Le FN : Un parti littéralement fondé par un Waffen SS et un tortionnaire en Algérie.
Un parti entièrement dédié à la haine raciste et la différentiation ethnique. Mais. Pas. Raciste.
On peut fermer le ban, on n'ira jamais plus loin dans l'inversion des normes, le retournement de la réalité.
Même ma citation préférée de Debord ("Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux") ne suffit plus à décrire ce que nous vivons.
Been homeless over 6 years. My social services agency, high turnover. Being female , almost all my case managers have been female, standard practice....
I don’t think you’re imagining things at all. In my experience, women and gay men tend to be more empathetic.
That said, I just wonder how those men CMS behave towards other men, and how different you’d be treated by women CMSs if you were a man.
Also, I found this review that compares the differences in empathy between males and females[*]. I don’t have the time or energy for it, but it could be a place to start if you want to learn about the research on this.
Dans Libé:
Jordan Bardella, invité pour la première fois à HEC sans qu'aucune association identifiée ne proteste, applaudi à la fin par une salle qui a ri quand le patron du RN s'est moqué d'une question sur l'histoire de son parti.
Ny rapport til FN's Menneskerettighedsråd advarer om, at Israel overtræder den fjerde Genèvekonvention ved at fordrive palæstinensere på den besatte Vestbred.
Okay, Color Spaces: "When I was a kid, art teachers taught me about The Color Wheel with its Three Primary Colors and its Three Secondary Colors and while that did help me make greenish paint when I only had yellow and blue, it also gave me some wrong ideas about color." #CSShttps://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces/#fn-2-mark
It’s Monday Morning, I’m halfway through my morning coffee and allergy season has begun. As I use caffeine to power through allergy brain fog my synapses are misfiring into oddness. These are random TTRPG thoughts.
I’m about 80% through a sabbatical grant application. The proposed project is to write a TTRPG. So hopefully that’ll happen.
The Ninth World Bestiary is about to make my Numenera table really uncomfortable. Yay.
My last BFRPG session was a bottle episode. It was intense.
I’ve got my Land of Eem review outlined. It’s going to take a bit to edit it, though, so I’ll be recording another video today that’ll go live first.
Ecclesicon badges are on sale. Are you in the Philly/South Jersey area and want to spend a couple of days gaming? Come on out!
I’m in the process of creating mini-golf rules for No Thank You, Evil! This should be interesting.
The Dragonbane Bestiary has entered my review queue. This book is stunning. When my new YouTube payout hits I’ll be picking up the hardbound edition of the core rules.
Dragonbane is going to be my next long-term campaign once my BFRPG campaign winds down.
I had a wonderful conversation with Stephen Grodzicki, the founder of Pickpocket Press. His upcoming game, Tales of Argosa, is an update to the terrific Low Fantasy Gaming. Crowdfunding should launch in March 2024 1!
There are so many games!
Stephen was the first game designer to send me a physical review copy. But I’ll be moving from reviewer to backer for Tales of Argosa because his role under system and luck mechanics are fantastic. ↩<a></a>
Superbe épisode des Portraits chez @blast_info dans lequel M0diie et Ostpolitik reviennent aux racines du mal et comment le #FN/#RN a fini par imposer ses thèmes. Les mots tuent, ou à tout le moins ils produisent des effets sur le réel.
This is half-way between a biography and autobiography. Parts were clearly dictated and recorded prehumously and are interspersed with observations from others. Terry's voice shines through although, as forevermore, I was left longing for just-one-more quote.
In among all the amusing asides1, perhaps what I found funniest was just how bitchy the man could be! A world-class grumping machine with built-in catty-power fuelled by snark and rage. He took grouchiness into an elevated art-form.
Rob Wilkins has the tricky job of making Terry accessible. He weaves his own life into Terry's (although he never oversteps) and acts as the perfect avatar for the reader.
For some reason, the eBook places all the photos in a gallery at the end. Understandable in a paper volume, but it would have been nice to intersperse them with the text.
But it is marvellous to spend a little bit more time in Pratchett's brain. Wandering around that glorious cathedral and weeping as it slowly falls into ruins.
so we have been batting around the idea of some kinda paper bot for awhile re: the question "how do we track discussions around scholarly work" and I am starting to think this paper-feeds project is the way to do it.
