"The truth is that the Americans will eventually make themselves hated by everyone, even by their most unconditional allies. All the manipulations the Americans imagine are contradicted by events."
"See, even in NATO, which the Americans built with their own hands, which is their thing, have you seen that? The NATO parliamentarians declare that the Multilateral Force is nothing but a big joke. The truth is that the Americans will end up being hated by everyone. Even by their most unconditional allies. The Multilateral Force would be one more trick. All the tricks that the Americans imagine are denied by events. It is more and more true. Look at their so-called détente."
Hint: That's the current government of France to this day. To me, that is a liberal democracy.
I would recommend reading "When France Fell" for more context on de Gaulle. You are talking about a complicated figure. I also would point out that he faced attempts on his life for getting France out of the former colony of Algeria.
And now you know why they need to spend so much money to buy and influence media outlets all over the world. Tip: it is not because media is such a profitable industry...
In other words, only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly — and tragically — moral. To express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the incomparably beautiful words of Hebbel’s Judith: “Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me — who am I to be able to escape it?”
“Tactics and Ethics” – 1919
… we Communists are like Judas. It is our bloody work to crucify Christ. But this sinful work is at the same time our calling: only through death on the cross does Christ become God, and this is necessary to be able to save the world. We Communists then take the sins of the world upon us, in order to be able thereby to save the world.
Quoted in Daniel Lopez, "The Conversion of Georg Lukács"
Dionysus versus the “Crucified” there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering—the “Crucified as the innocent one”—counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation.—One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy being; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering ... Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.
See [0] for the direct source, and see if you can find that quote. That is actually quote by Russian revolutionary Boris Savinkov. The relevant Lukacs quote is the following
ethical self-awareness makes it quite clear that there are situations — tragic situations — in which it is impossible to act without burdening oneself with guilt. But at the same time it teaches us that, even faced with the choice of two ways of incurring guilt, we should still find that there is a standard attaching to correct and incorrect action. This standard we call sacrifice. And just as the individual who chooses between two forms of guilt finally makes the correct choice when he sacrifices his inferior self on the altar of the higher idea, so it also takes strength to assess this sacrifice in terms of the collective action.
Not much wrong with that.
> Quoted in Daniel Lopez, "The Conversion of Georg Lukács"
That is very far from a verified quote. In fact even the 'Jacobin' article you probably got it from states that it is according to an account by a Social Democratic observer [1]. Social Democrats and Georg Lukacs didn't exactly get along. It is also stylistically not Lukacs, and it would be very strange for Lukacs to talk about Judas in a positive light. Lukacs was a proponent of revolutionary asceticism and discipline. Judas being a historical embodiment of betrayal wouldn't be seen as a positive figure.
> The will to power
You can complain all you want that Hitler and whole of far right misread Nietzsche's Will to Power, extract him from his historical significance and look at his words in abstract, however the objective historical fact remains that Nietzsche had a tremendous influence on Fascism and Nazism (and likely continues to do so) and that is not an accident.
You're right to point out I misattributed the quote from "Tactics and Ethics".
The point I wanted to make is that the parallels between Nietzsche and Lukács abound in these passages. Both advocate for a kind of "ethical self-awareness" that is attuned to "sacrifice in terms of the collective action" which leads to the "most profound human tragedy".
>The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering
"Sacrifices his inferior self on the altar of the higher idea" even sounds like Nietzsche concept of übermensch.
As for the accusation that I
>complain all [I] want that Hitler and whole of far right misread Nietzsche's Will to Power
, this wasn't my goal, and the fact you went on misinterpreting my words – whereas someone with a virgin mind with respect to these matters would have seen the obvious parallels I pointed out, and nothing more - shows how bound you are to adversariality, as you fail to realize there is heavy irony in blaming the outcome of Nazism, on top of marxist ideology, which did worse and collapsed onto itself. But I guess marxism is but an avatar of Dionysos:
>Dionysos cut into pieces is a promise of Life: it will be forever born anew and rise afresh from destruction
As Girard once said,
>The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify [vilify] their victims.
>It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.
κᾰτηγορέω: to speak against, especially before judges, to accuse, to denounce publicly. from κᾰτᾰ- (kata-, “against”) + ἀγορεύω (agoreúō, “to speak in assembly”).
There is a nice post-marxist reflection starting on page 2 of this paper, by someone who actually lived through it and is able to produce a cold-headed analysis of "heroism, self-denial, and altruism" without blaming nor praising it.
