and it wasn’t even mine to begin with!

she/her

[transmutationisms]

i know this is like baby communist stuff but do you have any recommendations on how to approach theory? aside from like marxists dot org

sorry forgot this ask was here. i'm not sure if you mean getting into marxist theory specifically or just, how to approach dense theoretical texts that are often unwelcoming to new readers.

regarding marxism, i personally get a lot out of michael heinrich's how to read capital every time i revisit it, and his introduction to capital. david harvey also has some useful work, including a companion to marx's capital. harvey also has a lot of problems (see here to start) and tbc i'm not suggesting him or heinrich because i think you should treat them as unassailable authorities. but i find that both of them are useful for glossing and presenting many of marx's ideas in a way that makes it clearer to lay readers how they're formulated and what's at stake. if you've ever opened capital and just been like "these corn laws must be important but i'm not sure i understand why", i think companion guides like heinrich's especially can be really helpful for giving you a foothold and an idea of what to look for, how to evaluate the utility and applicability of the concepts, &c.

in general, getting into theory can definitely be intimidating but i also think it's less scary than people make it look at first. what concepts or problems or people are interesting to you? that's where you should start; you might find that you end up wanting to read the people they were responding to as well, but i think it's a common mistake to psych yourself out by trying to trace every theoretical concept back to its ultimate source (the old "reading plato so i can read kant so i can read hegel so i can read marx so i can..."). if you're baffled by a text, online is your friend; i really recommend the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, and you can poke around their articles' bibliographies. also, if you're reading something and it sucks, hit the bricks. life is short. lastly i think discussing theory is not just fun but also useful, for pushing your own understanding and gaining someone else's insights. so, if you have friends who are into this stuff or access to a reading group or something, i'd take advantage. there are definitely ways to do this online as well, although there is something to be said for buying someone a pint and a pack and having a good argument :-)

[abandonedandurbex]

Computer wiring tunnel inside an abandoned coal power plant, photo by Bryan Buckley [1280x854]

[fodsley]

this image is so beautiful i remade it in doom 2 .

[transmutationisms]

Have you talked about ‘anti intellectualism’ on here, not in the sense of oh the internet is making us dumber but more as a general cultural artifact that ppl have been worried about throughout history?

no & i absolutely do not have the knowledge base to be making any claim about universal or general histories but. 'anti intellectualism' generally has two meanings, one being actual political suppression of knowledge professionals and the other being a more personal accusation that someone is uninterested in gaining or using knowledge for themselves, and even disdainful of others on that basis. so what i would say generally is that for this phrase 'anti intellectualism' to mean these things and be used in these ways, there are certain historical conditions: the professionalisation and specialisation that allow for the creation of a distinct 'intellectual class', which in europe we see most prominently accelerating in the 19th century in conjunction with academic discipline formation; and on a more cultural side, the embrace of the idea that people ought to be [reading/learning/knowing], and that failure to do so is a personal fault and an act of defiance, which would not really be an idea applicable to many people historically and today who have actually on the contrary been prevented from accessing books or schooling or so on, due to things like the demand to work or marry, or fears of solitary study being an insalubrious activity, and so forth.

my sense is then that if you are lookign for a general history of accusations of 'anti intellectualism' you would want to be attuned to these factors---the professional institutional structures as well as various social assumptions and practices that make this discourse of anti intellectualism cogent and possible to espouse. i think this is a very specific discourse and not interchangeable with simply calling people stupid (though it is also doing that) (and that probably has a stronger claim to being a common activity throughout most or all of human history).

[partialbirthabortion]

This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!

[partialbirthabortion]

my girlfriend has been talking about this since ancestry kits became A Thing

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

scientific institutions aren’t “corrupted” by racism or sexism, they developed specifically in the context of white and male supremacy. modern medicine developed, in part, to provide a biological basis for oppression and to pathologize the vast majority of the world’s population, all women and all “nonwhite” people. not only that, but many of the major developments in medicine have directly been at the expense of marginalized people. oppressive regimes also often rely on scientific institutions to further subjugate the population.

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

some sources to further read if anyone’s interested!

medicine and imperialism:

colonizing the body, chapter 5, david arnold

curing their ills, chapter 5, meghan vaughan

toward an anthropology of immunology: the body as a nation-state, emily martin

ethical variability: drug development and globalizing clinical trials, adriana petryna

science and authoritarianism/imperialism:

japanese doctors’ experimentation in wartime china, jing bao nie

administering colonial science: nutrition research and human biomedical experimentation in aboriginal communities and residential schools, 1942-1952

the humanitarian impact and implications of nuclear test explosions in the pacific region

medicine, misogyny, and racism:

interrogating bodies: medico-racial knowledge, politics, and the study of a disease, melbourne tapper

the woman in the body, chapter 7: premenstrual syndrome, work discipline, and anger, emily martin

the growth of medical authority: technology and morals in turn-of-the-century obstetrics, judith walzer leavitt

