a voiceless mass of ultimate moral victims @nyantara - Tumblr Blog

its really nice to be back!

adult, savarna ex-hindu, tme. live in the they/them zone. atheist. leftcom. fuck copyright. year of the linux desktop since 2009. bad at video games but good at robots. tshirt that says i want to have sex with industrial machinery.

there will be more #fandom #sportsblogging and #rpf than before that were previously cordoned off to their own blogs. content purged irregularly.

you will not call me desi or a person of colour.

ko-fi

#online is cool #i was formerly known as m*tamatar

txttletale

genuinely desktop linux will never see mass adoption until some huge mega corporation or future socialist state produces a centralised out of the box version that comes packaged with physical devices. 99% of users do not want to do research on different forks and their strengths they want a box that turns on and shows them the button for the internet

nyantara

system76 exists, but their pitch is in part doing higher end computers.

ubuntu already played this role for a bit, there was a bit of a push in india (much more price sensitive) to sell cheaper laptops that came with ubuntu for a while. you got a little canonical sticker on it too! do you know what people did? they would pay computer techs to install pirated windows on those systems for cheaper than the price diff on iirc dell machines.

nyantara

india has the highest adoption of the desktop linux in the world (16% to US 5%) but its driven by –

(1) developers who need UNIX and cannot and will not buy macbooks cause apple products are too expensive

(2) people trying to keep old machines alive. my grandparents are just as bad with every computer, so we put an xubuntu on their laptop from 2008 and there's a big firefox icon with a bookmark for their online banking and a link to zoom online. this was sensible till smartphones got good and cheap and the low end computer is slowly getting replaced by it. it is way easier to do both banking and video chat on. sadly its driven by the most spyware infused linux platform of all time, android.

its actually the desire to run windows only software that stops most people imo – they want either the office suite or photoshop. people also really love the online integration of office in microsoft 365 imo. autosave to the cloud and share links to edit anywhere online? or was why people loved the free google docs.

txttletale

nyantara

system76 exists, but their pitch is in part doing higher end computers.

collapsedsquid

Some of the tech influencers going "We need to cut off the Chinese AI because China doesn't believe in freedom and democracy" do seem a little deluded, like the Euros who talk about the US can be counted on the defend them for the next half-century. I'm sorry but if you are not a billionaire then you cannot trust an AI shackled by the US to defend your interests, your real concern has got to be freedom-of-action, let a thousand AIs bloom.

phaeton-flier

It's bizarre because it's not like China is constrained in terms of compute or energy and it's not like the bigger advancements are anything but ideas and concepts that you can somehow keep from crossing the Pacific—in either direction!

zzedar2

China absolutely is severely compute-constrained.

phaeton-flier

This is one of those things where an argument or maybe some evidence would be great. They have computers in China.

andmaybegayer

I guess you could say "China does not have legal access to the best GPU's and has had to smuggle them either into China or out of TSMC, which dramatically reduces their supply of good GPUs relative to the US and some of Europe" but they are still all made in Taiwan. Which regardless of your position on Taiwanese independence. Is preddy close.

nyantara

which is still compute constrained. you can't get one off the shelf which restricts access to all those bespoke 5 person labs that are not well connected to someone in the party with a hook up.

nyantara

just realised us foreign policy is mostly responsible for the last 5 years of post covid inflation in the entire world. well first the complicated sanctions on russian oil. this one russia is at fault ofc. then the nordstream pipeline. then the insane, randomly decided tariff regime. then hormuz.

the rupee for example has decreased in value by 20% in said time period because of this.

nyantara

every time trump gambles for corruption and shocks various sectors of the economy, he prices volatility into various parts of the supply chain -> someone somewhere cannot afford something they need -> someone who was doing fine isn't employed anymore -> someone dies. this isn't doge killing millions of the most vulnerable through cutting aid; this is just making the precarious vulnerable.

#its why i find the “nothing ever happens” meme so frustrating

the rupee for example has decreased in value by 20% in said time period because of this.

