love is stored inside the atom

the danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours iso / he / adult / aspiring algebraist

[stazher]

On a certain day in the future - probably in late May - the last war will be over, the last starving person will be fed, the last polluted river will be cleaned up. I see this as a fact. A man is born for happiness like birds are born for flight.

[saravalo]

the other day i dreamt that i was in some sort of industrial facility, maybe a power plant or oil rig? iso @krasnoarmeyets was sitting next to me on a steel beam and trying to teach me group theory. i was so shit at it that bro got frustrated with me and left to go get us coffee

[krasnoarmeyets]

i think this is the 3rd or 4th time i have appeared in a mutual's dream

[krasnoarmeyets]

At last, it is done.

[krasnoarmeyets]

to put it simply, i think the past year i have at times (read: quite often) behaved in embarrassing and extremely undignified ways that i am not really proud of about things that ultimately don’t matter at all, and i don’t want to keep my posts of that sort up because it frankly doesn’t make me feel good and i need to turn a new page in general. there are too many of them to selectively delete though. what i am going to do (and i have been thinking about this for a few months now but i have finally made up my mind as right now is an important moment for me to lock in) is make private all the posts on this blog and then maybe selectively unprivate some. i might also go on hiatus for a few weeks or so and hopefully come back reformed

[phaeton-flier]

What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half

What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half

My name is Emma and I’m six and a half years old and I like pink and Pokemon and my cat River and I’m going to be swallowed by a hedonium sh

[krasnoarmeyets]

building i have walked past countless times but been inside only once. inside it’s all smell of cardboard and plywood and paint, function over form… you need a pass to get in and get past the first floor also. then if you are one of those lucky ones you can sit in your office, bare-bones and smelling of cardboard also and full of stacks of papers, small whiteboard on the wall, and you can look past the boxes with papers and look outside into the boundless sky coloring red with the setting autumn sun and see the future stretching on and on into forever and feel an unbearable sense of freedom and perhaps know your existence has meant something if it is indeed possible for such a thing to occur at all. Alas

[krasnoarmeyets]

when i grow up i want to wipe away all your tears and to tell you to rejoice for there is to be no more death nor sorrow nor pain

[krasnoarmeyets]

the fact that u see communism as an utilitarian thing as opposed to a justice thing is so wild to me? like, the point isn't that the average person will be 'happier' under communism, the problem isn't that people are unhappy today, far 2 many people are happy about ugliness and the brutalization of the innocent and lies meant to make them feel good about themselves, the point is that we must cut these things from the world because they are wrong in themselves

like there are war criminals and epsteinians who just need to suffer as much as possible, we should have people spending their lives on ways 2 maximize the amount of pain those monsters experience, that's not utilitarian because utilitarianism was invented and championed by status quo libs

relation of communism and morality is a longer discussion that i don’t want to fully get into here (though i’ll say i think one can conclude that it is desirable from most ethical systems) but i’ll engage with this strictly informally. (nor do i actually endorse what would be called a classical utilitarian position anymore, though i did years ago. most recently i said as much. i am not sure why i am getting these sorts of anons lately.) i’d say i strongly disagree with what you’re saying, i don’t really understand approaching it with this spirit and don’t think it’s the most productive to have. the point very much IS that under communism people would have better lives and humanity could develop further, capitalism has done its role in facilitating the industrial revolution and technological development and it’s time to move forwards because from a certain point, it’s holding us back.

as an aside, i think there is no such thing as “justice” in the same way as there is no such thing as “human rights” (which you’d surely agree with as a communist). in the most abstract sense, if something was “just” but strictly harmful to people and not benefitting anyone, you wouldn’t do that. what data points would you be justified in considering in determining if something is “good” or “bad” besides how it affects the wellbeing of people (however exactly you would define that) anyway?

anyway, the reason people doing the things you list is bad is because they reinforce systems that allow said suffering to continue. there is nothing else to it. as i said, i think approaching it with this mindset is honestly very unproductive. as a communist, you accept the task of fighting for a more historically progressive system, for the abolition of private property and against the bourgeois class that wishes to keep ownership of the means of production and is willing to defend it at any cost. in their quest to defend and enforce capitalist organization of society and their private ownership of the means of production, the bourgeoisie and its allies commit crimes against humanity and brutalize the innocent, the system cannot exist without an unimaginable magnitude of suffering.

