sadistic point they’re trying to make. Capitalists, politicians, and of course the mass media under their control do this constantly and it infuriates me to no end.

It really is a matter of scale. Even at the scale of society as a whole, you as an individual don’t “matter” in that your presence (or lack of it) isn’t going to impact its course or functionality. It’s literally why we have to organize in order to even have any hope of achieving our aims. We certainly don’t “matter” on a global scale. However, what the person in the OP image said is entirely true. At the scale of our families and social group, and absolutely at the scale of our individual experience, each of us matters profoundly. At the scale of our individual experience, each of us is a universe unto ourselves.

It is infuriating to me when people refuse to understand that what is true at one scale may not be (and usually isn’t) true at another scale, but that this does not invalidate how true things are at any other given scale. The fact that your impact on the galaxy as a whole is so small as to be effectively insignificant does not mean that your impact on the world you live in, literally your sphere of experience and influence, is insignificant, because the truth is that it is extremely significant at that scale.

Western culture and society is pathological in how it simultaneously acts as though the only reality is what exists at the scale of the individual when it comes to blame and “rEsPoNsIbiLitY” but will utterly diminish and demean the experience of any individual that doesn’t spend their existence on this earth in service of the great evil god of capital. It’s Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families.” Meanwhile every single one of those individual men and women (rather the ones who don’t own or control capital) are treated as nothing more than a cog in a machine, a sliver of utility to be used as such then expended and replaced as such. It’s a philosophy that cherry-picks only the convenient truths of how things work at various different given scales and applies them across the board as if they’re true at all other scales, all of course to serve the interests of the ruling class. It is a source of many of the philosophical contradictions of capitalism and the diseased society that results from it.

https://htwins.net/scale2/

I’ve loved (and since missed) your weekly rankings. Fucking hilarious content. But I’m really happy to know that the reason they’ve been put on hiatus is because you’re gonna be a papa. Not happy about the difficulty part of course, I hope that all gets worked out comrade. Anyway, congratulations! Health and happiness to you, your wife, and your soon to be introduced to this world son.

Well that’s the whole thing though, we have no idea how phenomenal consciousness really fits in a (supposedly) completely physical universe. Our current models are just mathematical descriptions of fields and particles, we have no mathematical model for “love” or the “redness of red”.

But this just isn’t true. We have an understanding of emergence, emergent properties, and emergent processes. Consciousness (including experience and qualia) are emergent properties of all that mathematical physics we understand quite well. Any time the whole “why do feel then and why am I not a philosophical zombie?” question comes up as a response to this, it’s asking a question that doesn’t have an answer. And not in the way that it’s a question that doesn’t have an answer because we haven’t discovered it yet, but a question that doesn’t actually even make sense when you consider the philosophical context.

To use another example… It’s like asking “why is there a universe?” Well, who says there even is a “why” answer to that question? If we do end up resolving the issue of how Relativity and Quantum Mechanics don’t perfectly align in extreme conditions, we may well answer the question as to how there is a universe (which actually still is an unsolved problem). But again, asking “why” there is a universe is making a giant and unfounded assumption that there is a “why” or a “reason” that the universe exists when there is absolutely nothing that necessitates there being a “reason” for “why.”

The supposed hard problem of consciousness is no different. Qualia/experience is an emergent property of mathematical rules the same way that the complex and unpredictable undulation of schools of fish is an emergent property of individual fish following very simple rules of how to move relative to the fish next to them, and there being a “why” beyond that is ultimately just nonsensical. Obviously, you can give it further and separate explanations that seem to provide a “why,” like: “fish evolved to do this because those that did were more likely to reproduce, that’s why.” And that’s perfectly valid, but so too is saying “consciousness evolved this way because it was likewise beneficial to the reproduction of the systems that produced it, that’s why.” But that’s all just other angles to addressing the “how.” We have all the “how” necessary to explain consciousness, even if there are gaps here and there, just as there are gaps to every single scientific question there is. I know that may not feel satisfactory to a lot of people, but honestly, I think that’s only because of a combination of the unfortunate reductionist scientific paradigm and the resulting underappreciation for and misunderstanding of emergence as a real (scientific) phenomenon.

calm down you fuckin’ weirdo. This kind of ridiculous, childish response to having your morals called into question is pretty telling, though. Time for some self crit.