Thought you might find this passage from Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China interesting with all the anti ip posting recently:

Deng preserved his strength by touring only three hours each morning, then eating meals with his family, napping, and resting in the afternoon. On one tour of local areas, when the family saw a sign with the characters “Shen- zhen” copied from Deng’s own handwriting, Deng Nan remarked, “You should collect interest; you should have intellectual property rights.” Deng laughed. 23 Later, when they saw bamboo trees brought from Chengdu at the Xinhua Botanical Gardens, Deng teased his local guides, saying that they should pay Sichuan province for intellectual property rights. 24 The joke had a deep resonance for Deng: everyone knew that Deng had complained to West- erners about China having to pay large sums for intellectual property rights, and that Deng had reminded the Westerners that China had not charged other countries for borrowing Chinese inventions such as gunpowder and the printing press. But Deng also knew that China needed to adapt to the new international order. When visiting a Shenzhen factory making compact discs, Deng inquired whether they had bought the rights from the foreign countries and reminded the factory managers, “You must abide by international rules on intellectual property rights.”

Do you have any suggested readings on IP laws in China?

so much of the last fourty years or so discourse on china used to be hysterical about state sponsored or whatever corporate espionage, which is presumably why deng is posturing so hard for this quote. it went in the vein of: they take our IP! made with freedom loving capitalism! and they copy it and manufacture it for cheap with communism!!!

dengism is kind of incapsulated there isn't it? now china plays by the rules (the same ones they once railed against at the wto) and will enforce them because that's the world order and we must preserve it. china in the xi era is quite literally taking up the role held by the us historically during conomic crises — china is currently stabilizing global oil prices by not purchasing any and selling some to its sea neighbors.

frankly there's no reason or incentive for a country that isn't actually being sanctioned at the wto / being called up for arbittration by multi national corps for not persecuting foreign IP to do so.

#ip

nyantara

In my mind Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand are two awful siblings who can sometimes swap bodies to trick people like something in Alice in Wonderland

okay this is frankly a bit unfair to arendt she's not completely intellectually bankrupt.

nyantara

Racism in philosophy is graded on a curve, Randian philosophy is both poorly thought out and racist, while Arendt's ideas are mostly just on the continuum of bog standard liberalism. Her rejection of zionism actually can be extended to thinking productively about nationalism in post colonial states if you take the steps she can't — extend the humanity she has for the choices made by the victims of the holocaust to those of colonial violence in the americas, reject her notion of "civilisation" conferring subjecthood and humanity, extend the conclusions she makes about violence in the face of terror. Her stuff about Jewish diaspora and statelesness is really important in thinking about modern refugee and immigrant regimes.

Its just that when she seems to reason from her own psychology, she gets nowhere. She fled to the USA <- must be a legitimate project superior to Europe. Postwar no one thinks she's radical anymore and keeps bringing up her collaboration with Heidegger <- write Eichmann in Jerusalem and become preoccupied with punching left at Sartre and therefore third worldism. Black students don't think my classes are the answer to all political questions <- Seething, malding racism.

Yeah, there's nothing to recuperate in the Theory of Totalitarianism sine qua but like that's why its popular lol.

In my mind Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand are two awful siblings who can sometimes swap bodies to trick people like something in Alice in Wonderland

okay this is frankly a bit unfair to arendt she's not completely intellectually bankrupt.

sashayed

OK but I'm not imagining that we used to recharge batteries. Am I? You remember this, right? You'd click them into a little thing, a little double bed, and a green bar would go up in a satisfying manner, and after a couple hours you could put the batteries back in your CD player. You could use the same batteries over and over! I'm not making it up!! We used to do that!!!

#i still do it? for my keyboard and mouse and stuff

raisinchallah

to really get womens sports to the next level we need to craft teams that are supervillains we need a powerful eternal successful team that also has bad vibes bad energy and is fundamentally evil we need to construct the new york yankees of women

nyantara

its called barcelona women and it already exists. they were unbeaten for 46 games for 622 days in the liga feminine and have won it every year since 2020 averaging maybe 1 or 2 losses a year so way before the final match week and have made the champions league final every year since 2021 and won it 4 times and the ballon d'or has gone to a barca player every year since 2021. the bad vibes come from being (1) incredibly arrogant (2) sharing all the shitty habits of the barca men's fans re: unsubstantiated media scrutiny and gossip (3) buying up world class talent to sit on the bench (4) coach firing circle (5) vibes so rancid english players come back to the wsl and lie about stuff like no actually i left bc i missed tesco and english weather.