So say it is an AP instance and it has one primary bot user, you follow it and it follows you back. When you make a post with something that resolves to a DOI, then that post is linked to that work. Any hashtags used in that post are added to that papers keywords (assuming some basic moderation and word ban lists). Then keyword feeds are also represented as AP actors that can be followed and make a post per paper. I wonder if we can spoof the "in reply to" field to present all those posts as being replies to that paper.
So say the bot also has some simple microsyntax for linking your account to an ORCID - either directly in a profile field, or by @'ing the bot and checking a rel=me, or hell even oauth. Then you could also relate when the authors of given works talk about other works and use that as another proximity measure. Then you could make an author RSS feed/AP actor that is just the works someone publishes and optionally that they talk mention - so eg I could make an aggregate feed for the papers my friends are reading.
Then you could have instances of this feed generator follow one another and broadcast aggregated similarity information at a paper level not linked to personal information, and also opt-in info like the fedi account <-> ORCID link. Since youre on AP already you basically get that for free.
Thinking about what would be useful for social discovery of scholarly works, and there are a lot of really interesting ideas once you start actually yno doing it starting from a place of not having a product to sell or a platform to run so you avoid some of the scale and liability probs.
@hochstenbach yes yes - i have ultimately come to the conclusion that the LDP needs to be #P2P in order for it to do the things it wants to do. Fluid ontologies indexed by DNS have basically never worked, and so most of RDF world just treats them like non-dereferencing IRIs, which is sad - it's just intrinsically fragile, and really the only #LinkedData vocabularies you can really rely on still being there are the ones that w3c hosts because they're the only ones that really care about URLs staying the same forever.
I really like the design of what you're working on here - just operating on files is great, rules syntax took a bit to read but makes sense and seems amenable to interface design, and i especially like the plugin approach to 'just pull and push from anywhere'. The problem i have with thinking about the longevity or deployability of things like this are not really intrinsic to your project at all, but about the imo naive assumptions that LD makes about DNS: it is genuinely expensive and complicated to put something on the 'net for your average bear (timbl said as much). All the (necessary) placeholder example.com's in the demos are a reflection of that - since of course the rule isn't actually at example.com, presumably it isn't actually dereferencing there, and so it becomes just an IRI slug that is simultaneously necessarily bound to a URL but can't use it.
my longest lasting question in studying LD is "where is #SOLID?" I have tried and failed dozens of times to just run something from the project and have never managed to do it and have never heard of someone actually using it day-to-day. millions of people run bittorrent clients though, so it's not just an intrinsic "people don't want to run software" problem. The barrier to 'how do i actually put my stuff online' has to be a lot lower than 'rent a domain, manage a bunch of paths, and run an always-on server forever'.
The federated approach like the fedi and eg. institutions hosting pods is promising for many things, but it is sort of a nonstarter for anything with arbitrary clearweb user-generated content for liability and security reasons, so I think that would be super dope for things like notifications for scholarly work, but I think institutions will balk at an eventing framework that requires arbitrary code to run on an institutionally managed server, and especially can result in arbitrary content being available on their domain.
I think we should take advantage of existing infrastructure though - eg. i like how you're using npm to host and version vocabularies, and that federated infrastructure could (and imo should) serve some backstop role of preserving availability and providing bootstrap entrypoints for a p2p swarm. I think that has to look like using different protocols than HTTP though, and following along that line you pretty rapidly get to needing social infrastructure at the base in order to have comprehensible namespacing (rather than a bunch of long hashes, even with some naming system patched over the top of it, as IPNS demonstrates doesn't really work that well). I think your going towards integration with email and masto and whatnot from a local client is a nice set of steps towards personal web tooling, and i'm gonna keep this bookmarked for when i get closer to working on something related :)
Nuclear power was sold to the world as a safe, clean, and economically viable source of electricity. We were told that it would be "too cheap to meter"1. Even the most ardent proponent of nuclear power will have to admit that hasn't come to pass. Construction costs for nuclear power stations are dwarfed only by their decommissioning costs. Yes, politics and regulation conspire to increase the price - but nuclear hasn't made electricity particularly cheap. Indeed, we mostly seem to be paying more than ever for our power.
Well, not quite.
On Christmas Eve, my electricity company emailed me to say that I would have several hours of free electricity. They would charge me £0.00 per kWh. More than that, at a few specific times they would pay me for my electricity use!
