woodenghost [comrade/them]

Here are some quick thoughts:

Ask, who’s making the original claim and who much do they stand to gain and lose from lying about it if it were false and compare that to how much they stand to gain and lose from not covering it, if it were true. There’s pressure to lie, but there’s also pressure to report on real events. Think about material gain, but also about reputation, hype, clicks and career options. Think short term and long term.

For example, economic news offer lots of opportunity to gain from lies short term, but if an economic journal loses it’s reputation, it might lose more long-term, as investors lose trust.

If you want to compare multiple sources, make sure they have different incentive structures, or you won’t get truly different perspectives. For example compare news from imperialist and anti-imperialist countries.

To check if a story is plausible, it helps to have an historic materialist understanding of who the actors in the story are, what their history is and which classes material interests they share in.

Ideally, you shouldn’t come away from a confirmed story with the notion: “Wow it’s true, they really did that crazy thing! How dramatic and sensational!”. Rather, in confirming the story, you will have developed a deeper understanding of the underlying social forces driving individual actors decisions. So instead you’d be more like:“Now I understand why this thing that first seemed very surprising to me was bound to happen sooner or later.”

Dems(if they were honest): With us, live will continue to get worse and worse. And not only that, it will get worse faster and faster in an exponential way. And we’ll do everything in our power to speed things up even more (it’s what the shareholders demand). We can’t even promise to always lie to you anymore. Even empty verbal statements to appease your suffering will more and more often be to much to ask in the future. But we promise to let the mask that hides fascism’s ugly face drop a little bit slower than the opposition. And who knows, the speed at which the worsenings acceleration increases could maybe be a little bit higher without us, so vote blue no matter who.

Communists: Okay, crazy idea, but how about we turn things around and away from the looming abyss we’re accelerating towards?

deleted by creator

I’m sorry reality is biased against your prejudice.

Probably neutral alien monks from Mars who observe earth through a slightly broken amateur telescope, never read, watch or listen to any news themselves, have sworn an oath of silence and only communicate their news cast in form of slight alterations in pitch of a constant monotonous humming sound they make.

It’s all over the news so just google and pick a source.

Are you kidding? It’s all over the news so just google and pick a source. How about you provide sources for your weird conspiracy theory.

Isn’t that German flag and not the Nazi Germany flag?

No, you can see the fascist black sun on the upper flag in the video.

Math: here’s a theorem, if it’s proven, it’s true until someone finds an error in the proof or in the computer program or its compiler, if it’s a computer assisted proof and the compiler can never be proven not to be flawed (Turing). Or until someone finds an error in one of the assumptions or in their proofs. Or until the axiomatic system used is proven inconsistent and it can never be proven not to be inconsistent (Goedel). Or until you decide you need to work in a different system. Or technically if we stay in the system, but language or culture shifts and we change what we mean by the specific words and symbols used in the theorem.

Even if it’s true, unless you’re a platonist, it’s not true in the sense that it corresponds to a factual state of affairs in the world (there are no triangles). It’s only true within the system you’re using, just like the sentence: “Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street” is only true in the fictional world of the novels by Arthur Conan Doyle. But in a more redundant way, because unlike novels, math statements are tautologies, reducible to a small number of axioms or axiom schemes, while novels don’t follow necessarily from, say, the table of contents.

Ah, that makes sense

Trump literally said:

‘We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them through the Kurds.’

And Netanjahu blamed Mossad as responsible for the failure of the protests to affect regime change.

I literally had an intense discussion about this in real life and said the same thing. The victims and the perpetrators both agree that CIA and Mossad were trying to affect regime change. But westernern libs know better of course…

Neither. Math builds a lot on other math. And the curriculum is very standardized. That’s why, when people just happen to miss something at any point, because maybe they have more important stuff going on in their live right now, they never catch up. We should drop the requirement that everyone has to learn the same math at the same time, hire more teachers and allow students to flow freely between courses to focus on the stuff they can learn with the math they already know. This will allow students to catch up and, paradoxically, produce a higher over all level of math knowledge, if less standardized and predictable for employers.

Now, to ensure students also want to learn math, both abstract math courses and mixed seminars should be offered. Students could choose to attend either or both. In the seminars, math, physics and engineering would be mixed in challenges where students with different skills and preferences have to work together to produce a cool result (like a robot, a game, an experiment, etc.). The abstract courses shouldn’t be forgotten, because many students actually enjoy learning math. Instead of just teaching rules and how to follow them, they should involve a creative aspect, where students are encouraged to break rules by making their own definitions, formulate their own theorems and try to prove them (like actual mathematicians do).

“Teaching practical skills” is code for producing lots of ‘human-capital’ with a highly standardized skill set that is useful and predictable for capitalists. Catering to individual interests is not required, neither is actually understanding math, just being able to blindly follow an algorithm.

Space exploration is not the only thing that generates spin off effects. It’s not the only interesting science. Directly funding research into solving real problems actually works. So yes, I think it should be funded, but at this point, unmanned missions are a much better way to spend the resources: for the same money you get more science, more spin off, more everything. Just less spectacle. Space will not be profitable, or habitable in this century and that’s fine.

Ultimately, space exploration is outside the realm of production and will stay there at least for a long time. Therefore, what we spend on it is part of our societal surplus: the value we collectively create, that is left over after reproducing society. What happens to that value should be decided democratically. But in capitalism, it isn’t. Corporations control almost all the surplus and spend it on what’s profitable for them. All of space funding in the US is just crumbs falling off the table of the military industrial complex mixed with the potential for propaganda.

For example, all those year, when Hubble was the best telescope, the imperial oppression apparatus had multiple of Hubble sized telescopes whose potential was wasted on intelligence gathering for wars. Then they got even better ones and offered a few of the left overs to NASA, but NASA couldn’t even afford to make use of several free Hubble sized telescopes.

I don’t think anyone else is allowed to get one.

They only look unfamiliar, because they are just that good at hiding.

Yes, we’re comrades who share a common struggle. But do you mean anarchists and marxists? Cause every single anarchist I know in real life is also a communist. And ever anarchist movement or org or squatting place or whatever too. Only online do I ever find anarchists who distance themselves from the idea of a stateless classless society (the universally accepted definition of communism). Like I assume you’re okay with society being stateless. So you want it to have classes? Not really, right? Marxists and anarchists have different strategies for how to get there, but clearly every anarchists who wants a classless stateless society (i.e. communism) is also a communist.

That’s cool! It’s not always easy as a child to make sense of contrasting messages from home vs from school and wider society.

You’ve felt bad about what? Your childhood drawings?