BC SOCIETY
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So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.

 I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.
Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.
I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.
We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency. https://t.co/AoX2enwl36
The strand of communism I have the most problem with, which has the most violent reaction against l/acc, is the puerile insurrectionism I tend to call ‘Paris commune alt-history fanfic’. I don’t mean to demean either alt-history or fanfic here, but rather the imaginary commune.
There are many people out there whose intuitive orientation toward utopia (expressed as ‘omnia sunt communia’ and articulated by the microeconomics of LTV) looks to me like nothing so much as a washing up rota stomping on a human face for all eternity.
These insurrectionists are the first to castigate those who feel an aversion to such communal living arrangements (economics in the original sense of the management of the household) as themselves puerile and irresponsible, unwilling to collectively commit to reproductive labour.
They often simply cannot see that the ways they like to be embedded in the social environment that enables mutual reproduction (the macroeconomics of LTV and its competitors) are not well suited to those with different cognitive make ups. For the latter live through abstractions.
The strand of communist thought that emerges from Sohn-Rethel always threatens to collapse back into an ahistorical and eschatological critique of the evils of money, when the latter provides the freedom-of-last-resort for those who aren’t embedded in less liquid support systems.
I’m not going to say there’s nothing to the notion of ‘real abstraction’, but the unthinking valorisation of the concrete that I have critiqued in other contexts (https://t.co/aa2rcbOc40) renders it not merely useless but actively counterproductive.
If you can’t talk about the concrete abstractions that articulate the whole industrial platform of modern human life from agriculture and waste disposal to finance and telecommunications, then you’ve got no choice but to stick to fanfic. At best, this becomes sabotage fanfic.
I can see why it’s attractive to rhapsodise about pulling it all down and squatting the ruins, salvaging what little is left from the industrial remnants of the capitalist age, but I and my friends *need* industrial pharmaceuticals, and we’ll fight for them if it comes to it.
If it must be communism, at least give me acid communism or FALGSC over the hauntological aesthetics come haunted ideology of salvagepunk communes. Give me infopunk spectres over the last dying embers of the promise of modernity. Give me a fucking future, not a squalid past.
Solarpunk, fine! Atompunk even. Hell the NRx hellscape of nanofacture steampunk Pax Victoriana in Stephenson’s Diamond Age is better than this romanticisation of ruin and regret. The cynical view of endless domination/resistance in The Expanse and Altered Carbon is preferable.
I think there’s plenty of problems with what I’ve seen of the discussions regarding ‘patchwork’ coming out of the Fisher/Land nexus, and I’m pretty skeptical of ‘left NRx’ as a viable configuration, but at least the idea is to stitch us back together in some way that fits.
I’ve equally got theoretical bones to pick with the post-left anarcho-transhumanism of C4SS, but as recent exchanges with @rechelon have shown, these can be extremely productive, for me if no one else. But I can’t get into insurrectionist cosplay, no matter how much I like ARGs.
We simply don’t have the time, will, resources, or *opportunities* to burn it all down to the ground and start again, and anything that even suggests so in its aesthetic framing is squandering what opportunities we have to steer secular trajectories towards better futures.
This is my basic view of left-accelerationism: it’s a theory of strategic opportunity in the age of auto catalytic and mutually reinforcing global trends. The choices we have are: steer, slide, or crash into the collapsing potentials of the 21st century. Prometheanism is best.
If someone turns up at your door with a hammer & sickle pin, torn jeans, and asking if you’ve heard the good news of value form theory, my advice is to tell them that you’ve got better things to do, like hustling to keep up with the post-career economy we’re still sliding into.
So, that’s my thoughts on the speculative fictions that orient us towards the (hopefully post-capitalist) future, and my critique of the worst. What positive things do I have to say about the original question as I reformulated it?
I’ve got two thoughts, that are largely imagistic, but that’s what we’re after here: models or analogies that orient our thinking about how to steer/construct. I’ll number them, as I’ve taken to doing:
1. Urbanisation. There are various processes of modernisation throughout human history, understood as the generation of new ranges of personal freedom not through isolation but through economic entanglement: complicity in mutual reproduction.
Cities remain the best historical model of the sort of overlapping coexistence I’m advising in the way I’ve framed the question. I’m deeply influenced by Jane Jacobs’s work here (The Nature of Economies & TDaLoGAC), even if I have certain qualms about her normative naturalism.
Somewhere in my head she’s having a very interesting conversation with George’s Bataille, Guy Debord, D&G, and @InigoWilkins about the way time and energy bootstrap themselves into ever more excessive tangles of beautiful inefficiency, with cities as the core case study.
It's possible to reconceive processes of modernisation in a way that loosens the connections to modernity/modernism in the history of Europe from the Renaissance to post-colonial neoliberal capitalism: Addis Ababa, Tenochtitlan, Beijing as much as Rome, London, and New York.
We must avoid the anachronistic/utopian temptation to project the politico-economic configuration that Marx called 'capital' into times and places where it does not belong, where wage labour and endogenous technological evolution were not yet integrated and ascendent.
This is about more than the commodity form and its monetary synthesis - more than markets for land, labour, and currency - its about the mode of investment that ties these things together into an autocatalytic process of wealth accumulation through the modulation of industry.
This is Marx's real insight about what's unique to the birth of capitalism, and rather than watering it down so it can be indiscriminately smeared across time/space, we would do better to elaborate and particularise it, as Veblen, Neurath, and Polanyi do in different ways.
If you're serious about political economy, you've got to get outside the echo chamber of Marx philology now and then, no matter how much intrinsically worthwhile work there may be in there (e.g., the Frankfurt school, Cohen, Althusser, Postone, etc.). I'll return to this thought.
For now I'm supposed to be talking about cities, and the modernisation dynamics that they enable/are enabled by. Mighty empires have crystallised around the economies of cities (e.g., Rome), but cities have equally been created by the politics of mighty empires (e.g., Beijing).