Most factories and heavy industrial plants weren't running the day before Christmas. UK power usage spikes when everyone boils a kettle at the end of a football match or other similar event - but there was nothing so momentous happening at 3AM. So supply outstripped demand.
Anyone with a smart-meter could have been paid to charge their car, run their tumble dryer, or stay up until the wee hours playing on their console.
It wasn't mined uranium which gave us power which literally had to be given away; about 62% of the electricity came from wind.
At this point, the nuclear lobby will start whinging about subsidies (both nukes and renewables are generously subsidised) and how wind can't provide a base load (which is fair). But although sticking a bunch of turbines in costal waters is an engineering marvel - it's pretty cheap compared to building and maintaining a nuclear power station.
Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it.
Because home appliances are increasingly efficient, domestic energy use is falling - it's down 19% since 2010. Electricity use by domestic properties was about 96.2 TWh in 2022 and 135 TWh was generated by renewables.
Yes, electricity is fungible, but you can convincingly make the case that every home in the UK was powered by renewables.
Solar panels don't work at night, and wind-turbines don't work when there's no wind. We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity. That might be nuclear, or fossil fuels, or it might be storage from the excess power from renewables.
Sadly, the world is still filled with war, famine, and disease. But, for a few moments on a winter's evening, wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter.
If you want to move to a time-of-day electricity tariff, you can join Octopus Energy - if you use that link, we both get £50 bill credit.
There is a lot of contention about that phrase. It was (probably) about the future prospects of nuclear fusion - but it became attached to nuclear fission. You can read more at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission↩
I made my own tofu a few weeks ago1. I got soy milk, heated it, mixed in coagulants, drained it, pressed it, sliced it, then cooked it. And, you know what? I'm not sure it was worth the effort.
It tasted basically fine - no different to any shop bought tofu. It wasn't noticeably cheaper, it wasn't more nutritious, nor was it easier to store and prepare. I'm sure that if I spent several attempts I would gradually get closer to creating something comparable with the shop-bought product. And then what? Do I want to spend a few hours tending to my tofu whenever I feel like a stir-fry?
Cooking - and learning its chemistry - can be fun. It can also be a drudge. Sometimes I don't want to individually peel and slice a dozen ingredients. I want to push a few buttons on my microwave and then eat something.
The same extends to nearly every field. I could knit my own clothes and - no doubt - I would find the process interesting, relaxing, and entertaining. But for everyday wear, it would be a startling waste of my time to do so. Even if I avoid sweatshop labour and fast-fashion, a decent jumper is cheap and provides excellent utility.
But part of the joy of making - and mending - is that you get to learn a little slice of how the world works.
I first encountered Conway's Game of Life when I was a kid. I thought it was the hideously complicated thing which I simply was not qualified to understand. But after reading the biography of von Neumann it suddenly clicked. I understood its simplicity.
In order to test my understanding, I built my own Game of Life interpreter. It's nothing fancy. A few dozen lines of Python. It won't win any awards for efficiency nor for coding style. But it works.
In the unlikely event that I ever need to use Life in production, I'm going to use a mature and well supported library. But by building my own toy implementation, I have a superficial understanding of what it is meant to do, where the pitfalls are, and what limitations I might encounter.
And that's my approach to most things. Learn how to make, understand the obvious problems, fall back to the mainstream option if it is easier than continuing.
Yes, I am fully aware that I am a knit-your-own tofu, Guardian-reading, hipster, vegan stereotype. ↩
FN/RN, magouilles et compagnies
« escroquerie en bande organisée »,
« abus de biens sociaux »,
« recel d’abus de biens sociaux »,
« faux et usage de faux »,
« financement illégal d’un parti politique »
I did a few interviews for magazines and podcasts - but nothing like as much as previous years. I did get involved with some Doctor Who props which was pretty cool!
Here's how I did against last years hopes and dreams (not goal or OKRs)
Graduate from MSc (and regain my free time).
Done! MSc Managed. I scored a distinction and have vowed to not do anything academic ever again. Until I change my mind.
Go on a proper relaxing holiday where all I do is sip cocktails and read books (and maybe a little sightseeing).
