commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]

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  • 39 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Yes, we must understand that not only do Gazan Palestinians as a majority support Hamas, but Hamas is a force for good and they are correct for doing so. Sure, after decolonization, start fighting for a better representative, but for now Hamas is the best shot they have at not being genocided.

    This same framework is used every time there is a broad movement which chooses, with good reason, for a strong group which can accomplish their goals. “Socialism is fine but Stalin did it bad” but then the purity fetish prevents the original goal from ever being achieved. Don’t bother convincing people socialism is good but Stalin bad. No Stalin is good and so I socialism.



  • I dismissed cybernetics as a way to supplant the need for an underlying philosophy, which is what you were doing at the beginning. You can study cybernetics and believe it’s supported by dialectics, but the other way is nonsense. I am in no way dismissing that MST s are another way to talk about dialectical movements, but it is not dealing with the essence of a thing or that thing in itself at the level of philosophy. Hegelians talk about similar things very often, with a lot of the examples on the pages shown being almost identical in form to things Engels pointed out. But saying you’re not a Hegelian (we mean dialectician here, you’re likely not a marxist either) indicates to me that our disagreement is not at the level of cybernetics, but at the level of what causes such interactions at all



  • Ok you pull me back in, read some philosophy of science which is at the basis of your beliefs here. There are such huge assumptions under the ideas of mutual feedback you’re representing here. I’m a Systems Engineer, I get the appeal and genuinely base my scientific analysis of socio economics in the ideas that I’ve developed through that lens. But I also understand the limitations of this because I’ve read philosophy of science at the most basic level.

    You sound like the people who think that math is a formally complete system and base worldviews on it (“everything is math and we can understand all that happens by the math at the quantum levels and even below eventually”) without realizing that the experts of the field are completely against this interpretation, and even claim it’s disproven. You’re doing intuitionism but I don’t think you realize it. I do it too, because it’s easiest for understanding and useful, but I know it’s limited



  • Fair enough on the framing, just meant that I ignored it for the first half, otherwise the reply was not engaging with you up to that point, but I wrote sloppily.

    But you did not originally say “bigger and smaller IMPERIALIST” you said capitalist empire. It’s a totally different discussion which is where we started speaking past on another. I still don’t think that’s correct, because I don’t think a new analysis like Lenin made of imperialism would find Russia as materially equivalent in form or content of imperialism at all (maybe requiring a new word for the type of imperialism done by the US/NATO like super-imperialism or so. That’s why I still hold the point that it’s not just “bigger v smaller” that matters, but the Qualitative difference that then arose from the quantity of Imperialism performed/exported capital and coerced labour. They should be understood as 2 phenomenon at this point, not a big and small


  • You act as if cybernetics supersedes basic philosophical presuppositions. Of course I support cybernetic sciences like any other scientific study of systems, but if you think you’re doing this independent of an undergirding philosophy you’re entirely wrong.

    The only difference in the first paragraph is understanding not just that these are parts of a system, but that in practice they define one another directly through their internal contradictions (which are related to each other). Again, you’re just an anti-hegelian who thinks you’re above defining your own metaphysics.

    I also am entirely unconvinced you read either of those articles in their entirety

    But I’m not going to convince you here, and my replying is only to you at this point, nobody else will read. So hopefully you read those and try to grasp the underlying philosophy, but I’m out





  • One more point here, made clearly by Marx, is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it’s possibly the most humanising something can be. To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be. It’s finding how to live as both a human individual and a human who partakes in, creates, or grows away from mass psychologies. This misunderstanding is exactly Nietzsche hate for the masses. He attempted to understand HIMSELF as not human in this way and create a philosophy around it, while he himself was calling back to individual, anti-change philosophies from the Greeks who did the same (Plato as opposed to Aristotle)