> this wasn't my goal, and the fact you went on misinterpreting my words
What words? I posted a quote by George Lukacs to draw attention to relationship between Nietzsche and the rise of Nazism and Fascism. You responded with two false quotes from Lukacs in an attempt to draw parallels between Lukacs and Nietzsche. I would think that affirmation of sacrifice for the greater good is not really that profound a topic to draw parallels on
Bayer starts with quoting various chronicles on atrocities committed on the Jewish population at the time of the Hungarian Council Republic in 1919, which he described as a “rat revolt” to show “how the Bolsheviks, majority-led by Jews, were dealing with people of their kind.” Subsequently, he asks, “How did these animals deal with non-Jews?” In this context, he recounts a story that has emerged again and again since the 1990s. At the end of the First World War, Lukács as a peoples’ commissar took part or even ordered the execution of seven or eight deserters while defending the Hungarian frontier against Romanian troops. The truthfulness of this anecdote has often been doubted, most recently and in detail by András Lengyel, a Hungarian scholar on the history of literature. There are no witnesses to the execution, nor graves, nor documents that would testify the funerals. The trial in this matter, which took place in 1919 after the failure of the Council Republic, condemned the allegedly executing red armist merely on the basis of the fact, that the executions might have taken place according to the usual practice. What is spicy about this episode is, that Lukács talks about the event in the autobiographical interview volume Lived thinking and says that he ordered the execution to restore morality. If the executions were carried out, their purpose was to defend the Hungarian frontier against the Western-backed Romanian troops. So questionable the practice of the execution of deserters is, the soldiers were familiar with it from the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. If the execution had been ordered by Horthy or one of his officers, it would be considered a justifiable measure out of patriotic motives by those, who now claim, Lukács was a mass murderer.
Bayer not only uses this episode to insinuate double standards to Lukács’ defenders, who at the same time condemn the antisemite Hóman, but also deliberately creates a parallel between the Bolsheviks “majority-led by Jews” in 1919 and the defenders of Lukács today: “This is an announcement: enough with the intellectual terror, and with the fact, that ‘Lukácsists’ have been deciding who is in the pantheon of intellectual life for a good half century and who is not. And quite generally, it’s enough with you.”
Agreed. Rat populations have regulatory mechanisms that generally prevent them from overshooting with respect to the resources available in their environment.
>In my field, there’s an equation that best explains rat population size. Simplified, it states: Garbage in = rats out. When food is plentiful, there’s no check on growth. When the cycle of regular feeding has been broken, then rats will disperse, injure, kill and even consume one another.
Rat colonies are the exception, they usually live as "nuclear families", separated from each other. Walk 100m away from a metro station with trashcans containing a dozen of rats near the entrance, and you'll find rat families, not colonies.
However the damages they can cause when they settle inside our houses tend to let us think this is their default modus operandi, and as a consequence we tend to project an exterminatory mindset onto situations where they are not problematic–and I'd even add: situations where they are a necessity.
In particular, if you have a compost box, you'll have a rat family settle nearby, and you shouldn't obsess over it unless you have good reason to fear an invasion (it already happened or you have crops drying in a shed, or something like that).
Saying this as someone who both owned rats at some point and have a dachsund/pinscher who killed hundreds.
And another crowd, whose advice i tend to ignore - urbanite animal experts. The same crowd that in germany gaves us the go ahead for the reintroduction of the beaver, cause surely a terraforming animal that tends to flood valleys will not clash with a densely populated country, with tons of villages and towns in little valleys.
Well I was talking about urban rats. I used to live in a neighborhood where people would throw dishes out of their windows on a daily basis. Like clockwork, a rat family would settle nearby. What's best ? Having rats or meat miasmas ?
And no, fining people for this behavior isn't an option in a neighborhood with stolen bikes burnt every other day, drug dealing spots every 400m, squats, empty cash register lying on the ground, etc ...
Something I find problematic about the various implementations of Clojure is the lack of specs to determine a common ground.
Clojurescript doesn't use the same conventions in import/require statements: you're supposed to import macros using :require-macros or :refer-macros (I'm not even sure anymore). Conversely, `:refer :all` was banned in a prescriptivist attempt at fixing Clojure "mistakes", the rationale behind this decision being that with `:refer :all` it's not always obvious what namespace required symbols come from. Yet, with a REPL or a language server, it's very easy to get that info.
I agree with your criticism but those "mistakes" sadly come with inheriting implementation details of the hosted environment. As far as I understand, ClojureScript couldn't workaround some JavaScript limitations regarding macros and thus had to go with `:require-macros`.