once you begin to comprehend the evils of the world as it is, of “bourgeois civilization,” it is very natural to feel anger and hatred for everyone enabling it (or even just willingly selfishly closing their eyes to it because they can for now). but don’t get it twisted. the task of the communist is a primarily constructive rather than destructive one, to build a new world not based on exploitation of man by man (and this is much more challenging than just killing some assholes). some amount of destruction is necessary to accomplish that, but it is a means rather than the end. while i understand having this reaction to some things, realistically stuff like spending all your life researching how to make one specific guy suffer the most possible isn’t really the best use of resources and time, i don’t think there is any point in that. punitive measures in general are merely a means to the end of making the world better (by preventing people from standing in the way of that or making it worse), nothing more and nothing less, and are justified insofar as they are useful to that end.

[krasnoarmeyets]

i'm pretty sure the most fundamental change in my thinking since i first started posting on tumblr was in how i think about the "usefulness" of mathematics. i think at the time i first made a blog here (really starting a few years before that, and reading hardy's a mathematician's apology and lockhart's lament kind of solidified the form of it), i had a sort of puerile knee-jerk vehement rejection of "usefulness" as a factor of priority, a disgust with how modern society values things for being profitable that manifested in actively wanting to do things that are as "pure" and "useless" as possible, the reasoning behind that being that i would say that doing math is essentially a goal in itself much like humanity acquiring as much knowledge of the natural sciences as possible, there is inherent value in it that is sufficient justification in itself. and while i would still agree with the latter part, i have essentially completely reversed my perspective on the former, in that i find usefulness to be something to aspire to, not for profit but for the benefit of my fellow man and society as a whole (which the latter ties into as well). but of course these things aren't "useless" even in a naïve sense of the word and i no longer think that doing things that have applications is less desirable (because that's a silly perspective), even though i'd personally rather not work on the applications side of math myself.

[krasnoarmeyets]

so like back then if people asked me "but why do people do math?? what's the point?" i'd get pissed and say well there doesn't have to be a point, they want to do it because it's fun and cool and such. but now if they say that i get extremely defensive (because - as dramatic as this line of thinking may be - i interpret it as a threat to me and other people being allowed to work on such things at all, and therefore a threat to things that i have defined as my goals in life and so on and therefore an existential threat to me personally) and start explaining how stuff gets applied down the line eventually and it's like physicists work on a more fundamental level than the engineers, we work on a more fundamental level than the physicists and there is no such thing as "useless" mathematics. how knot theory was for a long time some random seemingly "useless" things born out of a failed scientific theory, but ended up having extensive applications in the study of proteins. etc etc.

[susidestroyerofworlds]

i dont know if i am right here, but maybe there is actually two questions here? one being "why do people do 'useless' math?" and one being "why should we, as a society, put resources into letting people do 'useless' math?" an individual working on some abstract nonsense (affectionate) probably doesnt have the big picture of how it will end up being their work that lets us predict the way plasma behaves, they are probably doing it for fun or for artistic reasons, because pursuit of knowledge is a worthy goal in itself. meanwhile society exists in the big picture of downstream effects. so far a ton of seemingly completely pure mathematical subjects have had applications discovered that changed the world, so the reason resources should be put to it is that we never know which theories will lead where. so maybe there is a shift to a more collectivist mindset that caused this change of heart towards usefulness?

[krasnoarmeyets]

you're right that i'm essentially brushing two different questions under the same rug here! ig what's funny is if anything the fact that my instinctual thought was to sublimate the will and desires of the individual to their utility to the collective and reframe and justify them in those terms probably is symptomatic of me having a more collectivist mindset... but in fact yeah you're entirely right in that an individual working on abstract nonsense didn't make that decision based on its utility to society, they did so likely because they personally find it fulfilling. even i initially made this decision for such "selfish" reasons, so everything following is essentially retroactive justification (it's not really hypocritical though because it's more like, the initial desire to do something with one's life may have come from one reason, but then i - though not necessarily other people in my position - need to believe it's useful enough to the collective to feel justified in acting on it).

i guess also when people ask why people do math they are confused about both of these elements...

