commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]
Happy Transiversary! I had no idea these exist but now that I know it, it seems super natural to celebrate it. If you don’t mind, I do have a few Q’s about it to pick your brain and learn. Is it the date that you decided for yourself or the first time you told someone? Or some third thing I didn’t think of? Are there any specific things that you do ritually on this day? (like taking a moment to reflect or buying a cake or throwing a party?)
Is it possible that that also was a sort of score handicap? Like for every hole he took a 1-2 stroke handicap? Then with that addition he got 5 at one above par?
Could also very easily be he cheated to get 1 above par. Honestly couldn’t give less of a shit but exploring the possibilities
A family member betrayed me and gave me those in a normal package knowing I liked jelly beans. This ruined them for me. Maybe being dramatic, but I threw up from the rotten egg one and swore off jelly beans forever to avoid that experience again
Maybe, but this is pretty basic stuff that you’re asking others to Google after a rough start to the thread making it seem like China’s approach deserved the same derision as western approaches without any real knowledge on the subject. That behavior is all too common with reactionaries.
Just be better in the future, either avoid the western anti-Chinese BS that taught you this line of reasoning or think skeptically about claims that China is just as bad or worse on climate change. And Google once you get pushback instead of the innocent “I just need someone to source me claims” act. If you don’t find the info, then ask. I found the result I shared with you by googling “energy efficiency of EVs”, so not like this was hard work or something
Though I get a feeling you’re just trying to be anti-China for some reason or other.
“I am an idealist” :he-admit-it:
But seriously, I have no real stakes in platonism, though if you ask me, platonism is just misplaced materialism because numbers very obviously exist in the interactions between themselves within material reality. But I do not care at all about this and find it entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand
I think you’re entirely incorrect in thinking that philosophy isn’t based in logic. Sometimes that logic is flawed, and sometimes I think someome is wrong but rational anyways, and that the useful thing is to find out how that rationality is based on something real to critique that. But this idea of a “logic” which you think just beats philosophy is sophomoric and gives away that you’ve never studied it outside of a math book. Taking a philosophy of science class from a non-maths professor would be useful, I think.
To clarify: you are the one requesting philosophy, including Marx, is done in some other way. I am explaining the value of the way it’s done relative to your preferred method. I also have a math background, I’ve taken all the classes. Your idea of rigour is misplaced, though useful in maths. When a good philosopher writes, they’re not speaking in riddles, it’s maintaining the proper amount of specificity to not err in range of a claim while writing a NEW IDEA for the first time in the way that will lead the reader to understanding it in its totality, not within the framework which the reader had before the work. The form of an argument in math can be simplified and more easily rigorous because there are standards assumptions of number theory and such. There is no such basis in philosophy which one doesn’t need to argue for simultaneously with the arguments at higher levels. Analytic philosophy assumes dialectical claims impossible “a=b and a=/=b”. If we’re talking about form and content, you may be able to use set symbols to get your point across, but set theory doesn’t have an easy way to represent that a is in the set of b but also partially defines b through its own inclusion, and itself is different after its inclusion, as well. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but the fact that the terminology isn’t agreed upon by all makes your idea of rigour very difficult. It’s not just context, it’s arguing about what types of assumptions are even allowed and how those relate in new usages.
I do not believe that you got a 1 line definition to learn cosine and that that was sufficient. It had to be explained how taking the opposite side instead wasn’t correct, that we’re dealing with triangles with 1 right angle (because you, like other kids, probably thought about that possibility for at least a bit), how it won’t change with the size of a triangle, how it was often not a rational number but that that’s fine, etc. It’s drawing the entire playing field and the limits and all related concepts as they relate to it at once. Otherwise you wouldn’t have learned it. Not just context, but underlying connections and to the context and about how the context shifts once you know this!
If you read Capital as a communist having read many other works, it seems unnecessarily long and doesn’t just directly state what you know he wants to say, like hearing a teacher explain to a 12 year old what a cosine is for the first time. When you read it as a non-knowledgeable person on the topic, it’s confusing and contradictory, and yet he seems to be claiming those things are simultaneously true…that is also how kids feel hearing about cosine for the first time. Capital isn’t even the best one here for this example, I’d go with German Ideology. It’s riddled with the same difficulties, but I will stick to Capital for discussion’s sake.