#personally im celebrating them being torn up this summer as iconic players leave to get the bag at shite teams like london city lionesses

gaysie

bad thoughts at night/poster’s delight… but those posts by the morning/scrollers take warning

btw in punjabi studies and hating on makki ki roti even more

In the Punjab province, an area where wheat, millet, and sorghums provided the primary staples, the expansion of wheat exports to Europe in the late nineteenth-century initially led to an increase in maize cultivation.''5 But, here too, even though used more often as a staple than in other parts of the country, maize remained a marginal subsistence crop and varieties of millet and barley were far more commonly cultivated. Eating makkai ki roti (corn flat breads) with sarson ka sag (mustard greens) in the spring is more of a symbolic statement of Punjabi regional identity today that nostalgically celebrates the rural roots of its sons of the soil rather than an accurate reflection of the levels of maize consumption in Puniabi history.

it isn't very healthy (no nixtamilization), doesn't even taste good and its not even all that Authentic.

#anything can be haterade of you're motivated

the funniest thing about hannah arendt's hatred of third worldism is that she's so anti black she thinks its a movement where africans are trying to piggyback on the successes of everyone else

The only ones who have an obvious political interest in saying that there is a third world are, of course, those who stand on the lowest step – that is the Negroes in Africa. In their case it’s easy to understand; all the rest is empty talk … The new slogan – Natives of all colonies or former colonies unite or all underdeveloped countries unite! – is even crazier than the old one from which it was copied: Workers of the world unite!’ (Thoughts on Politics and Revolutionem>, an interview with Adelbert Reif, 1970).

Note that the despite the actual and ongoing serious anti black racism within Latam, Asia and the Middle East – the early moment of Bandung Conference was a bit too Asian as this chart shows.

Nkrumah and Pan Africanism only really gets a representative at the declaration of the Non Aligned movement in the 60s, and in the 70s Latam gets a foothold with Castro.

Like this is about the real world alliances and not merely theorists and lip service tbc.

ooh, would you be willing to elaborate on your thoughts about hannah arendt? we discussed in class two chapters of her book eichmann in jerusalem, but there wasn't much time dedicated to the critiques of her work(s)

one sad thing about deleting my old blog is no one remembers i was fighting to be no 1 hater of hannah arendt on this website. in short she was very racist, her theorizing about africans repeatedly characterizes them as savages, her central theory of totalitarianism relies on racist tropes about oriental despotism and is also constantly in tension with her desire to exceptionalise the nazi holocaust regime from colonial racism by claiming said racism was either justifiable or had a utilitarian logic.

in her actual political life she was opposed to desegregation and deeply racist to black students and professors during the ongoing fight against jim crow. she was a defender of the american project, both its settler colonialism and even its slavery.

lots of really ugly quotes ahead

Consider chapter seven of Imperialism, ‘Race and Bureaucracy’, which contains the section, ‘The Phantom World of the Dark Continent’. [...]

They ‘can be watched like a laboratory test in the Boers’ [...] To Arendt, they were ‘the only European group that ever, though in complete isolation, had to live in a world of black savages’. Their racism, Arendt claimed, was 'the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species’. In a kind of nineteenth-century environmental and demographic determinism, Arendt depicted the Boers - and her own sense of the ‘overwhelming monstrosity of Africa’, the ‘merciless sun’ and ‘entirely hostile nature’, the ‘great horror’ of a place ‘populated and overpopulated by savages’ as "incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse’. All this gave ‘Boer racism, unlike other ther brands, a 'touch of authenticity’. Arendt quotes extensively from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness to substantiate her claims about what happened to European identity in the encounter with the extreme other. Fear and repugnance, when refracted through new ideologies of race, almost inevitably led them to ‘Exterminate the brutes!’ Arendt was seeking to show the effects of the Boers inability to accord equal worth to those they viewed as ‘alien’. [...]

Hannah Arendt was not seeking to justify extermination or massacres, but in her effort to ‘understand the experiential basis’ of the Boers’ moral failings she came too close to apologetics. Specifically, she suggested that Boer racism was different, even justifiable, because of the character of the peoples it was directed against. ‘African savages… had frightened Europeans out of their wits’. Like Hegel and Marx, it was self-evident to Arendt that ‘tribal’ Africans were more primitive than Europeans; ‘as far as we know, [they] had never found by themselves any adequate expression of human reason or human passion in either cultural deeds or popular customs, and which had developed human institutions only to a very low level’. Aware of the obvious implications, Arendt distanced the issue from ‘race’ to implicate the capacity to rise above ‘nature’. ‘What made them different from other human beings’, she wrote, ‘was not at all the color of their skin but… that they treated nature like their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality’. Arendt’s principle agenda was not to denigrate ‘tribal’ Africans as such, but to show that because they ‘were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, …when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.’ [...]