“scenes of an indelicate character”: the medical “treatment” of victorian women, mary poovey

[transmutationisms]

also maybe everyone already knew this but it does make me kind of insane how much influence osteopathy has in orthodox american medicine. like 16% of primary care physicians and 11% of emergency medicine practitioners received DOs not MDs like what. and people will tell you it's the same training just with the addition of osteopathic manipulative medicine for the DOs but it's like. ok. if the manipulations work then it's a bit fucked that not all doctors are trained to actually provide them. if they don't work then tacking them onto medical training is ummmm bad actually. we also know for sure that at least some of them don't work because these people are still being trained in 'cranial therapy'. and like im sorry but i actually do think it's bad for patients if the primary doctor you have access to is someone who may or may not still believe in non-verifiable non-observable spinal misalignments because andrew still said so in 1892

[transmutationisms]

i get why people like to criticise the neurotransmitters discourse by calling it humouralism but honestly i don't think humoural medicine was generally as facile and determinist as how people talk about neurotransmitters now lmao. like i can't think of an example ever of someone talking about a humour the way people talk about dopamine as some kind of socially dangerous pleasure drug. also humoural treatments at least in the greek tradition were generally more about removing whatever was in excess than increasing a deficiency, which i know sounds like splitting hairs but is indicative of a fundamentally different attitude toward bodily economies than what motivates things like pharmaceuticals marketed as being able to increase levels of serotonin. and in general with humours you were talking about the body and temperament as being produced in concert with factors like airs, waters, and climate, which is why it so easily gave rise to climatic racial determinist theories. people don't really talk about neurotransmitters that way (eg, seasonal depression is supposedly mediated by vit. d). i think there are other aspects of medicine that have a better claim to having inherited the legacy of greek humoural theory and i think the neurotransmitters discourse is more closely related to like 17th century iatromechanism honestly

[transmutationisms]

yeah i experience distressing obsessive looping self-punishing thought patterns centred around fears that are constantly reinforced & repeated by my social & cultural context and that are enforced by the threat of grave material consequences for a failure to comply. yeah it's a brain disease

[transmutationisms]

[metaphrasis]

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,“ a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

[algorithmist]

The end of the MrBeast era

Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back

this article is insane and making me insane

[pleoros]

Yasuhiro Zama

[transmutationisms]

do you have any book recs on the 2008 financial crisis? preferably for someone without an economics background?

of the popular books on this topic, the three i find most tolerable are:

the big short: inside the doomsday machine by michael lewis

crashed: how a decade of financial crises changed the world by adam tooze

reckless endangerment: how outsized ambition, greed, and corruption led to economic armageddon by gretchen morgenson and joshua rosner

all three of these have elements of extreme hackery and you have to put the commie goggles on tight, ie you're taking what you can from their explanations of economic mechanisms and financial minutia, and disregarding pretty much all of their larger ideological arguments. if you can go a little more complex / theoretical, these are better and give more historical context:

the enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism by david harvey

market rules: bankers, presidents, and the origins of the great recession by mark rose

the banks did it: an anatomy of the financial crisis by neil fligstein

the swamp peddlers: how lot sellers, land scammers, and retirees built modern florida and transformed the american dream by jason vuic

workers in hard times: a long view of economic crises ed. leon fink

[asunoasa]

spiders are the only web developers that are happy to find bugs...

[butchstrahd]

Quite possibly THE funniest way to frame a former president being deemed a criminal in court

[eclogues]

these are my 16 kids, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, and rook

[eclogues]

ugh. just found out my neighbor named all her 16 kids after mine. ok now everyone line up

[visenyaism]

one fun thing about being a teacher in march 2023 is that chess is a literal epidemic among teens. we are starting to have meetings about how we can STOP teenagers from playing too much chess which is like if we were trying to figure out how to stop them from reading for fun. When i was in high school five years ago chess was nerd shit only but now it is transcending every social and language barrier and is absolutely rampant. kids aren’t on their phone texting in class anymore it’s ONLY chess.com. kids are playing chess on their phones while playing chess in real life. this is still better than tiktok because at least the kids are developing an attention span from this

[visenyaism]

the worst part of this is that they’re on chess dot com instead of getting an education. but the BEST part of this is watching high schoolers develop the weirdest goddamn strategies I’ve ever seen. One of my students invented something he calls the “evil advisor gambit” where he gets a third person to give out constant terrible advice to both teams hoping that his opponent falls for it straight-up or that his opponent thinks HE fell for it and will act accordingly thus worsening their own strategy. he has won every game he has been able to pull off a coordinated evil advisor gambit in. this is chess innovation never before seen in its 700 years on earth