A workaround is using Reader Conditionals (https://clojure.org/reference/reader#_reader_conditionals) and specifying platform differences where they matter, but it's awkward to say the least. What most projects do is to separate "common" namespaces and use the `.cljc` extension to indicate they're multi platform, and keep platform specific things in namespaces with `.clj`, `.cljs`, etc.
>What most projects do is to separate "common" namespaces and use the `.cljc` extension to indicate they're multi platform, and keep platform specific things in namespaces with `.clj`, `.cljs`, etc.
This is exactly what I witnessed when finding the example above.
Out of frustration, I tried patching shadow-cljs one afternoon and was able to implement :refer :all as well as automatically generating :require-macros when needed to some extent, but I haven't put the time to make it work fully. I don't think this is a limitation caused by the lack of a Clojurescript compiler that can run in a Javascript runtime. In short, I don't think this is an essential limitation of the way the language is hosted within its target language, unlike things like Vars, which are not introspectable at runtime in js.
Legit complaint, can't really argue, yet, at the same time, using various Clojure dialects and Clojure-like Fennel requires so much less mental overhead. Even switching between Javascript and Typescript is not at the same level of unsophistication. I feel biased, but targeting JVM, Node, Browser, Bash, Lua, and now Go using a single set of idioms and patterns feels so much nicer and less frustrating. Even with all the little quirks and differences.
Oh yeah I definitely lost an hour debugging why something doesn't work in ClojureScript: it turns out I used :refer rather than :refer-macro. It's still possible to use :refer, but it requires some changes to the library such as https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse/commit/0cd039659dc76...
Your educational experiment involved 54 schoolchildren, aged 15-17, who were randomly selected from around 1,000 applicants, from 36 UK schools – mostly state schools. The teenagers spent two hours a week in online classes and after eight weeks were given a test using questions from an Oxford postgraduate quantum physics exam. More than 80% of the pupils passed and around half earned a distinction. Were you surprised by their success?
At one point, I was going to call off the whole thing because I thought it was going to be a complete disaster. We’d originally wanted the kids to interact with each other on social media or communicate online, but that wasn’t allowed due to the ethical guidelines for the experiment. I thought, what sort of educational experience is it, if you can’t talk to each other?
This is the Covid generation: none of them put their cameras on [for the online classes], so we were looking at a black screen. None of them asked questions using their voices, they just typed. It was a difficult teaching challenge by all standards. We also saw a self-esteem problem with the students. But the majority of kids liked that we had announced that you didn’t need a complex maths background. The maths had been a barrier to kids who had wanted to access this knowledge.
And then we got back the numbers. They did significantly better than we see from university-level students. Exams were marked blind, so we don’t know how many came in with the aim of pursuing Stem. We are processing that data now.
> we were looking at a black screen. None of them asked questions using their voices, they just typed. It was a difficult teaching challenge by all standards
IMO This is one of the most depressing things about teaching teenagers online in real-time. But I don't know what we can do about it. Should we adapt to it? Are there any benefits to enforcing the cameras and voice dialogues?
The only way you can get teenagers to really engage with any kind of instruction is to take some of the guardrails off and let them interact freely. This means they'll ask controversial questions, use slang, curse now and again, crack jokes, and go off into tangents that they've been thinking about. Adults are allowed to do all this at work, but teenagers aren't allowed to do it at school, and virtual education makes this even more boring.
One example: for online teaching, that may require a streaming model where there's a live, mostly uncensored chat where they can keep side conversations going and react to the material. I'm not sure if that model would be of use, but I do know that trying to get teenagers to engage requires the same thing it always has, which is taking them seriously as adults and not censoring them.
It didn't say their exam was an entire postgraduate exam. It said they passed an exam consisting of questions from a postgraduate exam.
I'd guess that if someone tried to take the entire exam it would include things that do require "complex math" (whatever that is). But you don't have to get to the parts of QM that require such math in order to cover things that exhibit the meat of QM, such as superposition, entanglement, and uncertainty principles. I'd guess that it was those kinds of things covered for these students and that is what they were tested on.
I have doubt that anyone with a high school maths would even understand any of these (2023 MSc QM level Oxford exam) [1] . but reading the original source on the study [2] it seems like it is not this or any of what we expect.