1. Mostly it was about fooling you into thinking that, as a worker, you have even an iota of power within that company.

2. You: “The owners deserve all the value that results from owning the company and not the workers because the owners own the company, duh.” Reread what you said and note the ridiculous circular logic.

3. The company would continue to function perfectly fine without the owner(s), yet would immediately cease to function or even exist without the workers. The only role the owner plays in the company (that the workers operate), is to siphon the value away from the workers who made it and unto themselves.

I don’t know how to go about it - currently it sounds a bit like a left wing Wikipedia. In my head, I can see it more like a giant 4D map, or a big messy case file sprawling out over a desk.

Well to butt in again, I don’t know enough about it, but people here have said good things about Obsidian. This is the place I know of that shows how it might be used to build an interconnected knowledge base. I think it would be better for the kind of thing you’re describing than a wiki would. There’s no “4D map” but it does have a rotating 3D map of how different sections connect. Just a thought.

Country of the week.

After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.

I am actually tempted to put some feelers out for the starting of a community researching project. I think we have a varied knowledge base and if we could put our collective minds to use in mapping the history of a country/region/issue in a similar way to the Ukraine stuff.

I think this is an excellent idea and believe that @[email protected] has said something very similar. It was the major impetus behind the COTW thing that was started a few weeks back. It might be worth hitting him up to discuss further.

“Elevatorgate” and especially Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” letter made me step away from atheism as any organized movement.

the idea of standing with that bunch of euphoric reactionaries was unbearable by that point.

Exactly the same for me. Well, I would say I stuck with the movement a little longer, but only as part of the sliver that had no choice but to shift the focus of criticism towards our former atheist “allies,” the reactionaries and sex pests, which in turn made us the evil enemy SJWs, the fanatic feminists, the beta cucks, and the cringe white knights. While it was shocking how elevatorgate suddenly revealed this giant gaping rift in the community, and how full the entire atheist movement had been with the most disgusting of reactionaries, it was one of those things where in hindsight, all the misogyny, racism, white supremacy, etc. had been visible just beneath the surface all along, but had been easy to overlook as just a nasty patina sticking to the broader movement. Nah, turns out it was actually deeply intertwined with it.

I still think Rebecca Watson is cool (for anyone who doesn’t know but is interested, “elevatorgate” centered on her because she dared to say “guys, don’t do that” when referencing being hit on by a stranger very creepily when alone in an elevator at a convention, and was subsequently hounded, harassed, ridiculed, and derided even by the famous Dickie Dawkins). She still to this day puts out some banger videos sometimes. I will always have a soft spot for PZ Myers and his Pharyngula blog that I spent so much time on, finding community there because even then it was clear how ugly and toxic so much of reddit was. Pharyngula was like the last bastion where social justice was recognized as good and necessary, rather than demonized as something that needed to be snuffed out.

I’m also still an atheist. But that movement is dead, just as it fucking should be. Amusingly, but also sickeningly, the larger fascist-adjacent majority of it kind of morphed over time into things like Jordan Peterson’s cult, at least the parts that didn’t just fizzle out into the background noise islamaphobia and generic chuddery.

I should confess too, reading Christopher Hitchens (one of the “four horsemen”) was definitely a big stepping stone on the path towards my own radicalization. Though I wince to say it now, I did admire him back then and he wrote about being, or having been a Trotskyist, which was one of those little epiphanies that showed there were actually political positions to the left of “as left as it gets” liberal. Wanting to find out more about that is eventually what lead me to Lenin.

To be clear, I’m not saying that’s what radicalized me, though it was a small part of it. I’m mostly just commenting to respond to the New Atheist part of the discussion.

I guess I’m trying to understand what makes this a liberal viewpoint or why do you classify it as such?