Done! Spent a week in Cape Verde swimming up to the bar and reading books (not simultaneously). Visited Berlin (gorgeous). Kuala Lumpur was an incredible city, I think I'm still full from all the food. And a couple of weeks driving around New Zealand's South Island was just perfect.
Put more effort into things like OpenUK and BCS (I need to give back more to the community).
I've been doing more things with OpenUK - both attending board meetings and meet-ups - but the BCS work has been harder. I keep suggesting things but they never get much traction. I have to admit to myself that I'm not a very good organiser of events and lack the ability to convince people to engage with them. Consequently, I'll be resigning shortly.
Consider joining a Worshipful Company (looks like it could be a fun way to get more involved with charities).
Nope! I went to a couple of events, and they were... fine, I guess? I don't think I'm sociable enough to benefit from them. I don't have the hustle to pick up work from them. And I'm not sure how much time I want to devote to something like that.
Blog more. I'm not introspective enough to keep a diary of how I feel - but I do enjoy looking back at what I thought. Probably not daily - but we'll see.
Done! Daily, as well. I find it a tremendously cathartic outlet. I do not have a rich emotional inner life - but it is nice to get my thoughts out.
Read more. I have too short a commute to get into a good book. So I'm going to have to proactively set aside some time.
Done! 52 books this year.
See more friends. I'm conscious that I've been keeping to myself rather a lot. If you fancy a beer and a natter, please get in touch 🙂
Well, mostly. Again, I need to put more effort into arranging things and seeing people.
So, what's up for 2024? More of the same, with a twist.
I have two contradictory goals. I've moved to 4-days-a-week in order to glide down to FIRE / FILE. But I'd also like to grow my own consultancy. I've already had several clients who are happy with me doing ad-hoc work for them. So how do I reconcile working less with taking on more work? Answers in the comments box, please.
With the upcoming General Election, perhaps I will get a bit more involved in politics - both local and national. After being politically constrained by my job for so long, it'll be interesting to see how that feels.
We've hit over 30,000 submissions to OpenBenches. Have we hit the limit? Is it worth promoting it more?
I am terrible at playing with all the toys I have. I want to spend a bit more time playing the games I have on the Oculus and Switch.
After several years of intensity, I think I want to throttle back a bit.
No doubt life will throw the usual amount of twists and turns. Let's see what happens!
The year 2014 has been removed pending legal advice. Needless to say, I fully expect to be vindicated and look forward to being crowned the rightful winner of The Eurovision Song Contest. ↩
"Pour le député européen Bernard Guetta (Renew Europe), la place que les nouvelles extrêmes droites ont prise en Europe et dans le monde est déjà suffisamment inquiétante pour qu’il ne soit pas nécessaire d’aller les croire et les dire irrésistibles. Aux démocrates, centristes et écologistes de faire front pour les battre."
"Il y a, c’est vrai, toutes les raisons d’avoir peur. Il y a dans l’air comme un parfum d’avant-guerre mais en est-on vraiment revenu aux années 30 ?
Avec l’Ukraine et Gaza en toile de fond, on le serait si les électeurs américains n’avaient pas refusé un second mandat à Donald Trump il y a trois ans, si les Polonais ne venaient pas de chasser du pouvoir une droite réactionnaire, si les Espagnols n’avaient pas préféré reconduire les socialistes que passer les commandes à une droite dure, si Geert Wilders pouvait s’appuyer sur une majorité parlementaire et non pas sur à peine un quart des députés néerlandais ou si Javier Milei avait les moyens d’appliquer son programme de démantèlement de l’Etat argentin dont ni le Parlement ni les régions ne veulent.
La place que les nouvelles extrêmes droites ont prise en Europe et dans le monde est déjà suffisamment inquiétante pour qu’il ne soit pas nécessaire d’aller les croire et les dire irrésistibles alors qu’elles ne le sont pas. Elles sont, au contraire, incohérentes et contradictoires car, opposées ou non à l’évolution des mœurs et au droit à l’avortement, tantôt libertariennes, tantôt conservatrices, elles sont de surcroît divisées entre partisans d’une pleine liberté du marché et défenseurs d’un rôle économique de l’Etat."
(...)
