Latest Posts by diabolical-dialectical - Page 2
I think the turbolift is stuck…
"The Earth is listening" painting by Mikhail Pyaskovsky, USSR, 1988.
national holiday
One of the absolute biggest failures of the US/Western "left" is the fact that most people are only capable of being anti-imperialist in the abstract and/or in hindsight. "Of course invading Iraq was bad!" people will say. "Of course invading Vietnam was bad! Of course the US lied about Iraq in the 90s to initiate the Gulf War!" (and Vietnam in the 60s, and Iraq again in the 2000s). But when it comes to what the empire is doing now people get fucking goldfish brains and are incapable of critically analyzing any new information. You see, we just have to stay in Syria to save the Kurds and defeat Assad. We just have to go to war with China if they try to reunify Taiwan to protect democracy. We should have stayed in Afghanistan to protect women and girls. Or people will try to both-sides it and say "well of course US imperialism is bad, but [insert Official Enemy State here] is just as bad if not worse!". Then when the empire makes its move and inevitably it kills thousands of people and makes the world objectively worse, then people will say "oh I guess it was bad after all", and the "anti-imperialists" of 20 years from now will pat themselves on the back for remembering that bad thing the empire did and knowing it definitely was bad.
All of this is supremely useless. If anti-imperialism means anything it means stopping the empire before it ever even starts, and if it does start, doing any and everything possible to sabotage and defeat it.
art in architecture // wien leopoldstadt
II
part 2 of art in architecture in leopoldstadt, vienna. and again a mix of modern and traditional formal language, executed as sculpture, mosaic or sgraffito. sometimes the artworks refer to biblical themes (weintraubengasse), local handicrafts (große pfarrgasse) or history, such as former buildings or residents (rotensterngasse & czerniengasse).
1. weintraubengasse artist: f. barzig, d.j.
2. zirkusgasse
3. große pfargasse
4. rotensterngasse
5. czerniengasse (completion 1962) artist: k.drexler
“Assemblers” by Yaroslav Krestovsky (1975)
Myth: Trans rights are not human rights
Status: BUSTED
Trying to revivify this blog, spent fifteen minutes searching how to log out of tumblr on desktop
w
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/virginia-eubanks-interview-automating-inequality-poverty
It’s a little bit silly, but I have this little Hippocratic oath for data designers in the book. There are two basic questions I encourage them to ask themselves. One is, does it increase self-determination of poor people? And two, if it was aimed at anyone but poor and working people, would you be able to do it? And if you answer “no” to either of those, don’t do it. You’re on the wrong side of history.
The High-Tech Poorhouse
That chapter is really saying, “If you do everything right, and you’re still living in a society that is deeply impacted by its hatred of the poor and its fear of precarity, you’re still going to create systems that punish, police, and profile.” And that’s the most frustrating place that people get to. Because then they’re like, “Well then, what do we do?” And they want me to give them a ten-point plan for creating better technologies. And I’m like, “Well, what we do is, join in social movements, and end poverty everywhere, and forever.” And I’m sorry that that’s a frustrating answer. But it’s the real answer.
The High-Tech Poorhouse
“The ‘natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value.”
The Problem of Sex
It’s not hard to see parallels between the three dimensions of perfectionism and so-called “call-out culture,” lately the hegemonic tendency on the Left: a condition in which everyone watches everyone else for a fatal slip-up, holding themselves to impossibly high standards of virtuous self-effacement, and being paralyzed with the secret (again, not unfounded) fear that they’re disposable to the group, that their judgment day is around the corner. The pattern is of a piece with other manifestations of neoliberal meritocratic perfectionism, from college admissions to obsessive Instagram curation. And because it divides rather than unites us, it’s no way to build a movement that ostensibly seeks to strike at the heart of power.
Under Neoliberalism, You Can Be Your Own Tyrannical Boss
Neoliberal meritocracy, the authors suggest, has created a cutthroat environment in which every person is their own brand ambassador, the sole spokesman for their product (themselves) and broker of their own labor, in an endless sea of competition. As Curran and Hall observe, this state of affairs “places a strong need to strive, perform, and achieve at the center of modern life,” far more so than in previous generations.
Under Neoliberalism, You Can Be Your Own Tyrannical Boss
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Theses on Feuerbach
s h a p e c a t s
https://medium.com/@hondanhon/these-are-the-deep-learning-neural-network-voyages-of-the-starship-enterprise-5c62dacc0480
One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him
Why Are Rich People So Anxious?