> This article is concerned with a new language for quantum, to which we refer as quantum picturalism (QPict) [5]. It
is the subject of two books written by some of the authors, respectively entitled Picturing Quantum Processes [10] and
Quantum in Pictures (QiP) [9]. The first one is the text book of an Oxford University postgraduate course that has been
running for well over ten years now. The second one, remarkably, has no mathematical prerequisites beyond what is already
taught to 6-7 year olds in the UK, namely angles
String diagrams of category theory potentially make working with invariants easier by embedding them in graphical transformations, so they "just maintain themselves". Eg, electric circuit laws.[2] Or here, ZX-calculus/diagrams for QM.[3]
Major milestone for ZX-alike calculi: now for all finite dimensions, with completeness theorem. I.e. for all dimensions any equation derivable using Hilbert space maths, is derivable with pictures! ZXW moreover allows for differentiation, integration and exponentiation.
One of the high school student went on publishing a paper applying what he learned during the course, but I can't find it anymore.
A sibling comment posted a 900 page pdf textbook[0] on the subject which mentions the word hydrogen once (discussing the Stern-Gerlach experiment). It doesn't mention atomic spectra at all. It doesn't mention the word "chemistry" at all.
Here's the eigenfunctions and energy levels of the wavefunction for a hydrogen-like atom[1], equations derivable in the Hilbert space formalism which explain the Rydberg formula[2] and offer a path toward understanding molecular bonding. This stuff is usually covered in an introductory quantum mechanics course, which immediately requires you to work with infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces.
The process calculus stuff is neat, but it's not really covering what you might call "quantum physics". The mentioned textbook says it's "about telling the story of quantum theory entirely in terms of pictures", but it doesn't even mention what quantum theory is about. It starts with saying a photon or an electron might be a typical system, but what's a photon and why do we think they exist? What does it mean to say electrons are quantum systems, and why do we think they are?
A standard introductory text like Griffiths (which is also kind of unmotivated but at least covers the material) has e.g. this problem 5.11a: "Figure out electron configuration for the first two rows of the periodic table (up to neon)".
That sounds neat, but it seems like it's specifically for certain (discrete) processes? Like can you use this to e.g. derive the shape of atomic orbitals or predict something about spectra (which are kind of important parts of quantum mechanics)? If not then the implication that it's somehow teaching people years of material in 16 hours is about as silly as it sounds.
The "famously bizarre" parts are the parts that tie it back to the questions that first motivated it, e.g. what is "stuff" made out of, why do molecules behave the way they do, and how to reconcile that with naive predictions you might have from Coulomb's law.
Albert-László Barabás, a physicist, created a network map that can predict an artist's future success based on their early network connections. His work outlines two key "laws of success":
- Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. This highlights the importance of networks when objective measures of quality are difficult to establish.
- Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. This indicates that small differences in quality can lead to large disparities in success due to the amplifying power of social networks
Barabási's model can predict an artist's career success with surprising accuracy based on the venues of their first five exhibitions. This model underscores the importance of early connections and the venues where an artist exhibits their work, which can significantly influence their long-term success4.
This is a reflexion I made to a friend yesterday: the banana doesn't improve the state of art over Duchamp's Fountain. The real artist, in this case, is the guy who paid 6 millions to eat the banana !
Workers are required to follow the orders they are given which are typically specified such that it is the people paying them that get to exercise aesthetic judgement. That is why Notre Dame was restored to a modernized design that is visibly different from its original state.
All my life I have been thinking I should develop good skills in my career. But actually I should have been learning how to make connections and talk to people.
There's no chance of me selling a single banana for that much. But I could be making a multiple what I do now.
Whenever an absurdly priced work of art makes it to the news, laypeople immediately jump to the explanation of money laundering, but any artist, art purchaser, or even money launderer would know that this is ridiculous. You'd be an idiot to launder their money in the most publicized auction in the year. If you wanted to launder money, it would most likely be through low-profile private sales.
I agree that any individual piece is not guaranteed to be laundering, but the market as a whole is definitely pushed upwards by more factors than people's desire for historical artifacts or decoration.
In any case, in the true upper end of the market, most of these auctions are publicized but the buyers are behind many layers of indirection.
In this specific case we know who bought it Justin Sun. He's a Hong Kong based cyrptocurrency investor who ate it. So it seems like in this case it was more about getting some press, and probably a bit of distraction against some of the allegations against him.
- that buyer didn’t get a real banana. Should have a lifetime supply for that price!
or
- Robert Ryman was exhibited in the Orangerie Museum and compared to Monet (in the equivalent sense).
The bulk of Ryman’s art is a plain white canvas. Not a single dot. Not even a frame. Textured drywall painted with bargain white paint is far more interesting…
It's more about people with a lot of money hoping to sell it for a greater return, while maybe also having shit taste in art. In five years it'll be at an auction and sell to some other person with too much money in hopes of making a profit on it later on.