[krasnoarmeyets]

the jump in social relations that will occur under socialism will be of roughly the same magnitude as the jump in technological development that has occurred under capitalism. in this sense "now" is a fairly unique time in history in that the latter jump separating us from the majority of previous human history and the reality of people who lived in it has already occurred, while the former separating us from the majority of what will be subsequent future human history (barring unfortunate events) has not yet occurred (and ironically, in some sense, the way people relate to and conceptualize their role in society now is likely in many ways closer to how people have since the dawn of class society than to how they will under socialism). the change in the fabric of society itself under socialism will be (ie must be) as revolutionary to the human condition as the development of industrial production was (but of course the former is a consequence of the latter)

[krasnoarmeyets]

i remember i accidentally came across this video on youtube (i didn't know/haven't watched the film it's from) soon after i had just been studying this proof myself, a couple of months ago. surprisingly it's all actually correct math. i think it's sort of the ideal thing to use in a film actually, the snake lemma is kind of like what you'd imagine math looks like if you don't know math but have been exposed to it. encapsulates the aesthetics of modern mathematics pretty well

[krasnoarmeyets]

this is just moralslop. you’re only doing it because it’s good and righteous

[krasnoarmeyets]

the same methods of analysis just aren't applicable to the real world and works of fiction. every aspect of a work of fiction is what it is because someone made an artistic choice to make it that way (now, of course it is part of the real world. you can try to analyze what real-world factors led them to make a particular choice instead of another and therefore how it reflects conditions in the real world, what real-world effects they were trying to achieve, eg in the service of propaganda, etc etc). the real world has no overarching "narrative" in the same way. it may form something resembling that because events follow a logical sequence, but there are no hidden meanings encoded by any consciousness, narratives merely describe processes rather than processes satisfying narratives. the real world is under no obligation to fulfill the most narratively satisfying course of events, although the human mind might be inclined to search for this. the world is not trying to make any point.

this would seem really obvious, and yet...

[krasnoarmeyets]

@sparksagainstthesun:

#Love calling this the 'torment nexus fallacy' - because theres a book about something that somehow means it must be true irl

there are some loosely related thoughts/critiques i always have whenever i see that angle of discussion. but essentially, they all boil down to the fallacy of considering fictional narratives as something independent from the reality in which they were created, or even "above" it. so thank you for this tag because now i am going to go on a bit of a rant that is kind of just an expansion of what you said.

often times the reason there is a book about the torment nexus is because the author made some observations of trends in society they found troubling or whatnot, or at least worthy of exploring, and wrote a story where the torment nexus could be either a literal prediction ("hey guys if we continue like this we're really close to inventing the torment nexus and it's kind of fucked up") or is merely a stand-in for these more general trends. the torment nexus in the work of fiction exists because of the (perceived, by the author) potential for its existence in reality.

more generally, people make this sort of point like, in x work of fiction people do y and it's bad so we shouldn't do that, and i'm always sort of taken aback by this because it just feels incredibly childish. like ok, for example, maybe a work of fiction depicts a dystopian society where people do or think x. all this tells us is that the author probably thought x is bad and decided to write a book about it—and then we can go further thinking about this, what was the societal attitudes relating to x in the author's time, maybe they were reinforcing some attitude, or trying to push back against some attitude, whose interests or perspective does the author take, etc etc—but at its core it only tells us about the attitudes an individual (and then that individual's attitudes were obviously created by a variety of factors so it might tell us something about these factors too) may have had about x, not anything about the actual properties of x (whether it be the literal x depicted in the fictional story or the actual thing that there is an allegory for) in the real world. sure, a work of fiction could provoke you to start thinking about and evaluating x and even direct you to some lines of thinking about it, but stuff along the lines of "in a fictional story people did x and y happened" is literally not an argument for anything at all regardless of what it is and it drives me crazy when people treat it like it is.

[krasnoarmeyets]

@chilope:

agree with what you've written here, but my understanding has always been that the concept of inventing the torment nexus was supposed to be a critique of instances where someone engages with science fiction, thinks the metaphor for societal ills is cool, actually, and then goes on to make it in real life (a la the squid games, skynet, etc) because they dont underatand what the author was trying to say. i agree 100% that it is frequently used in the manner that you discuss here, i just think there's another angle here that may be worth acknowledging

yeah i think you're right that this is the context this is usually happening in. there are a few points to this, but thanks for the reply because i think this gives me a good direction to clarify some more things i meant here and some tangential points.

in many of the cases it is true that the people doing the thing you describe are

incorrectly analyzing the work of fiction in question (that is, misunderstanding the point the author was even trying to make), and

doing something bad in the real world or thinking incorrect things about the real world (this is deliberately vague because it can take various forms that this applies to equally really).