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pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.

In the UK, so much of our political troubles come from the growth in the landlord class, who if nothing else, wield disproportionate power relative to their social worth: at one and the same time claim to be martyrs to the risk of investment, and demand these risks be minimised.

Of course, it's possible to make claims like this: e.g., nurses have every right to claim that they shoulder not merely more risk than most, but far more risk than is strictly necessary. The pandemic has made this brutally obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

However one chooses to tally up compensation for this social role, be it financial, social, or some other privilege, it's pretty obvious that every last 'essential worker' is shouldering more societal risk than most non-essential workers compensated far better than they.

The way this trade off gets (implicitly) articulated as 'pay vs. purpose' is one of the enduring insights of @davidgraeber's Bullshit Jobs. Yet there are many essential workers who don't even get the illusion of purpose in compensation for personal risk (e.g., warehouse staff).
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 I accept that I haven't given a proof of this impossibility, but I believe the concerns I've laid out could probably be formalised in a way that would lead to one, though it'd involve something like a combinatoric diagonalisation similar to Russell's paradox.

@schulzb589 To state my issue in a more philosophical way, I think the desire to combinatorially totalise mathematical syntax is an effect of something like a transcendental illusion, what I sometimes call the Mythos of Logos.

@schulzb589 It's the Leibnizian desire to obviate creative dialogical interaction (dialectical reason) by providing a deductive system (monological reason) that would allow us to simply 'shut up and calculate'; the desire to obviate the pragmatic autonomy of discovery by automating it.

@schulzb589 It doesn't matter how many times this desire is betrayed by its own formal tools: Russell, Godel, Turing, Chaitin, etc.; it doesn't matter that these betrayals are what drive the externalisation of thought by producing new tools to automate computation. It always comes back.

@schulzb589 The desire to brute force reality, be it mathematical or empirical, is always lying in wait, whispering seemingly 'reasonable' lies about what is and isn't rationally possible. This is as close as I come to endorsing Heidegger and Adorno's worries about technoscience.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
My morning thought. I think what's most incompatible about the way I think and the journal article format as a means of capturing and validating thought is that I have a completely different sense of the relation between tentativeness, rigor, and informatic compression.

The characteristic Pete thought is: wait a minute, this whole area is dominated by an assumption that no one seems to be questioning, and I've got two options to express that: i) outline the logic of the issue in a quick and compressed way, ii) write a small book with references.

The discipline seems to want something in between these poles every single time, and this makes me extremely anxious because I feel (with good reason) like any partially referential engagement with the issue will get instantly torpedoed by anyone outside its referential remit.

To repeat something I've said before: I'm actually quite good at being *concise*, I just find it very hard to be *brief*, because most of the thoughts I have don't permit brevity. Consider what your (referential) reactions are to this brief piece:

One of the main genres of publication I've actually excelled in over the years is dictionary articles, which I take a lot of joy in writing, and include some of the pieces of which I'm most proud. Consider this one on the crux of Meillassoux's project:
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).


This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.

And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.

We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.