She rationalised and even sympathised with racist tropes. Consider her comment on the ‘boomerang effect’ on Chinese and Indian laborers imported to southern Africa; ‘for the first time, people were treated in almost the same way as those African savages... The difference was only that there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensible reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense it is only here that the real crime began, because here everyone ought to have known what they were doing’.[...]

Rather than seek to understand why anti-racist activists might situate themselves within wider anticolonial and neocolonial struggles, that is, in the context of global white supremacy, Arendt reduced black solidarity to a crass demographic calculation. She presented black students as more violent than whites, with the backing of the wider ‘black community’. ‘Serious violence’, she claimed, ‘entered the scene only with the appearance of the Black Power movement on American campuses. Negro students, the majority of them admitted without academic qualification, regarded and organized themselves as an interest group, the representatives of the black community’. These black students then made ‘nonsensical and obviously damaging demands’ such as instruction in the ‘nonexistent subjects’ of African literature, ‘soul courses’, and Swahili, ‘a nineteenth-century kind of no-language’. The ‘white rebels’, in contrast, put forth ‘disinterested and usually highly moral claims’, such as support for ‘nonviolent “participatory democracy." [...]

She acknowledged that ‘the extermination of native peoples went hand in hand with the colonization of the Americas, Australia and Africa’. But she also claimed that North America and Canada were ‘almost empty and had no serious population problem’. Echoing the Africa of Origins, these were places ‘without a culture and a history of their own.’ [...]

In Arendt’s eyes, neither the annihilation of Native Americans nor the institution of chattel slavery was enough to discredit her fabled version of the American Revolution. She claimed that in the eighteenth-century American slaveholders viewed slavery as only a temporary institution and that the Founders knew that slavery and ‘the foundation of freedom’ were incompatible. But she did not analyse the contradiction in any depth, nor did she extend her condemnation of European imperialists to the American founders. Instead, she suggested that slavery was not as bad as statelessness [interwar], for at least slave labour ‘was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society - more than the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human’. Yet slaves were not conceived as ‘fully human’; they were property. Arendt did not accuse the American revolutionaries of the same hypocrisy as the interwar statesmen and humanitarians who insisted that the millions of stateless really were in possession of ‘inborn’ and ‘inalienable’ rights. Instead, she praised the Founders for not falling under the sway of the Social Question - poverty and the ‘degrading misery… of slavery and Negro labor’ - to focus on founding institutions for political freedom. Slavery was a price worth paying to found an enduring republican government for some: the American slaveholders.

Racism in the Theory Canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the one Great Crime in which America was Never Involved’ by Patricia Owens

#hannah arendt

nyantara

Sorry are you saying racism/racial resentment was not a factor in the Holocaust

context. no, im saying that the voyeurism of modern historical literature (ie, not memoirs by victims or survivors) about the holocaust written from an obviously sympathetic viewpoint is not really driven by racism or even dehumanizing anti semitic impulses about jews. this is distinct since mainstream zionism + americanisation of racial logics via the hegemony of said racial regimes antiblackness whitened jewish victims of the holocaust in the global imaginary. its driven far more by the fetishisation of suffering and fascination with the holocaust. much of it engages with the holocaust at level of the universality of moral atrocity and will in fact completely separate it from other racist & genocidal regimes of imperial and colonial violence. hannah arendt is an infamously racist theoriser of the holocaust like this.

im talking about books like boy in the striped pyjamas, the schindlers list (ark) so on.

nyantara

h/t @northwest-by-a-train for an article explicating the precise phenomenon im gesturing at via the tattooist of auschwitz and cilka's journey

every day on this website you guys get freaked out and unsettled and attempt to relitigate stuff settled by the actual history of israel and the ongoing palestinian genocide like do jews have racial privileges in the global imaginary. like yeah they do. they're mostly understood as european and white now. this stuff was being theorised by anti colonial writers like cesaire and black theorists like web dubois post holocaust, much less in big 2020.

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a voiceless mass of ultimate moral victims