Lady @Lady@cat.family

i can now reveal to @wallhackio that this Youtube comment comes from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz4OLOpXKCo

@gaditb i think the parallel to this in Marxist analysis is in the idea (paraphrasing here because i do not know the theoretical framing for it) that people encounter contradictions experientially, not intellectually. so you look at the anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, and you say “well, clearly this problem is misdiagnosed. immigrants are not the problem here” but you ALSO say “clearly there is something real that people are experiencing, that is leading them to think in this way”.

and so the goal is that a superficial conversation about “why do communist intellectuals and lay workers disagree on immigration policy?”, which seems tightly scoped, gives way to a deeper interrogation that gets closer to the essence of what is actually going on. and i think the practice of that uncovering is similar (maybe not exactly the same) to what you point to in the Talmud, where an initial question develops into a deeper and more nuanced dialogue

however the motivations are probably different. Marxism is very practical and primarily concerned with establishing correct praxis, which is to say that i think it is ultimately in search of a truth about “the right thing to do / policy to have”. i think part of why dialectics is a slippery term is because it is unclear to me whether it is the process (and skills associated with that process) or the goals/ambitions which is more important. i tend to think of it more as a process which can be applied to many different goals/ambitions, but i suppose others may think that it is the goal/ambition that is more important

@gaditb i think @aescling might know more about what actual Marxists mean by dialectics than me i learned most of what i know from Wikipedia and hiphop

@gaditb [the other way contradictions are “resolved” are by conditions changing; for example the contradictions in the feudal system resolving into the different set of contradictions in the capitalist system. but there are always contradictions]

@gaditb bit complicated i think, because resolving contradictions also produces new contradictions, and also you have to define what “resolving” means

to give a practical example, consider a political party and the people represented by the party. the political party sets the policy, but the people are who the policy is supposed to serve. there is a contradiction here because the policy has to be set by people who do not have the lived experience or understanding of the people the policy is supposed to serve. on the other hand, this contradiction is necessary because it is not an appropriate expectation that your average person on the street be a policy wonk.

so dialectics are necessary to ensure the policy actually benefits the people in ways that it is supposed to benefit them. you could say that if this is successful, this is “resolving the contradiction”. or you could say that the contradiction is inherent and cannot be resolved. but what you do NOT want is for the contradiction to be ignored and the people who set policy to do so without engaging with the public.

so this is kind of the context of dialectics in Marxism as i understand it. it is an attempt to answer the question of how Marxist intellectuals who do not reflect the average worker can nevertheless figure out policies that the average worker will benefit from. so it is a conversation between theory and practice, leaders and workers, and hypothesized ideals and historical experience

this is a different scope and scale than the personal level of a single person developing opinions through conversations with other people. i guess i don¦t have a good answer on whether they can be considered similar or different? it seems kind of different to me but the process also seems kind of the same

@gaditb well it is complicated because dialectics is a greek word coined by Plato to describe Socratic dialogues, but it was refined by German philosophy to mean a resolving of contradictions

the way i think of dialectics is this: you have an opinion, and somebody else has an opinion. on their own, each opinion seems relatively reasonable and cohesive. but when brought together, each opinion reveals gaps or unexamined contradictions in the other one. this process of bringing the opinions together allows the opinion-havers to refine their opinions in ways that they could not have on their own

i am not sure that this definition exactly matches either the Platonic or Hegelian or Marxist definition, but it does seem close to what you were describing

@gaditb i mean i would argue this is dialectics but

also the UK is so much better than America at rap

where do i follow the kind of people who will tell me about this music when it comes out so i don¦t have to learn about it from a Wikipedia page a year later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwnfjcDCCmE

people who post takes because they are developing their opinions dialectically

🆚

people who post takes because they are proselytizing

@djm62 here is the history of Mastodon, in short:

• Once upon a time, there was a technology called RSS. This let you follow posts from blogs you liked.

• RSS had some failings, so some people created Atom, which was basically the same but a little better standardized and more extensible.

• People with blogs wanted people tp be able to reply to their posts. So they invented a technology called Salmon which allowed people to send messages “upstream” to the originating blog.

• People realized that blog feeds + comments was basically social media, if only they had better support for user profiles. So they adopted Portable Contacts to specify user profile information, and added a small amount of PubSub features to more clearly define the concept of “following”. They called this combination of Atom+Salmon+ Portable Contacts+PubSub “OStatus”.

• Atom feeds have a problem where they are entirely public, so it is hard to make posts which are limited in audience. Additionally, they are XML feeds, which looks antiquated to modern technologists. So people designed a JSON push-based equivalent to OStatus where you can only push messages to specific people, instead of the whole universe of social media being public feeds. And this is basically ActivityPub.

at no point did somebody sit down and say, i am going to invent social media from the ground up. that’s Bluesky. the good parts of Bluesky are because it was designed by very smart people, and the bad parts of Bluesky are because those smart people are also evil. your mileage may vary

but Mastodon developed through a long process of people adding a single feature to an existing technology to solve a specific problem. that is the beauty of it and also the folly of it. when you start from a place of public blogposts in the blogosphere in the 2000s, you are not considering harassment on Twitter in the 2010s. and building the momentum to solve that very hard problem is difficult for a technology whose history has largely been to make the smallest possible change