"Peu de temps avant que Donald Trump n’impose des droits de douane à nos industries et ne menace de refermer le parapluie américain, Mme Le Pen était allée vainement chercher son onction jusqu’au pied de la Trump Tower à New York. Elle était ensuite allée à Moscou demander et obtenir celle de Vladimir Poutine et ses amis avaient voté contre l’emprunt européen destiné à relancer nos économies malmenées par la pandémie, contre l’intérêt des 450 millions de citoyens européens.
I remember seeing the original "A new decentralized microblogging platform" on HackerNews back in October 2016. A few weeks later, I joined - becoming the 7,112th user. As the years went on, my use of it waxed and waned. I started cross-posting to both Mastodon and Twitter. Gradually, I started spending more time on the Fediverse.
Once Elon shat the bed on Twitter, I moved over completely. And, you know what, I don't regret it for a second.
I've found a lovely community of people. I get my parasocial fix without being inundated by cryptogrifters shilling shitcoins, nor by thought-leaders posting inflammatory takes for clout. There are no disingenuous politicians and remarkably few celebrities trying to sell me their bathwater. There's no advertising. There's a great API for bots. And - for now - people are generous with their time and expertise.
But, just to be contrary, let's list some of the bad points about it.
That does mean there are fewer arseholes1. But it doesn't yet feel as magical as Twitter did - when you could suddenly be in a conversation with a goat farmer from the other side of the planet and a world-famous astrophysicist.
The people who are about tend to be on the techy side of things. Which does mean putting up with some annoying pedantry and plenty of "jUSt InsTaLl LinUx aNd delETE facEbOoK."
Small, insular communities are fractious. A perceived insult or slight can rapidly descend into childish taunts of "well I'll defederate you first!"
There was drama on Twitter - and even more since Elon's full on conversion to the dark side - but because the community is smaller here, the drama feels bigger.
This is a mixed bag. Frankly, Twitter should never have been a customer support channel. But businesses wanted to promote their goods and services, and customers took the opportunity to upbraid them in public. That led to all sorts of weird behaviours.
Nevertheless, I'd like to be able to see what's going on in local politics, and transport, and a dozen little services I used Twitter for.
I've posted some thoughts on Mastodon search. It's now pretty good. But the federated nature of Mastodon means it'll never be as comprehensive as Twitter.
I've seen plenty of waves of users over the years. But I think that the majority of people who wanted to leave Twitter have done so.
And... I think that's OK. I still use Facebook, I'm signed into a dozen different forums, I'm not particularly loyal to anything.
The Fediverse is about diversity. It would be nice if Twitter and Threads and BlueSky all federated with each other. But I think that Mastodon now has enough users to be self-sustaining. It doesn't need to become a giant killer. It mustn't become a de-facto monopoly.
The UK has what is known as a "Standard Scale" of fines for criminal acts. For example, breaking the law may incur "a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale".
Part of the reasoning behind this, so I understand, is to make it simpler for the Government to update the value of those fines. Rather than having to change every law in the land - and have tedious votes on them - it's possible to change one law and have its provisions cascade down to all others. Efficient!
And that nearly happened! In 2014, a Draft statutory Instrument was published. It proposed increasing the Levels 1-4 fines by 400% - so Level 4 would go from £2,500 to £10,0001.
Quite why it was never published, I was not able to find out.
All I know is that during this time of rapid inflation, it appears that the Government are doing nothing to make sure crime doesn't pay.
It is estimated that in 2021, 77% of all offenders received a fine. That's approximately 737,000 offenders who are paying less than they would have thirty years ago.
The very least the Government could do is ensure that the criminals who do get caught, charged, and convicted have to pay a fine which reflects the severity of their crime.
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.
Making my first Mastodon post because Twitter just keeps getting worse.
But here's an atmospheric scattering shader I'm optimising. Left image is 1 spp, using newton integration+importance sampling with temporal integration. Right picture is regular raymarching at 32 samples per pixel.
The left is more accurate, but right is significantly faster. Hoping to find a way to get the right one looking much closer to ground truth.
Lors de la conférence inaugurale du Front national, en 1972, se tenaient à la tribune un ancien de l'OAS, un ancien Waffen-SS, un milicien sous Vichy, un chef d'Occident.
Why are male social workers so different?
Been homeless over 6 years. My social services agency, high turnover. Being female , almost all my case managers have been female, standard practice....
Biden calls China a 'ticking time bomb' due to economic troubles (ground.news)