When you work within the framework of other economic disciplines, disproving Marx is absurdly easy. Claim that value is circular logic and that Marx can’t describe how price and value relate. Outside of the framework he’s building, this is obvious. But he’s simultaneously trying to introduce that framework, and just placing definitions that he makes up doesn’t lead the reader to understand his definition. It takes some lines (in Marx, some pages) to get the concept as he is introducing it into the mind of the reader. He also pre-empts as many counter-arguments as possible for even more rigour every time he introduces a concept (this is how Germans wrote works then).
Your example of Marx contradicting himself is a great example. He’s walking through every way that a commodity can be seen so that he can distill precisely what about it makes it a commodity. Is it that it has use-value? Partly, but that doesn’t capture it completely, so then we go to exchange to flesh out it’s more useful and true form to the topic at hand. It may be that you call a stick you found something with “use-value” but that use value has no way to connect to exchange as value, because exchanging it doesn’t make it value in and of itself either. He doesn’t say “that’s not true!” About his own claims, because he means to say that “of course this is true, and this is true also, because I’m stemming from Hegel’s methods where any other way to claim this is more confusing than this way, because the truth doesn’t lie between these facts but in their interaction and movement in exchange!” Remove it from that context and it’s a dumb claim. If you think we’re too removed from Hegel for this method of writing to be useful, find another person who tries to translate it to modern day language, or do it yourself. It’s useful and good work, but I’ve not found too many good translations to modern language and understanding. I’m not going to clip parts of Capital for you, sorry. Maybe another day but its nice weather and I’m reading something else.
I was not calling you a STEM-Lord, I was claiming that the reason that you think what you think is similar to the reason STEM-lords can’t handle philosophy and end up anti-intellectual in the reactionary sense. Your example of taking philosophy and comparing it to engineering is an obvious case of this. Marx wasn’t writing so that anything could be recreated, what would someone even be recreating??? No, he was convincing people of the way that history relates to the present and future and material reality relates to us and our creative labour.
I should also add: I think a handy reference list isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not a priority when you’re Marx trying to just get the main body of work out before you die. I also think it’s easier now than when he was developing his methodology simultaneously with applying it. That doesn’t lend itself easily to such simplifications for easy congestion.
I’m not going to reply to most of this, it’s too long for that and I think I can get my point across is minimal points.
I think your cosine example is precisely what I needed to know I am right (I apologize back for snarkiness, I’m not angry at you either but I do think you’re representing a position we must work through as a movement).
The first time you learned what a cosine was, how did your teacher explain it? Was it a mathematical proof listing the assumptions of number theory, 2-D planes, and simultaneously capturing it’s geometric, graphical, and algebraic representations in one big swoop? I can guarantee you it wasn’t. You learn cosine first in one of the ways (usually simple geometry as the relative lengths, and the teacher shows a triangle and doesn’t explain its limitations to 2D because you’re still learning), then says "and here’s how this looks algebraically, and lastly “now let’s plot the values of it” sometime later and you learn about trigonometry as graphical representation. And it’s utility in calculus comes years later.
What was the point of this exercise? Why didn’t your math book just make a 1 A-4 length list of assumptions, graphs, and images to get you up to speed in 10 minutes?
If you want to create that for a philosopher, do it! It’s a great exercise in your knowledge. But that’s not what the philosophers are doing, they’re being the teachers. (Please understand I’m speaking well of philosophers in general, though I mean good ones specifically.)
If Marx just threw out at once every contradictory way that commodities exist and his “synthesis” of what that means they are in 1 definition, nobody would have a goddamn clue what was happening. His writing tries to get you to follow the thought process, through the contradictory stuff, to the kernel of truth represented by each of them are to greater concept. For your development as a person and thinker, it’s much more useful than throwing out only “empirically proven” lists of claims.
I unfortunately think that the position you’re staking is strongly correlated to the Western anti-intellectial and pro-STEM-lord bent that is preventing development in a lot of areas. If you have to go and argue with others about what is meant, that is better than just being able to accept/dismiss everything on an “empirical” whim. In fact, it’s also the point. Argue that it’s empirically false, even, and see how the pushback you’ll receive isn’t at the level of empirics but at the level of philosophy of science. Then empirics has nothing to say til we decide what proof looks like. Philosophers can pre-empt this by staking their claims in that realm, where rationality is our only tool. The Real is Rational and the Rational is Real, as Hegel liked to say.
And a small point: if you think philosophy isn’t needed to be a good Marxist, you’re in disagreement with every famous good Marxist I know of. Lenin fuckin loved Hegel and hated his idealism simultaneously.
