whats everyone reading lately? we're almost finished with affirmative action empire (pic related). its really insane how dedicated the soviets (esp stalin) actually were to national autonomy (even during the terror), and also how at ever turn party leadership made exactly the wrong decision that made everything one billion times worse.
other than that we recently finished a book abt lineages and sojourners in fujian, and engaging the other: japan and its alter egos by ronald toby. the latter is written in the most meandering old man style imaginable, but its required reading for any of u edo jidai heads
>>3mqnzzj5hc32o
i ve been reading la patagonia rebelde by oswaldo bayer for the last few months which has been slow going due to all of the rioplatense idioms and vocab that i've slowly been acquiring while reading it. and just cus it's pretty dense. its a history of two general worker's strikes in argentinian patagonia in 1920-1922 that ended in the military massacring 1k+ workers over a few months in 1922. i started reading it somewhat out of the blue as part of a general desire to read stuff in spanish that isnt really replaceable in english.
its notable to me how much of the repression of worker's movements even back then relied on misinformation spread thru mainstream media/cultural channels and open vigilatiism being selectively allowed or punished amongst class/political lines. even though the military and government had brokered the negotiation of a pretty moderate victory for the workers in the first general strike, the capitalists were able to actually drum up enough fear and noise around "threats to civil order/the country's values" to lay the ground for violent repression by the same government only a year or so later.
when i finish this i'd like to move to Historia contemporánea de América latina by tulio halperín donghi to try to get a better sense of the broader strokes of latam history
reading this philosophyslop book tht applies Peirce 2 teh qualia issue. i think it's making good points overall (qualia are not locked up "inside your head"; there is a real quality of redness shared between a red thing and my experience of red which makes them literally present in each other). but it keeps citing rly grotesque + cruel experiments on the brains of monkeys :( free them
>>3mqo3hzrip223
deep
im waiting for this to come in the mail. Message from Nazca - I expect it to be a mixed bag of emotions. Mostly for research purpose. ufology woowoo for most ig. Im particularly curious if theres good folklore/get a tale how the ancient nazca saw life/culture. I was hesitate to get at first - but id like to wrap up my journey with nasza mummies. It could be a door to something else tho. Have to try.
>>3mqo3hzrip223
that sounds really interesting! and yeah one thing ive been turning over a lot in my head recently is the way that the "public sphere" as constituted by mass media and democratic political culture is really inseperable from the late 119th early 120th century consolidation of states and their respective nationalisms. ppl often want to draw a line between the institutions of civil society and the modern nation-state, or posit that the problem of state abuse of power lies in a lack democratic oversight, but i think people identifying with the state and with "the political process" is precisely the problem, the great evil of our age.
do u have any recs on latin american labor history in english? its far outside my wheelhouse but id like to learn more abt it
>>3mqo4sine7q2t
>the way that the "public sphere" as constituted by mass media and democratic political culture is really inseperable from the late 119th early 120th century consolidation of states and their respective nationalisms
definitely, this is a pretty large thrust of bayer's analysis of how something like this came to pass. ideologically the largely german and english plantation-owner (dunno what to call, in spanish the word is estanciero) upper class and the government at the time had little in common, and the alliance between the two was formed was mainly on the basis of how much they were able to convince the president that action against the workers was necessary for nation-state consolidation reasons ( the president at the time was the first elected by universal suffrage, and power in patagonia up to that point was held by these ranchers probably moreso than central government)
as far as recs go i really have none. ive never read much history in the past in general and have really only started reading this to make use of/develop my spanish. if i come across anything that's translated or refrenced i'll ping you in here.
>>3mqo4rbctn223
why u fw the nazca so much?
>>3mqo3yfusi42k
how *do* you make the argument that there is actually redness contained in something red? i don't think i would necessarily object to the notion that red things have redness outside of my perception, but i would find it difficult to prove..
>>3mqoa3civmc23
yeah japan is very similar, the expansion of the suffrage goes hand in hand with the exclusion of the far-left from politics. its very easy to see the continuity between "taisho democracy" and the showa militarist crackdown when u view the former as a period of consolidation for the classes/institutions that comprise the state, rather than a "real" process of liberalization cut short by imperial revanchism.
ty ty ill keep on eye out
rn im leafing through Ancient Ghana and Mali, by Nehemia Levtzion. its a little hard to get through cause its primarily constrcuted from arabic accounts so im having 2 wade through all the arabized names >.<..
i think it might be a little outdated 2, cuz it relays the old "sudanic people were organized into greator civilisations by nomadic indo-europeans" as just a theory at the time, wheras to my understanding this isnt 2 serious of a position these days
This sounds interesting ! Have you heard “two good men(Sacco and Vanzetti)” by woody Guthrie?
Woody Guthries catalog is full of these kinds of oral histories on now forgotten labor movements from the twenties… it’s maybe what makes him special to me amongst folk artists
>>3mqobgzwbkn26
it's fun when older scholarly books bring up old theories that sound completely insane nowadays... Was reading an older sociology book (Michael Mann's Sources of Social Power) and it causally breaks out a reference to the fringe theory (by a real academic!) that ancient Andean pottery was influenced by Japanese pottery. Consequence of a less settled field, I guess
I've had a childhood fixation with the Egyptian deity Seth that I've always been too embarrassed to talk about until I met my friend Meti who is a Kemetic and appreciates not having to explain large facets of Egyptian mythology to me.
