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Monthly Archives: June 2014
I’ve been living under a rock and I just came across John Green’s Crash Course series and I’m so excited to learn about communism, imperialism, and Islam from someone who knows so much about all three.
Eugene Goostman seems like a typical 13-year-old Ukrainian boy — at least, that’s what a third of judges at a Turing Test competition this Saturday thought.
This is how it begins, next thing you know we’re living in the Matrix and our bodies are being used as disposable batteries.
Computer passes Turing Test for first time by convincing judges it is a 13-year-old boy
Through the machine, man in socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain. And man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. The machine is not in opposition to the earth. The machine is the instrument of modern man in every field of life. The present-day city is transient. But it will not be dissolved back again into the old village. On the contrary, the village will rise in fundamentals to the plane of the city. Here lies the principal task. The city is transient, but it points to the future, and indicates the road. The present village is entirely of the past.
Leon Trotsky | Literature and Revolution (1924)
These three pieces deal with an issue that we really need to discuss as Marxists. I know (too well) that my opinion is unpopular but I am in full agreement with Gourevitch and I completely reject Ajl’s arguments and premises here (and everywhere else – but that’s a different story).
- Alex Gourevitch’s original piece in the Jacobin: Two Hurricanes
- Max Ajl’s reply to it: Climate Change and the Politics of Responsibility
- Gourevitch’s reply to Ajl’s reply: Nature and Progress
With under a week left for the Italy-Englad matchup at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, let’s take a minute to re-appreciate Andrea Pirlo’s brilliant penalty kick against England in the 2012 Euro Cup quarter-finals.
Addressing regional developments, the source quoted Aoun as saying that Syrian President Bashar Assad deserves a Nobel prize for combating terrorism. He added that he supports Assad “because he opposes his alternative.”
This is the end.
Report: Aoun Hints Riyadh is Impeding his Election as President, Says Assad Should Win Nobel Prize
This is one of my favorite monuments to Marx, and it’s actually of both Marx and Lenin. It’s also the largest bust in the world, that of Lenin in Ulan-Ude comes close second.
World Cup strip: Germany football colours removed from Karl Marx statue
I’ve seen this stencil! I can’t remember where, I will take a picture if I come across it again.
The Italian national team just scored three goals in three minutes against Fluminense and Juventus need to get Immobile [back] ASAP.
Poster published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on International Women’s Day in 1981.
Four Christian houses of worship by Oscar Niemeyer
- Catedral de Brasília (Cathedral of Brasilia)
- Capela do Palácio Alvorada (Chapel of the Alvorado Palace)
- Igreja de Sao Francisco de Assis (Church of Saint Francis of Assisi)
- Igreja Nossa Senhora de Fátima (Church of Our Lady Fatima)
”One part of my job I’ll never learn to love is the pre-match warm-up. I hate it with every fibre of my being. It actually disgusts me,” he says.
👋👋👋👋👋
Andrea Pirlo so confident of beating England next weekend he won’t even warm up in training
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to [money], becomes illusion.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer | Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
Lenin actually said this though, just not in those words:
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.
Arab members of Maki, the “Israeli” Communist Party (a descendant of the Palestine Communist Party) in 1949. In 1965 the party split into two factions, one Zionist and the other anti-Zionist. The Zionist faction retained the name Maki, while the anti-Zionist faction named itself Rakah. The Soviet Union recognized Rakah as the official communist party in Palestine quickly after its formation. Rakah still exists today, and ironically, it has renamed itself Maki, while the original (Zionist) Maki has been disbanded.
Messier 16 and the Eagle Nebula
Image credit: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, University of Arizona
Many think it is just a myth. Others think it is true but its cause isn’t known. Adventurers pride themselves on having seen it. It’s a green flash from the Sun. The truth is the green flash does exist and its cause is well understood. Just as the setting Sun disappears completely from view, a last glimmer appears startlingly green. The effect is typically visible only from locations with a low, distant horizon, and lasts just a few seconds. A green flash is also visible for a rising Sun, but takes better timing to spot. A dramatic green flash, as well as an even more rare red flash, was caught in the above photograph recently observed during a sunset visible from the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos in the Canary Islands, Spain. The Sun itself does not turn partlygreen or red — the effect is caused by layers of the Earth’s atmosphere acting like a prism.