This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
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1) “Eliminationism” is a term you need not just to become familiar with, especially in today’s American rush toward authoritarianism. This will be a long, illustrated thread explaining what it means, how it works, and why Donald Trump is now our Eliminationist in Chief.


Warning: Some images contain violence and are disturbing.

Also warning: This thread is ridiculously long. 75 tweets is insane. I apologize. But this stuff is important. I hope you find it compelling anyway. If not, I understand.

2) So, what exactly do we mean by “eliminationism”? Here’s the academic definition:


3) It was largely coined by Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, about the role ordinary Germans played in the Holocaust, which he described as fueled by “eliminationist antisemitism.”


4) The book describes how in reality the largest numbers of Jews and other victims killed by Nazi directive were rounded up and gunned down or immolated en masse and buried in mass graves by ordinary Germans and non-Jewish residents of German-occupied territories.
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The numbers on their face for the @FCC RDOF auction are exciting - lots of Gigabit winners. But it’s important to remember the job is just starting. These rural areas don’t magically get Gig today or tomorrow. 1/

The job is only done and the celebration can really only begin once we see that rural Americans are actually going to get the broadband they’ve been promised. 2/

And that’s the rub here - at least from preliminary indications, there are LOTS of question marks clearly hanging out there once you look past the gloss and proclamations. And since we won’t know for maybe 5 years if it worked, due diligence is essential now. 3/

A number of big winners have offered some service but never done Gig. This would be like giving hundreds of millions of $ to firms that have repaved residential streets to now design & build our interstate highway bridges. 4/

A number of big winners are using tech that has done Gig (maybe) only in tightly controlled applications that don’t look anything like rural America. This would be like giving interstate highway $ to firms who’ve built lots of scale models but never actually built a bridge. 5/
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Miss C
Miss C
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1. Most people are aware of the fail doxes posted by Jamilla Moor on @Snakeeater36 and myself. I'm going to go into the details (in layman terms) of exactly how a specific group of duhnonymous idiots came up with these fail doxes & I'll prove that they're wrong.

2. @Snakeeater36 posted this screenshot on his TL. He had exposed the page source code on tweet which included an image. Anyone can do this in Chrome by opening a tweet, clicking on the image, then right click on any open space on the screen, select "inspect", then "network".

3. In fact I did the same by pulling up a different tweet and image. You'll see the IP highlighted in yellow and the region Dallas TX. It's not my IP. It belongs to Akamai which is identified. Why is that important.......


4. Well Akamai is a Content Delivery Network also known as a CDN. A CDN, is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers (make note of the term "proxy" servers) and their data centers. More later on why this is important relative to the fail doxes.

5. CDNs allow companies like Twitter to provide better performance in uploading content, like images, by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. Rather than pushing content directly (left), Twitter uses CDN networks (right) to push/pull images from end users.
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Youyang Gu
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I've seen many news articles cite that "the UK variant could be the dominant strain by March". This is emphasized by @CDCDirector.

While this will likely to be the case, this should not be an automatic cause for concern. Cases could still remain contained.

Here's how: 🧵

One of @CDCgov's own models has tracked the true decline in cases quite accurately thus far.

Their projection shows that the B.1.1.7 variant will become the dominant variant in March. But interestingly... there's no fourth wave. Cases simply level out:

https://t.co/tDce0MwO61


Just because a variant becomes the dominant strain does not automatically mean we will see a repeat of Fall 2020.

Let's look at UK and South Africa, where cases have been falling for the past month, in unison with the US (albeit with tougher restrictions):


Furthermore, the claim that the "variant is doubling every 10 days" is false. It's the *proportion of the variant* that is doubling every 10 days.

If overall prevalence drops during the studied time period, the true doubling time of the variant is actually much longer 10 days.

Simple example:

Day 0: 10 variant / 100 cases -> 10% variant
Day 10: 15 variant / 75 cases -> 20% variant
Day 20: 20 variant / 50 cases -> 40% variant

1) Proportion of variant doubles every 10 days
2) Doubling time of variant is actually 20 days
3) Total cases still drop by 50%
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.