Nah, it has to do with money laundering, tax evasion, and easy international money transmission. There are tons of interesting tricks you can pull once you have your hands on a small object "worth" hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars whose very illiquid + inefficiently priced sales also affects an entire market of similar objects.
Have you ever tried to move $10MM between jurisdictions before? It's much easier when you can put it in a box that looks like, weighs as much as, and actually is a piece of cloth inside of a box, and then open the box up wherever you want it.
(To be clear, the banana piece specifically is probably a bad artwork to use for financial engineering purposes, but for the art market as a whole these dynamics add a lot to the prices near the top end)
I wonder that too fwiw, what's the exact mechanism with this banana NFT-purchase by which elicit money (from who (?)) is now being laundered as legal income (of who (?)). How does the process work?
Again, I have no clue whether this banana falls into this category, but generically and hyper-simplified: you have dirty money in a high-scrutiny jurisdiction, you buy a piece of art for $10MM, you move that piece of art to a more permissive jurisdiction and sell it for $8MM. That buyer gets a good deal and you just mostly cleaned $10MM for 20% in one transaction, which you can then layer into its now-local (permissive) economy for further cleaning before pulling it back out, apparently legitimately, to whatever jurisdiction you want.
You've avoided an international (currency) transaction of $10MM which would be flagged by pretty much every authority with oversight. Just two high-value domestic art sales, which happen all the time.
It came from an art sale… you can go read an article about it in the news, in fact, and sure you may think it’s ridiculous but that’s just because you’re uncultured and don’t understand Fine Art. People are demonstrably willing to pay millions for bananas on walls.
Obviously it attracts some attention (we’re here talking about it), but a whole lot less than a wire transfer of $10MM out of the country which would trigger SARs at several levels.
Ah so why do the sale at all then? Why not just deposit $10MM in cash at the bank and say it was from an art sale? Something is missing in your explanation.
Any examples of this happening? Famous artwork being bought in us (high scrutiny preusmably) then sold in , i don't know, Switzerland (low scrutiny presumably). And then repatriated!!
Seems a lot of steps on the way.especially in crypto era.
Anyway, would love to see some real examples here. Why can't it just be exuberance, pumpanddump if we want to be cynical.
It seems to me like a more valid way to describe that work is that, you can predict an artist's long-term success based on their early success.
The first five venues where an artist exhibits isn't wholly based on their social networks, but also tells you how excited the art world is about their work. Since attitudes about the work or the artist are key factors in establishing what their early network is, I don't see how you can conclude that the work and the artist are irrelevant, but the network is relevant.
> It turns out, however, that you can make it by starting from the outside. It’s not easy, but it can work. You have to go around and show your art as much as possible to as many people as possible.
I.e. some portion of “network success strategy” is actually downstream of talent success.
When you say it can "predict an artist's career success", to a 1st approximation, that means it can predict which artists' work will sell for over 10x its current price in a dozen years.
Is it really that easy to make money in the art market?
wasd isn't accessible for those of us who have the unfortunate disability of not using a qwerty keyboard. If your project isn't a competitve FPS, arrows are fine.
As a long time lisper I don't think homoiconicity is that relevant, at least when comparing lisps with other programming language. What I miss when writing C++ is the incremental compilation model of lisps, and in particular the ability to have compile time data drive code generation.
Homoiconicity is more useful when comparing lisps IMO, and pondering on how they could be improved. To me, homoiconicity is a constant struggle and should be appreciated in degrees because homoiconicity is about immediacy.
A lisp that doesn't allow you to embed data along with code, JSON/Javascript style, is less homoiconic than a language that does, and it's more about what the core library allows than the language itself. For instance I'd say Clojure is more homoiconic than Scheme because it allows you to embed hashmaps in your code natively, whereas in scheme you only have `(make-hash-table)` without the corresponding reader macro. Similarly, a lisp without syntax quote would be less homoiconic than one that has it.
This is why I say it's about immediacy. When you don't have to deal with hashmaps, or templated s-exprs in terms of the process that builds them, the mediation layer disappears.
Things I'd like to be more immediate in Clojure:
- keeping track of whitespaces within s-exprs. Useful when you want to print code as it is indented in the source file. There's a library for that (rewrite-clj), but it isn't integrated in the reader+compiler pipeline, so it's a bit of an headache as you have to read code from files, which implies, bridging the gap between the compilation pipeline and this library on your own.
- accessing semantic info within macros. Which functions use which variables. Which variables are global vs local (in particular when lexically shadowed), which variables are closed over by which lambdas, etc. To do this you have to use clojure.core.analyzer, which is very complex and poorly documented: not immediate enough.
— Charles de Gaulle