Two Palestinian resistance fighters with their children in Beirut, 1982. The child on the left was injured in a Zionist airstrike.
The Atlas Group (a fictional platform that presented much of Raad’s work and invokes a social network of philosophers, research scientists, and academic experts) and to the moment in time when the image is finally produced and presented in an exhibition context, thereby introducing a further rift in the historical continuity of his work. For instance, We decided to let them say, “we are convinced,” twice deploys a grid of oversized photographs that include images of smoke trailing behind fighter planes, Israeli soldiers napping next to a tank, and a crowd of onlookers observing a military action in the distance; taken as a teenager by Raad in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of West Beirut, the blown up scale of the images in 2006 reveals damage done to the negatives over time but also betrays a digital ghosting of the images via applications of blue, green, and pink tones that are not remarked upon in the text accompanying the work. Displaced from a strictly historical time, Raad’s images depart from the customary attributes of war photography or archival documentation. Equally insistent upon both abstraction and representation, the work oscillates in between, disturbing the reception and impact of historical narrative and photographic representation. (via)
see more photographs here from the artist walid raad’s project we decided to let them say “we are convinced” twice. it was more convincing that way.
Amal militants hold back the advancing “Israeli” army in Khalde, on the outskirts of Beirut in 1982.
a man who was about to disclose the location of an arms cache to the israeli soldiers invading lebanon is hushed by his wife in beirut 1982.
Should have cut his tongue out.
Lebanese Communist Party militants flash victory signs before a destroyed “Israeli” tank in Khalde on the outskirts of Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Leaders of the Lebanese Communist Party, most notably Hussein Mroueh and George Hawi, talk to LCP militants on the eve of the Israeli invasion in 1982, in an attempt to raise their morale and prepare them for the battle that lies ahead.
Residents of Beirut bid Palestinian fighters farewell with tears and rice in downtown Beirut on August 21st, 1982 as the PLO was relocating to Tunisia. Yasser Arafat was in Lebanese PM Chafic Wazzan’s car which can be seen covered with rice in the second photo.
Lebanese Communist Party militants carry out an operation against Zionist occupation forces in the Bekaa Valley, 1982.
We have a running joke in Lebanon, Italian victory in the World Cup means “Israel” is going to wage a destructive war against us (see 1982 and 2006). I’ve always been an Italy fan and I’m not superstitious at all, I nonetheless always find myself feeling conflicted about cheering for the Italians in the World Cup.
On this day in 1982, Zionist forces began their invasion of Lebanon under the command of then Israeli Minister of War, Ariel Sharon. Zionist forces were met with heroic resistance at the hands of joint Lebanese-Palestinian forces, which ultimately resulted in the deaths of over 700 Israeli soldiers in the fighting, and over 5000 were wounded. Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Beirut and other Lebanese towns and cities by air, land, and sea resulted in the martyrdom of close to 20,000 people – the vast majority of whom were civilians.
That poem by Qabbani on the Naksa is truly beautiful, one of his best. Despite the grim overtones what defines this poem is its optimism; all that led to defeat is dead, there can only be victory from this point forth.
The Setback (Part 1)
I decree, to you, the death, my friends, of the old language
And the old books
Our perforated words, like old shoes
And immoral vocabulary, and spelling, and the tirade
I decree, to you, the death… I decree, to you, the death
The end of the ideas that led to defeat
“Al-Naksah”- Nizar Qabbani
I have never identified with a poem as strongly as I do with this one.
Today marks the 47th anniversary of the Naksa.
US secretary of state arrives in Beirut on unannounced visit to pledge $290m in additional aid for Syrian refugees.
This is like the $3 billion Saudi Arabia promised the LAF (which is yet to materialize).
(He actually made this shot)
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
“Soviet power is one million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.” Lenin, 1919
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