kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

#brexit Boris Johnson's claims about its benefits fact-checked

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/55522329

@g

This is indeed a very valid point in general. I just don't think it specifically applies to modern Russia for two reasons:

1) especially the older generation in Eastern Europe has a strong tendency to blame everyone else ("them") for any failures; the attitude is sometimes called Homo sovieticus (after Mikhail Heller's book) or "sovok" in Russian

2) the whole point of Putin's "raising Russia from its knees" movement was about the state taking more responsibility

@vfrmedia

I live in Emmer Green and my kids actually attend Highdown so this very close home. Hopefully this tragic case triggers a debate on the issues you mentioned because the last year's knife attack in Forbury park was quickly dismissed as "terrorist attack" which is a synonym with "not my problem" usually...

@amici

Probably the most prominent example of this attitude of Marxism was the rise of Lysenkoism and subsequent prosecution of geneticists in USSR - a conflict that originated specifically from rejection of the idea that a fundamental change in nature could be a result of a random mutation in individual organism, a concept fundamentally incompatible with Marxist ideals.

@amici

So while modern science has been always to some extent obviously impacted by human bias, the bias is perceived specifically as failure of science, and science has procedures to prevent the bias from happening.

In case of Marxism, the bias was at the heart of the ideology and any non-compliance with its fundamental assumption was immediately labelled as "reactionary" even if observed reality obviously contradicted the ideology.

@amici

Thank you for constructive comment on the subject.

Marx introduced a whole new analytical apparatus (specifically diamat and histmat) which he continuously boasted as "scientific", which was later repeated by Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist philosophers.

"The iron laws of dialectics" however from today's perspective can be only described as pseudo-scientific - and have been explicitly described as such by Popper and Kołakowski.

🇵🇱 Głosowanie na Biologiczną Bzdurę roku 2020

https://www.totylkoteoria.pl/2020/12/biologiczna-bzdura-roku-2020-gosowanie.html

@g

This article is a very good analysis in general although this particular conclusion seems to be an overstatement in my opinion. Most people I know in Russia can see a causal connection between Putin's politics and the economic situation.

@edsu He's not thinking "critically", this is an absolute opposite of critical thinking. He was just denying a basic physical observation because he didn't like its conclusions. At the same time he didn't deny Newton's laws of motion or Einstein's theory of relativity and he's benefiting from them on daily basis.

@cjd

He obviously didn't acquire these from reading of Derrida whom he would despise if he ever heard about him (because "leftist") but from alt-right press. What was especially sad is that he's an engineer by education, so when he started ranting about his "intuition" about CO2 levels the obvious question I had was whether the chemical engineering installations he helped design were also built based on "intuition"...

@cjd

This sounds like a good explanation of the generic mechanism but what raised my eyebrows was that the relative I talked to was almost literally quoting the arguments you could before only in works of postmodernist philosophers such as Derrida - far fetching statements about relativity of science and inability to describe reality objectively. He used it specifically to reject easily observed phenomena such as CO2 concentration in atmosphere, so you get where that was going :)

These tools were initially forged by Marx to facilitate his wishful thinking about how societies operate that science did not support.

In 20th century far-left faced the same challenge and picked the same tools as they knew them well due to ideological compatibility and general inspiration by Marx.

Today the same Marx-inspired tools are being picked up by alt-right generation that talks about "evils of cultural Marxism" (a bullshit term on its own).

Sokal Affair was LOL, this is LOL squared.

An interesting observation after traditional Christmas arguments with my right--wing relatives in Poland:

Alt-right is now talking 100% postmodernism.

History made full circle: half-century ago it was mostly far left who ranted about "gender aspect of mathematics" and "science as a social construct", basically denying humans ability to objectively describe reality.

Gender inclusive is OK but this reads like some kind of satire really:

"'Amen and a-woman': House opening prayer goes gender-inclusive"

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house-congress-prayer-emanuel-cleaver-amen-democrats

(except it originates from Biblical Hebrew not Latin)