One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they MUST work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don't.
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Some thoughts on episode 53 of #Hercai

Love,that is not real,has no passion. Its fire turns into embers, it doesn’t not smell. The day, the night, the moon&year burn without sun, light, comfort&sleep.
Ömer Hayyam

#Reyyan #Miran #ReyMir #EbruŞahin #AkınAkınözü
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1
PRAISE
The praise in this episode goes foremost to Ebru because she portrayed Reyyan so realistically like a woman who truly lost her unborn child. I was in awe and pain watching her along the episode, all her breakdowns and tears were so real.
#Hercai

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Of course also Akın took his part and did his part masterfully, but he rightfully was the one who stood aside in this specific episode that needed to be about Reyyan’s pain and thus concentrated on Ebru.
#Hercai

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And last but not least, if I say thank you to something that B gave us this year, then it’s to have Ali as our director. Also in this episode we saw the artistic eye behind every shot and I loved it.
#Hercai

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OVERALL COMMENT
I don’t know who wrote ep. 52 but ep. 53 was going strong once more on symbols: roses, stones, fire and trees were incorporated and especially the ReyMir dialogues were written very well. I truly loved every ReyMir scene.
So let's get into it.
#Hercai
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Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
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Magudeswarar Temple, Kodumudi
#Erode
#Tamilnadutemples 🚩

Situated on the banks of the river Kaveri, Magudeswarar Temple is one among Paadal Petra Shiva Sthalam. Kshetram is famous Parihara Sthala for Naga Dosham and for performing Tarpanam to the departed souls.


There are 3 sannidhi here for Paramashiva, Mahavishnu and Brahma Deva.

Sthala Puranam says that once Adisesha and Vayu Deva placed Meru parvat at the centre to decide who is stronger among them. Parvatam was held tightly by Adisesha and Vayu blew the wind to push Parvatham.


In this struggle, peak of meru  parvatham broke into 7 pieces and fell in different places as precious gems. Diamond fell at  Kodumudi as Magudeswarar. Panchamirtham abhishekam is very famous here. Vanni tree situated here is very old which contains medicinal values.


It is believed that Agasthiya Muni did Prathishta of Shiva Lingam here. As Adisesha is one of the reason for creation of the temple, this is famous Parihara Sthalam for Naga Dosham. It is believed that those who


who take a bath in the river Kaveri and worship paramashiva and mahavishnu, will be cured of diseases and will get relief from all illness.

Om Namah Shivaye
Om Namo Narayanaya
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Kitze @ 🇩🇪️...
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To people who are under the impression that you can get rich quickly by working on an app, here are the stats for https://t.co/az8F12pf02

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These things seemed super scary at first. I always thought it was way too much work and something would break. But I'm glad I persisted. So far the only problem I have is that mailgun is not delivering the license keys to certain domains like https://t.co/6Bqn0FUYXo etc. 👌

omg I just realized that me . com is an Apple domain, of course something wouldn't work with these dicks
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Anu Satheesh
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Sri Mridanga Saileswari Temple Muzhakkunnu, Kannur KERALA

The temple is established by Parasurama and it is one among 108 Durga temples.
Devi will answer all the prayers of her devotees who pray to her with utmost devotion lighting the ghee deepam.


It is the family diety of Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja.
Devi is present in three forms Kali, Saraswati and Lakshmi.

Legend...👇
Once a Mridungam ( musical instrument) shaped rock fell from heaven here.
@SriramKannan77


Devi originated in the form of Mridangam and Parasurama captivated the essence of Devi into a Vigraham. Vigraham is made of Panchaloham.
Kathakali, an art form of Kerala originated here.


Temple Vigraham was stolen 3-4 times, but because of power of Devi all the attempts were failure. Police records says that Whenever the thieves try to steal, they lose their senses, and they will be in a confused state. So they will abandon the idol.
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Jaya_Upadhyaya
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RISHI BHRINGI AND ARDHA-NAREESHWAR SHIVA

Rishi Bhringi was a devoted bhakt of Mahadev. However, in his devotion to Shiva, he ignored Mata Parvati.

Once, he visited Kailasha along with other Rishis. All the Rishis did parikrama of Shiva and Parvati both except Rishi Bhringi.


The same situation continued whenever Rishi Bhringi visited Kailasha. Mata Parvati decided to teach him that Shiva and Parvati are one and inseparable.
So on one such visit, Mata Parvati sat on the left lap of Mahadev when Rishi Bhringi came.


Seeing this, Rishi Bhringi took the form of a bee(some say bird) and did pradakshina/ parikrama only around Shiva’s head and ignored Ma Parvati.
Angered Mata took away the Shakti from his body. Rishi lost his blood and flesh and was left with a bare skeletal form.


Seeing him in such a situation where he was unable to support himself, Shiva granted a third leg to him.
Shiva then fused one half of his body with that of Ma Parvati and appeared as Ardha Nareeshwar.
Rishi Bhringi finally realised that Shiv and Shakti are one and the same.
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