i think there's actually a sort of pattern of people (of any views at all, really) engaging with works of fiction by trying to find evidence that it's really supporting their points of view and the author agrees with them. (of course, you can always say like, you could write something with a similar premise that's reflecting your opinion on x instead.)

but the thing is it's totally valid to read a book where the author's point is "x is bad" and to go "actually i think x is cool and i would totally do it irl too." like, the claims A: "x is supposed to be bad in this work of fiction" and B: "x (or what it's standing in for) is actually bad in the real world" are entirely separate, and one does not imply the other. this is sort of what i'm trying to get at in point 2 of the previous reblog. it's ok to just go "the author is wrong"! the work of fiction is at best an invitation to provoke thought and maybe engage in dialogue on the questions raised. they're just a person who wrote a book, not a prophet of the universe's truths. like, anyone can write a book saying anything is good or bad, and it can even have a lot of artistic merit as a work of fiction, but it doesn't make the author and the ideas they may be defending necessarily right.

it's definitely "cringe" in a lot of cases but not really self-contradicting or hypocritical or by default logically fallacious on that basis. the questions of their poor media analysis and poor analysis of the real world ought to be engaged with separately. like what's happening in the scenarios you describe is

someone made a work of art about how x is bad

person who thinks x is good saw this work of art, conflated A and B as described above, and decided this work of art is about how x is cool actually because x is cool irl (in their view)

people make fun of them by going "you think x is cool and yet this work of art is about how x is bad (and you like it)"

i guess in some cases doing this might have slight propagandistic merit, and it's like i get why people do it, but when people think like that it betrays some thought patterns i find genuinely somewhat bizarre. if your goal is to make these guys look cringe i understand the utility of it, it's just not an actual argument imo (and i understand that sometimes people will say things that aren't an actual argument and that's fine ig, it's just that sometimes i'm not sure they do understand that it's not an actual argument). at the end of the day when one is saying this regarding real-world things imo it's more important to be able to evaluate the real-world side of things and understand why given ideas are right or wrong on that basis, because when people do this thing and they're wrong this is the reason they're wrong rather than like having incorrect media analysis and various pieces of media disagreeing with them.

[krasnoarmeyets]

all my problems were from remembering too much, remembering in too much detail. but if i simply forget, nothing can hurt. then why should i fear anything? if i live, if it hurts in the moment, i can simply forget. if i die, it's simply over. so nothing is really scary. all my problems are from being connected to too many things. i want to simply stand in the shade of an apple tree, or perhaps on the bank of a river or in the middle of a snowy field, and forget. to cease to be anyone in particular, to cease to know anyone in particular. this is what freedom is, i've always known, i've always been okay with everything because i've known it will come. it tastes of lemonade on a sunny day.

[krasnoarmeyets]

“meek” makes me think of rabbits. when i hear “the meek shall inherit the world” i am imagining bnuuy with big floppy ears . and smiling

[krasnoarmeyets]

important to note. bnuuy will make such a loud and powerful meek that it will shake the whole world ☝️

[krasnoarmeyets]

it appears to me that often people ostensibly attempting to be “rational” and base their politics on fact (which is of course in itself an admirable goal and necessary one) in essence take the view that the “right wing” Weltanschauung fails only in its conception of ethics, that is, that its assertions about factual details of the world are correct, and thus the task is to square one’s “left wing” ethical instincts with these Facts that “contradict” the factual positions often adopted by those with those same ethical instincts. i think this is wrong, not in the sense that it is morally wrong (though in some cases of this it can certainly lead you to doing and supporting things that are), but in the sense of factually incorrect. it is one thing to oppose dogmatism and question one’s own intuitions (good and healthy), but entirely another when people in an effort to (ostensibly) do this in reality just unquestioningly accept plainly incorrect and false ideas that exist (and were sometimes manufactured post-facto!) only to maintain and reinforce a specific order of things in the world, and ought to be analyzed primarily in terms of their function to do precisely that. in the most charitable interpretation of this phenomenon possible, this goes to show that merely having good intentions and “egalitarian” moral intuitions is insufficient, the core of the matter is developing a factually correct understanding and analysis of objective social reality.

[krasnoarmeyets]

the very nature of moral boundaries is such that there are certain things one would rather die than do. but suppose the unthinkable happened, and you have found yourself in a position where you have done such a thing, it's done and in the past, there is no going back. then there are essentially 3 options: die, accept being evil and simply give up on the idea of morality, or simply try to act in the way most conforming to moral principles from that moment on.