We've been exchanging a lot of academic papers about Sobek and Seth and this one is a 2020 paper that explores pre-"villain arc" Seth in some of the early seats of his cult like Dakhleh Oasis. Graffiti, reliefs, and other such things show that he wasn't a sexually-hungry murderer as depicted with the unification of Southern and Northern Egypt, but like.
A solar figure of some sort, a hero (as depicted in his role upon the solar barque) but also like, absent his "wrathful" role, depictions in early Dakhleh associate him with very humble creatures like mice, and depict him enjoying flowers and stuff.
It's kind of cool, I don't know.
message from nazca arrived today.
unfortunately the tone of the book is not vibing with me. I think, what ultimately lead to my wanting to buy the book anyways was its discussion about the ancient view of 'pachas' which kinda mirrored my own fantasy/reality views. upper, mid and lower. Which they call the 'mirrorverse' in the book which is cute... but it needs time - Energy is spent by the writer almost defending or explaining why things are rejected - which seems to kinda waste time so its hard to cut to the point - the views -etc. what are you bringing to the table that isn't just online discourse abt whats real and not etc. As to the legend myth couldbe fake real citidel legend online - it was presented far better and to the point - because they were presenting it as utter fact - not - this is why everyone disagrees with our story. IT was true myth,legend tones . I was hoping for more of that from this book. But I'm being, VERY strict with the limited I'm able to digest, which I think is necessary to involve with any ufology stuff - doubt goes a long way. Ultimately, prob just a bad book - but there might be something .
i got a copy of walter benjamin's illuminations recently for $5 and that's been a lot of fun to dig into. i'm very new to actually reading a lot of theory but benjamin's work meshes really well with my brain. i appreciate the way his religious and marxist and surrealist/romantic convictions always exist alongside each other, despite never fully synthesizing and often being at odds. i relate a lot to his collecting and flaneuring impulses and his fixation on particularity and ephemera as the highest expression of truth. i too want to write a book entirely out of quotations someday.
at some point down the line, i really wanna dive into the arcades project too, but that still feels pretty daunting right now. i'm also incredibly curious to see what his hashish diaries are like lol
Just finished reading. Pretty dry and colourless, a lot of the times felt more like a succession of thinly sketched case histories reduced to the medical essentials + a lot of dull autobiography instead of the more in-depth history of arctic medicine I had been hoping for. Still some fun descriptions of now deprecated surgical procedures, like dynamic cardiomyoplasty, where heart failure was treated by yoinking a patients latissimus dorsi back muscle out of place, wrapping it around the heart, and using electrical stimulation to train it to beat in time with the heart to supplement its muscle mass. Apparently was successful enough but caused a noticeable pulsey twitch in the patients' armpits for the rest of their lives. Fun.
>>3mqozfbs2dx2z
very cool. got any good tawaret lore? regarding ancient egyptian religion, all i know is their names and which ones are sexy or not
There is a lot to dislike about this one. I especially dislike the idea in the second chapter about cosmic warfare and the general attitude towards "ai".
I do really like the idea of applying the dark forest solution to the fermi paradox to the internet. If communication is inherently risky, then what do we make of technology that pushes the user to compulsively communicate?
I feel like this might be a good gift for a middle aged dad who doesn't read philosophy, because it might get him to look up cyberfeminism or Deleuze or something.
Hi O. I've been reading Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Still working through the historical & "exigetical" sections. The late 19th/early 20th is a very funny time period for this stuff, since the theories of inheritance they were working with have all obviously been superseded, but they have to become specified as emperical understanding of evolution and developmental biology advances.
Also reading some Bakhtin.
>>3mrdcymql2k2c
I think that kind of history of science is really fun.
What are you reading by Bakhtin? It looks like he wrote about a lot of different things.
>>3mricvrvwjc2c
I have his set of four essays collected under the title "The dialogic Imagination". I read only the first essay before I was distracted by some other reading. I'm not sure if I think it is particularly true, or if the ideas will make reading literature more interesting or enjoyable. I don't doubt that B was well-read, but I'm just not used to this broad-strokes style of exposition and argumentation and it's hard to take him seriously. I'm not really familiar with the history of literature, so when he makes a broad claim about the development of some phenomenon and its qualitative relationship to literature as a whole, naming a couple of authors as a citation, it's unlikely for me to know if that is a commonly accepted idea or not, or what the most acceptable alternatives would be. And I also don't know what the standards for evidence and argument are in the field either, so I'm not sure how much to trust my intuition that he's often BSing. Nonetheless the basic ideas he is introducing are often quite fun! and I find myself considering them lately. Our book club has been doing Eliot's "Romola" and I find myself often considering the ironic or parodic elements of many of the passages there that I might not have otherwise considered in that light.
>>3mrnsc5oors2z
bakhtin is like huizinga for me, writers entirely carried by how interesting the ideas they present are despite having probably little to no basis in historical evidence. i think reading the diaologic imagination definitely helped me think about what was going on in novels, particularly wrt characters social types, even if ill probably never return to his work for any serious reappraisal
I have been reading heroes: mass murder and suicide.
Its a marxist analysis of that new kind of pointless violence, but also of the general hopelessness and violence of capitalist life, but most importantly he is the first person of this tone ive found to talk about the inner world of and the growth of lonely internet psychopath kids
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