I guess I am just trying to understand the viewpoints of my communist fellow humans

I’m not the person you’re responding to, but… A liberal viewpoint (in this context) is one that is idealist, not materialist. A liberal will point at a policy ostensibly drawn up to address some given issue, and whether that policy is effective or not, or even whether the policy is enforced, will claim that “something is being done” to address that issue. In a liberal framework, it is the policy itself that satisfies the condition that the issue has been addressed, not any actual action that makes a real material difference to solve or change the issue. Again, it’s just idealism vs materialism. Liberalism is a philosophy based on the former, communism is (among other things) a philosophy based on the latter.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think you missed the whole point of GarbageShoot asking you specifically about Allende.

just based on a small snippet of reading about them, I think in general […]

I think this is the main problem here: a lack of knowledge about the historical context of “authoritarian” socialist projects, but nevertheless making generalized statements about them without even considering the material reasons why they were by necessity “authoritarian.” Read up more about the history of Chile and consider what happened to Allende and the hope of a socialist Chile. Who came after Allende (and almost as important, who installed that successor)? Why do these events seem so familiar when learning about every other attempt, successful or not, to bring about a communist society? When you’ve done that, you will at the very least have a leg to stand on when criticizing so-called tankie authoritarianism.

I’d also suggest reading The Jakarta Method. Here’s a somewhat relevant quote from it:

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

Im not liberal, im a socialist.

A “socialist” who believes capitalist propaganda and refers to the largest and most successful actually existing socialist state’s functionality as “antics”? Sounds pretty liberal to me.

And im not American either :)

The person you’re replying to wasn’t suggesting that you were. He signs all his comments with that phrase at the end, and strangely enough, it’s almost always fitting.

Anyway, yes, this instance does tend to try to talk about China accurately, and it does so in the face of overwhelming torrents of western propaganda cultivated by the capitalist’s/imperialist’s demonization of the state that poses the largest contemporary threat to their hegemony.

I just edited my comment to fix my use of “they/their” into “he/him” as per the other commenter’s pronouns. I mention this specifically because you said in another comment for us to “stop being against lgbtq.” This instance is the most lgbtq-positive space I’ve ever encountered on the internet. We frequently get hated on by transphobes because we include pronouns next to usernames. We were, and to my knowledge still are, the only instance to do so.

Tbf, seconds are defined by a fundamental physical property already, the properties of a caesium atom because that was the most accurate way of keeping time known. Seconds defined this way are part of the SI metric standard. If we were to meet ET comrades, so long as we could communicate what hydrogen is, which should be pretty easy, we could extrapolate what our time measurements are based on from there… probably more easily than using planck multiples, which to my knowledge has nothing in the physical world that oscillates by it. (Also, it’s no better or worse than using any other multiple, but using multiples of 10 is arbitrary because of our base-10 system that we use as a result of having 10 fingers. Who knows how many fingers ET has!) 👽

If we’re basing our units on something to appease potential aliens, I personally like the idea of using pulsars, which when discovered were thought at first to be aliens because they pulsed with frequencies more accurate than our atomic clocks.

Honestly, the dolphins should be making these decisions regardless.

I’m curious what aspects of that comment you thought were fantastical. Will you elaborate and be specific?

It is true that there are plenty of people who use reddit that are not racist (setting aside the idea that everyone who lives in a racist society, which we in the west do, has at least some internalized racism). Some people on reddit even actively fight against it, to their credit. That said, as a platform, both in terms of the people who run and administrate it, as well as the larger majority mass of users, definitely tends towards racism. This can be seen in all kinds of ways, from admins always siding with of racists over bipoc to the frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of the “orcish hordes” that dominates in every popular subreddit (and the silencing of those who offer even the mildest criticism of it), to the understandable yet very telling rabid defense of the privilege so many of them insist they earned when it is nothing more than old fashioned white privilege. You seem to agree that reddit is bad for its corporatist bullshit and its laser focus on profit at the expense of people. We agree. But that alone is inherently systemically racist for sociological reasons that I’m assuming you’re aware of, given some of your other comments. For all these reasons, it is hardly an overreaction or unfair to refer to reddit as “a racist website.”

As for “authoritarian” communists, all I’ll say here is that I hope you can learn to seriously, genuinely question a lot of what you have learned from what amounts to an ocean of propaganda deliberately spread for decades (even over a century) to demonize any successful socialist revolution. I’d encourage you to ask some of us “tankies” in good faith about some of that propaganda in other appropriate threads.